Home is Where One Starts (PC) Review

Home is Where One Starts… mechanically just consists of walking around looking at stuff. Whereas A Story About My Uncle was, for example, a platform game with short sections of "exploring a story," in Home is Where One Starts… this comprises the whole experience. It's about taking in the atmosphere and just getting a feel for someone's life. Essentially, it's about exploring a story - or perhaps not even that. A "walkthrough of a memory" would be a better way to explain the experience.

It opens to a narration describing a scene from someone's childhood, with the open shot artfully showing some birds flying about overhead. From there, a surprisingly open environment is instantly explorable, with a few points of interest to choose between straight away. However, depending on which points of interest are examined first, either the details or limitations of Home is Where One Starts… reveal themselves.

Walking around is slow, taking a long time to reach anywhere even nearby - and that's assuming the destination is accessible at all. The game's landscape doesn't have obvious barriers marking its edges - movement just stops suddenly. While the slow walking pace can be put down to a deliberate choice of mood - and even somewhat of a necessity for the point of the experience - sadly, the invisible walls just come across as bad design. Invisible walls are, of course, inevitable due to it being set outside, rather than fully indoors as in Gone Home, but it feels too arbitrary and breaks the atmosphere. If no ditch or wall could be put in the landscape at the very least the narration could comment that they "didn't wander too far" or equivalent to give some in-universe reason to the restriction.

Dotted about the environment there are examinable items, which can be picked up, turned around and put back down again. Reaching specific areas will trigger a narration further supplementing the items and landscape to give insight into "the player's" childhood.

Much like exploration in space terms seems a bit too limited, exploration in narrative does, as well. Home is Where One Starts… seems to be trying to be a snapshot of someone's life - a moment in time. To do that, the moment must not just be played through, but there also needs to be enough information to find out the background and context for it, and while this is done...it's not quite done enough. Essentially, the experience the game is trying to be demands a bit more than what is here. It feels like there should be more to look around, more to examine and thus more about the characters to discover. It's a little frustrating, in fact, that so much seems to just be scenery, either out of reach or without story context. What's this old chimney? Do these broken down cars have a story behind them? What's that weird building in the background? What's in the locked filing cabinet?

When an item is found, or narration is triggered, it does reveal a well written glimpse of the protagonist's life, but there are so few items it all feels a bit incomplete - almost like a demo of something more substantial to come. Maybe the developer will go back to add more, as it all seems slightly unfinished, or at least, it feels like the environment was designed for more story than is here.

That all said, it's important to note that while the result is somewhat disappointing, what the developer is trying to do isn't. The idea of living over someone's memory is a solid one - it's more than experiencing a narrative, it's an attempt to experience what being someone is like - which is quite a worthy goal to attempt in any media. More so, it is notable that as the Oculus Rift is supported, it might be well worth revisiting this game - or future ones by the developer - in a few years. For those lucky enough to own HMDs, these sorts of experiences are probably particularly well suited. After all, how better to see a world though alternative eyes than with a device that completely replaces users' vision?