Indie Jeff's Weekly Pick: Home
Effectively conveying horror through the medium of video games is a pretty tricky task. Most games rely much too heavily on cat-scares, or copious amounts of blood and gore; tactics which are akin to building a cake entirely out of frosting. Games like Home by Benjamin Rivers, on the other hand, take a much more psychologically-driven approach where dramatic tension, disturbing mysteries, and the player’s own imagination are leveraged to create atmosphere more so than typically cheap scares.HomeI recently played through an early demo of Home (a slightly updated version of the build submitted to IGF 2012), and while it just provided a taste of the full game, it illustrated that Home’s approach to story-delivery is quite intriguing.The player wakes up in a dark room in an unfamiliar house. Armed only with a flashlight, the player explores the sprawling abode in an effort to find out where he is, why he’s there, and why he has a sneaking suspicion that something terrible awaits him back at home.Presented in 2D, the game’s presentational attributes work in concert to its advantage. The combination of great sound effects and the pixelated retro art-style compliment each other well, and encourage imaginative embellishment from the player. Somehow, discoveries like a cage matted with blood or a human corpse–though presented in charmingly-crude pixel art–carry a heavier psychological weight, thanks to the storyline’s mystery. More often than musing about how disgusting my discoveries were, I found myself wondering how each disturbing scenario factored into the overall story.Rivers describes Home as “a murder mystery with a twist
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