Light My Way Home

This game (I think it was made for Shufflecomp?) really touched me. You play as a person in a kind of melancholy town at evening, watching grass blow and seeing things like power lines swaying in the wind and an old radio. When downloaded, the game plays peaceful, ambient piano music that strongly affects my rating.

Gameplay is about wandering around, at first, and then learning to interact with the world in a new way.

There are some whitespace issues and the interactivity took me a bit to figure out, but the music was polished and I loved discovering the mechanics. Very emotional, very powerful, I can't remember the last time an IF game made me feel this way (but I don't expect all readers to feel this, as it just happened to fit my mood and time of day, and things always feel better when you discover them organically rather than when someone tells you they're cool).

As LMWH starts off, you don't know what to do, and you don't know who or what you are. But this isn't an amnesia game, far from it. It's a tightly contained game where you, quite simply, have to help someone find their way. You are some sort of ethereal spirit, and you have the ability to give an electric charge to one item at a time. The goal, as stated in the story, is to bring someone home--figuratively or literally.

This person is the most beautiful person you've ever seen, with no direct description why. The story implies it strongly, and it's not hard to figure out, but of course it works better than if you'd been told directly.

Objectively, the person you guide seems a bit stupid as they bump around oddly, but it's not hard to care for them in the game, because of who you guess they might be, and what they need to do, and how powering certain things up makes them move around.

There are only a few things you need to power up or down, but that is enough for a satisfying story. Too much, and the person might seem clueless indeed.

The author seems particularly good at making these nice short stories that provide a quick burst, both as a player and as someone who'd like to make a few more good short games or scenes. Replaying this years after it came out for ShuffleComp, the combination of what I remembered and what I forgot felt about right.

Light My Way Home is a contemplative Shufflecomp entry set by a hydro corridor, and the landscape is unlikely: metal towers, scrabbly grass, abandoned barns. But in the midst of this comes a simple, lovely story of longing and loss.

Light My Way Home is a lovely sensory experience. The location descriptions are evocative; it features a quiet soundtrack punctuated by the chirping of crickets. This game revolves around a special command, >POWER OBJECT, which allows you to change the environment around you to guide the one NPC and, in so doing, find out more about yourself.

Light My Way Home is a simple, evocative little game. The unfolding of exactly what is going on is, I think, important to its emotional arc, so I'll avoid spoilers.

Knowing how to make use of empty space is a big deal in most artistic disciplines. Home is deft in how it employs the gaps often present in games: the dark loneliness of night-time in interstitial urban space, the gaps in recognition and memory, the unbridgeable distance between PC and NPC. It shows rather than tells, and doesn't overshow. It's able to do this without being frustratingly opaque, because the underlying story is quite simple; it is more of a tone piece than a plot or character piece. There is a small knack to interaction, and a little thought is required about how to progress, so the pacing is neither puzzly-slow nor trivially-rapid.

To some extent, it felt akin to a small, moody point-and-click 2D Flash adventure: the single mode of interaction, the genderless NPC who follows your actions rather than being explicitly directed, the atmospheric music and emphasis on lighting.