You play as Emily, who has agreed to meet her friends at a rented house for a meteor shower party, she hasn’t seen her friends in over a year. However, after arriving and reconnecting, trouble starts to brew.
The house has some secrets and soon Emily and her friends are being chased by a killer. Obviously, after being chased by a killer, comes being murdered by a killer - and after being murdered comes… well… I don’t know, but as for Emily, she appears right back in the entrance hallway at the start of the night, now armed with the knowledge that a killer will appear, and escape becomes the number one goal.
The crux of the game is puzzle solving, the house has many secrets to yield, and you are now up against the clock to solve them. The puzzles are a good mix, some are very clever, and some are tried and tested classics.
Throughout your time exploring the house you will need to find codes, fiddle with some pressure gauges and even play some video games, you will also die a lot - but with death comes knowledge.
When you die, pieces of Emily’s backstory are explored, giving insight into her life - and this is where the story really develops, the game is about anxiety and isolation and It does a cracking job of exploring its themes, the story is without of doubt the star of the show, I was very impressed with how it deals with anxiety and how it manages it to intermingle the more personal anxiety with the anxiety of the situation you are in.
One of the things that really captures the unease is the sound design - but I’ve never felt such love and such anger towards a game’s sound design, one minute you have wonderful sounds capturing the tense atmosphere, then you will have some ridiculous, irritating grating sounds for no reason.
In one scene you had this ear-piercing metallic sound combined with one of my least favourite things in games - a noise that occurs each time a word appears on the screen, it was awful, I’ve never had such an intense dislike of sound design choices in my life.
Homebody has some flaws, and specifically features two things that I always think can cause some problems - the one is being chased by a killer. In theory, it should always induce terror, but after several loops, it just becomes more of an irritation, and the same can be said from having to do some of the puzzles several times over, I know why these are in the game, but it does start to wear thin over time.
The cast of characters in the game are an enjoyable bunch, who get fleshed out as the mystery unravels, most are likeable and some of the conversations later are very revealing and do feel like actual conversations people might have, the flashbacks especially embody these heart-to-heart conversations with some genuine weight to them.
SUMMARY
I think the biggest achievement of the game other than how it deals with and illustrates anxiety is the horror, it never resorts to cheap jump scares, instead crafting little unsettling moments using design and visuals to build the terror.
This has been the first game in a while that I felt tried to be more than a jump-scare-athon.
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