With game creation now within the reach of anyone who has the time to dedicate to it the differentiators usually stem from the strengths of their creators. Many come from a writing background, pouring themselves into the creation of a brilliant narrative that flows through the game. Others develop wild and intriguing mechanics, some that allow the players to develop their own story within a world they create. Few however find their strength in the art and graphical fidelity as out of all the things that make a game it is by far the most costly and time consuming to create. Homesick is one of those rare few indie games that brings with it astonishing visual quality that even rivals recent AAA titles.
You wake to a world that’s cold and unfamiliar. The world is barren, bereft of nearly all life and seemingly cold despite the sun’s unrelenting rays punching down through every crack and crevice. As you explore though you see remnants of the world that once was, little reminders that show people were here…once. However you struggle to make sense of the world, the books and letters are all written in code and try as you might there’s little sense to be made of them. You know one thing though, you must get out. You must find your way into the light.
I would forgive people for thinking that Homesick was simply a demo project for a new engine as it’s honestly by far the best looking indie game I’ve ever seen. The attention to details is astounding from things like the rooms with wallpaper peeling off to the fully working (but out of tune) piano. Looking at Barrett Meeker’s (the creative director) history in animation and effects it’s not hard to see why as he’s worked on such titles like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. If I hadn’t taken these screenshots myself I would’ve written them off as carefully crafted renders but the game really does look this good when you’re playing it. Of course there were some sacrifices made for this beauty, namely the extremely simplistic animations and accompanying sound effects, but it’s hard to deny that the graphics are anything but amazing.
Homesick is your (now) bog standard walking simulator where you’ll move forward at a relatively slow pace that encourages you to take in your surroundings, look at everything and essentially be a tourist in the game’s world. Each room has a set of puzzles that you’ll need to figure out in order to progress and, interestingly, they all share the same end goal. However that doesn’t detract from the challenge at all as figuring out how to accomplish said goal can sometimes involve a myriad of steps, not all of which will be obvious at first glance. Once you finish a section it’s off to the dream world which will allow you to progress to the next section.
The Kickstarter for Homesick described the puzzles as “hard, yet fair and sensible” and for the most part that rings true. The game provides absolutely not tutorial to speak of so for the first 10 minutes or so you’re on your own to figure out how everything fits together in this world. Thankfully whilst all the rooms are interconnected they’re not dependent on each other, meaning that each new puzzle is self contained and does not require any backtracking. There is a couple times where you can miss an important clue which will get you stuck (hint: make sure you look at all the filing cabinets carefully) but other than that you should be able to work things out eventually. My favourite by far was the blocks puzzle but I won’t say much more lest I spoil the fun.
Whilst the game is extremely pretty it does suffer from a few areas that could’ve used a little bit more polish. For some reason there are certain places where I’d get a lot of slowdown, usually when turning past a corner in some of the first rooms. There’s a couple other places where this happens too which leads me to believe there’s some unoptimized geometry hiding somewhere. There’s also a couple glitches that require a game restart to overcome, like an issue (which was said to be fixed but still happened for me) where holding a certain item would overwrite your entire inventory. Thankfully I didn’t lose too much progress but it was still a frustrating experience.
The story of Homesick is what you make of it as for the vast majority of the game you really have no clue about anything. Once you unlock the ability to decipher the riddles you can go back through the entire game and read everything which does give you a good sense of the world before your time in it. With games like these, ones where much of the story is locked behind globs of text hidden everywhere, I find it hard to get emotionally invested in the story and Homesick was no exception. I do admit that when I started to slowly unravel the code of the world I was a little excited but that wasn’t enough to drive me to slowly walk back through everything just so I could read some things.
Homesick is a stunner of a game with graphics that will remain unchallenged by the indie scene for a long time. Once you dig beneath the surface though what remains is your typical walking simulator game, with all the requisite puzzles and hidden pieces of text to flesh out the world. Whilst it’s worth playing for the graphics alone I really can’t say that there was much more that drew me in, mostly due to my resistance to reading large walls of text after I’ve slowly trotted my way through everything. Still I’m sure fans of this genre will find a lot to love and would not hesitate to recommend it to all the indie fans out there.
Rating: 7/10
Homesick is available on PC right now $14.99. Total play time was approximately 2 hours.
