The nice replies here are melting my heart. It is satisfying to hear that people like the open-ended nature of the game's narrative. Over on the Steam forums, people aren't always so accommodating! A lot of folks think I half-baked the narrative to cheat, but I assure everyone that everything has been mightily considered over and over again. However, the best part of the game is hearing players' theories, and having them come up with twists that even I never thought of. In fact, when I showed of the initial demo of the game to press at GDC 2012, one particular person came up with a theory I'd never considered. I added a few hints into the game to support his idea.
I picked this up day one on Steam and it was a really chilling experience. Walking off the beaten path and trying to find every screen absolutely pays off, as that's where most of the horror is found...there's not much obvious and lying around right there for you to stumble over. Explore, it's the best advice I can give to you. The suspense of the ending portion of the game is still stuck to my spine. It's a slow burn experience, but if you're interested in a unique replayable little horror title, check this out for sure. Hope to see more from the devs of this.
Touch Arcade forum's Game Of the Week Poll - June 20 2013 Home - a Unique Horror Adventure was nominated as a candidate for Touch Arcade forum's Game of the Week. Final voting is occurring over the next 3 days here: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=193796
Ugh, of all the times for a quiet, unique game to launch. I see comments that it takes ~30 to finish on PC (by comments I guess I just mean the comment by Appletini)... Clearly there is a lot to do here, and for games that I love, complying them fully is something I enjoy greatly.
Same here - 4th gen Touch plenty of random crashes. Works fine on iPad 4, not that this is any help to you, I assume. Overall, I found it compelling enough once but didn't feel a need to play through I again. "Play" being the wrong word as it's not really a game. I think the people who are going to come away disappointed are the ones who go in expecting a point-and-click adventure with puzzles, etc. It isn't. Still, it held my attention for that first experience, which is generally how I feel about most books and films that I enjoy.
Hey, cool to see the game in the poll, thanks! For those of you who had issues playing the game on a 4th gen iPod TouchI'm really, really sorry. The game was tested thoroughly on this exact device as its baseline, and everything worked great. I worked hard to get everything to fit within that device's wee memory space. However, I think before the game launched, the version of GameMaker Studio I used might have had a memory bug in or something similar. I've been trying to go over the release notes to see. I'm hoping the v1.4.1 update (which should be out this week, whenever Apple approves it) removes these random crashes. It's shitty because I worked my ass off to make sure this device ran the game well, and it did in every test I could throw at it, so I'm not sure what's going on. I will be checking to see if there's anything else I can do.
On the fence about this game Is Home anything like Lone Survivor? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtt0ZezljHk
Hi Bronxsta. Home is more of a narrative-driven experience, whereas Lone Survivor is more complex, with a real cool survival horror vibe. Jasper's game is more "game-y," in a way. Home is more about atmosphere and freaking you out with your own brain. Lone Survivor a fantastic title; we just took two very different approaches to the genre.
Lone Survivor puts a lot of effort into being "Silent Hill 2D", while Home is more like an ambiguous piece of interactive fiction (text adventure) given a graphical treatment, doesn't involve combat or resource management, and relies more on the player to interpret the story based on both the fixed elements and their own choices.
Sounds cool. Atmopshere and tension is always number one on my horror game check list so I definitely got try out your game
Just got the update last night. Fun game! However, I'm still experiencing crashes that beak the flow of gameplay. Such as the receipt room, which crashes consistently for me. Others are simply sporadic, though.
Quick suggestion. Do you think a pause button would be possible? The ability to restart the game? I want to play straight through, but there are times I am unable to & it would be great to have the ability to begin at the start. Just my 2 cents
