return to home

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.