Home Sweet Home uses Thai lore and myth to weave together a tension-filled journey. But while the game is commendable, its dull structure and near game-breaking bugs hampered the experience.
Home Sweet Home
Developer: Yggdrazil Group
Price: $29.99
Platforms: PlayStation 4 [reviewed], PlayStation VR, Xbox One, Steam and Steam VR for Windows PC.
The modern horror game is marked by passive gameplay. Instead of a weapon to defeat the terrors in the night, players are now asked to use their wits to maneuver quietly past the monsters. That stealth approach to horror brings a different level of tension and terror to the genre. Sometimes it works, but other times it can leave a game’s structure feeling hollow and over-reliant on jump scares. Home Sweet Home, developed by Yggdrazil Group, is not without its good scares and tense gameplay moments, but its linear structure doesn’t allow the game to open in any exciting way. Its use of Thai culture does give the game an interesting identity, but it has plenty of bugs that marred the overall experience.
Players will navigate Home Sweet Home’s main character, Tim, through different dilapidated locations as he searches for his missing wife. He will encounter different spirits pulled from Thai lore and myth, like the Preta, a tall ghost that suffers from a high level of hunger and thirst. While the story didn’t do much for me, I was intrigued by the game’s use of Thai mythos and beliefs. It gives the game an identity that separates it from most games in the first-person horror genre. But what was lost on me was how the story was connected to Home Sweet Home’s inspirations. The game implies the reasons why Tim is being haunted, but it never manifested into anything that felt connected to its Thai foundation.
The gameplay relies heavily on stealth, where players will navigate slowly between cover spots to avoid being caught by one of the game’s ghosts. One of those ghosts, a young woman who hunts the player with a box cutter, can be alerted if the player makes too much noise. The ghost is quick, but her attacks can be shaken off, which give the player a chance to find a new hiding spot.
Home Sweet Home’s stealth gameplay lends itself well to creating moments of tension that build up to good jump scares. And some of those scares came from me making a mistake. I enjoy those moments of terror because it feels more organic to the experience than any scripted scare can achieve.
While the stealth leads to organic scares, Home Sweet Home’s structure is left feeling hollow and nothing more than a vehicle to see the player reach the end of a level. The act of stealthily walking through tunnels and searching for an exit never allowed the game to open up to something bigger, or better. Home Sweet Home throws a few puzzles at the player to solve, but these didn’t put up much of a challenge. The game starts to feel dull and mechanical, which really dampened its horror elements. The one positive from its linear structure, however, is that Home Sweet Home gets straight to the point. It wastes no time getting to the scares and before it drags on too long, it reaches its conclusion.
At first, the PlayStation 4 version of the game ran fine, but I noticed the longer the game went, the more it seemed to break. In one instance where I had to unlock a door by putting out three candles, I was forced to restart my game because one candle wouldn’t trigger and the path to another was flat out broken. Interacting with some puzzles or doors would also function poorly. Again, I had to restart my game after I couldn’t interact with the lock on a door or the table that lead me to finding the passcode for that same lock. Luckily, when I did restart the game, I lost very little progress. It’s unfortunate how broken the game can be at times, and it detracted from the overall experience more often than not.
The Final Word
Home Sweet Home is not the cleanest game. Several times I had to restart it to get past near game breaking bugs. The linear structure of the game meant there was little room for it to open into anything larger in scale. It does become dull down the stretch, but Home Sweet Home is admirable for pulling inspiration from Thai lore and myth and delivering moments of tension and good scares.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
