REVIEW : No Longer Home (PC)

0
209
REVIEW : No Longer Home (PC)

The game medium is certainly varied, and nothing says this more than the abundant number of indie games that appear year after year. Here it goes from explosive action games of the Guacamelee type! and My Friend Pedro, to more introspective games in the form of experiences such as Proteus and To The Moon.

No Longer Home – the latest game from publisher Fellow Traveller, the company behind titles such as Paradise Killer and Hacknet – is one such indie game, falling elegantly among the more laid-back additions to the genre. And although it is far from the best game of its kind, it still offers a fresh and exciting twist on familiar and relatable themes.

REVIEW : No Longer Home (PC)

Laborious melancholy

Many will probably refrain from shouting too loudly when they call No Longer Home “a game” because there is a limit to how much you can play while you’re at it. The experience feels like an old-fashioned point-and-click game where the main characters explore their surroundings and you make simple dialogue choices along the way, but even in this light, there is not a huge amount of speed in the gameplay part of No Longer Home.

The game has no puzzles that need to be solved, you should do well to answer incorrectly in conversation with others, and you are free to go back and forth until you have explored as much as you wish. But that might also be a bit of the point.

More than anything else, No Longer Home is about telling a story; creating a dialogue, and exploring the main character’s thoughts and emotional life.

It is up to you who will speak.

REVIEW : No Longer Home (PC)

In the game, we get to know Bo and Ao, two people who have met on life’s winding country road and who, after four years of education, friendship and shaky love at university in London, don’t quite know what to do with themselves. A short prologue gives us an insight into the main characters’ first meeting before we fast forward to the present, where the reality is that Ao will soon be moving back to Japan, neither of them knows what they want to do with their lives and the indeterminate love affair is on the way end.

It’s an instantly melancholic affair, and the game does a good job of switching between the different points of view along the way. The player takes no specific role during the story but instead stands as an independent third party who can make choices for both Bo and Ao (and a couple of other characters) during the game. This takes the form of dialogue trees where you see several people’s next statements, and it is up to you who will speak.

REVIEW : No Longer Home (PC)

The conversations are, as I said, of the introspective type, and although you influence the form of how each meeting unfolds, the impression is that this is a game where the roles are divided right from the start. You cannot change which way the characters will take, and instead you are left almost as paralyzed by action as Bo and Ao feel. And therein lies a bit of the game’s quirkiness.

What now?

No Longer Home is a relatively short experience – just under two hours – that will be very relatable to many. Because how many of us have not stood there with two empty hands and faded ambitions, when what we thought we were going to do for the rest of our lives doesn’t hold water anymore, and we pretty much have to grow up?

The game tries to look at this problem from several angles at the same time, and the result is more than thought-provoking.

It cannot be understated that this is probably aimed mostly at the younger generation, with modern approaches to both language, style and sexuality. To some, the whole thing will probably come across as whiny and whiny – “just pull yourselves together”, as it were – but there is also a lot of witty and not least important food for thought for both young and adults baked into the experience.

The game does not put two lines under any of what is being promoted but instead leaves it up to each and is easy to interpret. Unfortunately, it gets a bit diffuse at times, and parts of the script also lack the finesse one might have hoped for.

“I didn’t know it was life”

Purely audiovisual, there is still little to complain about with No Longer Home. This is a project that is close to the developers, and they have taken a corresponding amount of care with the composition of the surroundings and characters. Large parts of the action take place in the slightly dilapidated apartment Bo and Ao share with friends from their studies, but the fairly ordinary setting gets a lot of flairs thanks to the graphic style that has been chosen.

Here, each room floats in the air in an infinite star nebula, and parts of the surroundings both fall away and come into place as it suits the action. At one point, for example, Ao stands and stares at currents in the apartment’s bathtub, before we zoom in and see that there are both dreams and microcosms in the depths.

Parts of the role gallery are also promoted as strange dream creatures, and the approach to typical dialogues also changes somewhat along the way. Much of the time is still spent in conversation with others, and where certain sequences are filled with both quick and apt dialogue, others go a little too far for their good.

It all comes together in just the right evocative way, with hope, longing, joy and sorrow for the future. Much like life itself, that is.

Conclusion

No Longer Home won no awards for its game mechanics or the answers you get along the way but does very well as a series of philosophical and relatable considerations about growing up.

The game appears a bit superficial in all its simplicity, and neither the flow nor the script score well, but there is still a lot to appreciate here. The experience has a quirky visual style where the developers have spent a lot of time on composition and compositions, and the music is correspondingly captivating.

REVIEW : No Longer Home (PC)

It’s all stitched together by cinematography with resilience and flair, where environments constantly flow together and apart to create exciting and slightly hypnotizing dream sequences.

REVIEW : Return to Monkey Island (PC)

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Conclusion
8
Previous articleREVIEW : Return to Monkey Island (PC)
Next articleREVIEW : Endzone – A World Apart (PC)
review-no-longer-home-pcThe experience is not too long either so this is easily something most people can use to relax and philosophize a bit about what it means to be human. I think everyone could benefit from that once in a while.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here