Home Sweet Home is a Thai horror/adventure game that was originally released on the PC a year ago, and has finally made its way over to the current generation of consoles. The game takes the player through an interesting tapestry of the countries mythology, changing locations occasionally as the player passes through doors. The question then becomes, how well was this game ported from the PC—which is a system that relies heavily on tons of RAM and solid-state drives to give the players the best experience.
The coating the game uses of the country of origins mythos does well to evoke a real sense of terror and unease—from the moment that the character wakes up in a strange room everything simply feels left of center and slightly wrong. The way that it feels that several of the enemies are woven together make the game feel like a breathing world, albeit a living nightmare. The most impactful time that the game has is when it is doing almost nothing to the player, and the time between those that there is any real danger of death. The suspenseful moments are perhaps the best in the game.
Check out our stream of Home Sweet Home here:
The problems then become with the puzzle like encounters of the creatures that dot the different landscapes that must be explored. Since the player has no way of combating them, each of them must be avoided. Each avoidance ends up feeling like a puzzle that the only real way through is trial and error. This takes all the fear out of the game and makes these sections simply feel bothersome and frustrating. That is also, before the load times.
The game manages to load every time that the player enters a new region of the game or dies. These times are not that simple either. 15 seconds at a clip after a death starts to add up quickly when it is possible to die directly after respawning back in a level. It also fully destroys any emersion of the game that a save icon appears on screen the moment that any monster is about to appear anyway, meaning that any jump scare that could have happen has a pre-warning.
The game is one of the few VR titles out there worth playing. To add to that it is a budget title. With those factors in play, this is probably a must have title for anyone who has a VR set for their PS4. For anyone without, you may want to ask yourself how into Thai horror you really are before deciding to pick it up. It isn’t that it is a bad game, just that it has slight flaws that ruin the otherwise wonderful experience.