return to home

Listen, I appeared in the interactive fiction community a year or so ago, straight out of visual novel community, therefore, I’m used to creating and playing choice-based games. I’m still getting used to parsers and trying to destigmatize them in my head, where they’re still clinging to the association of hours-long, puzzle-filled ordeals (don’t come after me, I’m trying to make a parser myself!). That’s why I was actually kind of happy to see return to home, which advertises itself as a “little IF romp”. Also, today I learned what “romp” means.

I have Lectrote installed but it wouldn’t run the game so I installed Gargoyle as instructed and everything worked as it should. I’ve never heard of GAGS or even Gargoyle for that matter so I’m glad I got to learn. I’m aware that it’s customary to attach transcripts of your parser playthroughs alongside your reviews (on IntFiction forum, where this review was first published) but truth be told, not only I don’t know how to do transcripts with Gargoyle, I also absolutely forgor that I should probably record the playthrough. I’m sorry, it will most likely happen again.

The premise is pretty simple: you’re on your way home but your usual route is blocked. You decide to leave your car by the blockade and just walk to your house instead. Along the way, you can decide to take random detours, take in the views, and encounter a variety of objects you can take with you. Short, neat, very slice of life.

I visited 13/14 locations and gathered 3/4 objects you can find, which translates to 13/14 points. The greatest difficulty I had with this game was trying to enter the house because I simply don’t know how directions work. There’s not a lot I can say because it very much has a vibe of a test project – something you make just to test out a way to make a game, and if I understand correctly, that was essentially what it was meant to be. I’m kind of sad that I couldn’t, for example, examine the house or the car, but that’s understandable within a “test game” scope, I suppose. I won’t comment on the language because the author requested so (European English-As-Foreign-Language solidarity?) but I didn’t have trouble understanding what’s going on, which is great.

Overall, the game has a very calm atmosphere. There’s just something nice about “walking simulators” where your only task is to walk and maybe go on little detours. You know, you need to switch up things from time to time, break the routine, go on a different path. Variety is the spice of life. Did I enjoy playing through it? I actually did. Might even go on a walk today.

return to home is a short walking simulator, doing exactly what it says in the title. The road back home is blocked, forcing you to leave your car and finish the "journey" by foot. Along the path, going up and down a hill, you're given the option to sidestep and visit a grove, or go up a knoll and check out the view. There are also 4 objects you can find and pick up (just for fun, they are not used anywhere). And when you finally get home, you can enjoy a well-deserved rest.

Though the piece is short, and parse in its implementation (trying to X whatever noun in the description won't give you much), it knows exactly what it's about and doesn't pretend to be more than that: an atmospheric little walk back home. Its strength lies in fulfilling the expectations formed by its synopsis, no more, no less. Though, part of me did wish you could examine a bit more your surrounding, as the game does nudge you to take little detours and take your time. I don't know, maybe sit on the knoll and take the landscape all in, or interact with the items you find in some way... But that's out of the scope of a romp creation.

It's an atmospheric tiny piece, that reminds you to enjoy the journey, and the little things you find along the way.

It’s not often that I’m stymied by a piece of IF – especially not one as slight and apparently straightforward as Return to Home. This short parser game starts with your car blocked by an unexpected detour on your way back from work; rather than drive around to find another route, you decide to cut through the countryside and walk home. This isn’t a perilous adventure where you need to cross raging rivers or make your way through a forbidding forest – there’s a hill, sure, but the weather is fine and the danger is non-existent. Nor is it a set of brain-teaser, with no puzzles to speak of beyond a couple of Easter eggs to be found if you stray slightly off the short path home (the whole game is about a dozen rooms). Structurally, it resembles a so-called “walking simulator”, but where games in that genre balance their mechanical simplicity with detailed backstory and lush environments, Return to Home is matter-of-fact; most descriptions have a sentence or two of simple prose, without much in the way of scenery, and there’s no lore or hidden trauma to pick up on (or if there is, wow did I miss it!)

So it’s hard for me to evaluate the game’s success according to its design goals, since I have a hard time articulating what I think those are – it seems content to just be a low-key experience, not in a hurry to impress anything in particular on the player. There are some small grammar and spelling issues in the prose, but English isn’t the author’s first language, and since the writing isn’t reaching for the stars I didn’t find these minor slips had much impact on my enjoyment. The one thing I can say about Return to Home is that I think it’s a game that enjoys that it’s IF. Most of the Easter eggs point to classic-era games (I picked up references to Curses and Once and Future/Avalon, though there were a couple I know I missed), and beyond that, by stripping the parser game down to its bare essentials, it made me slow down and be more mindful of what I was experiencing: moving through a map, reading a few sentences of narration, enjoying the way that a minimum of effort would frequently turn up a new bauble, without needing to worry about what I was supposed to do with it. Playing Return to Home was a gentle way to spend five minutes connecting with as unpretentious a piece of IF as you can imagine, and I guess that might just be the entire point of the thing.