Home Party

I may have bumped HP's rating up because of the author's notes as they told what they were trying to do -- the vision and so forth. Because I think there will be a divide between people giving up on it and people who are willing to poke around. There's a bit of heckling involved in all of this, which may not fit the tutorial/helpful tone the jam wants you to take, as well. This may bug people, but having finished, I find it amusing. I liked the ASCII art, too.

The first time through HP, I was happy simply to find an ending. I figured it might be the worst ending, but it was something. Writing anything in what is not your first language is tricky, and some of the writing bears that out. But getting to an end is fun, if a bit chaotic. I was surprised how rewarding the best one (being the life of the party named in the title--though it's someone else's home) was, after finding the two "bad" endings and the okay one. But I did have to use the author's notes to get through in a timely fashion. However, said notes and source gave me insights into their thought process.

The tutorial feeds you what to do, perhaps a bit too on-the-nose. People are playing Cards Against Humanity, and the game ends after you follow some simple instructions. Then you go wandering about Bert's apartment. You run into other partygoers, who do feel like somewhat papery NPCs, but their alliterative names are charming, e.g. Winner Wendy or Shy Sinty or Anonymous Andrew (ha!) They're even randomized each playthrough, so there can be Winner Wendy or Anonymous Anton. I had the feeling of being slightly out of place, which I think is what the author wanted. You jump from a card game to assembling a lamp, which feels like a reference to A Christmas Story based on the pieces. Maybe a gummy worm doubling as a wooden rod should have prepared me for the surreality. It's a bit of a jump from a card game, though once you see what needs to be done, things may click. And it's just after the tutorial ends, and some of the parser responses misdirected me.

Talking to the NPCs at the party is important, but sometimes I felt like I didn't really notice how or why until I read the source. They give obscure references to assembling items or finding popular party items. For instance, there's a knife blade and hilt to assemble, and the final puzzle is a disco ball which -- well, it's not intuitive, but it makes sense. I think the switch between doing surreal stuff with items and the everyday partying/people just hanging around is a bit much. And I felt like I needed more to go on than "find all four endings" to keep looking, and I might not have anyway in a larger jam. But I kept going, determined to have the game label me as more than a bad boyfriend or person, once I found ending three or four. The "bad person" ending is kind of clever, as you may forget the whole thing is a flashback, but once you remember it, you know why a certain action is awful, and the game does warn you. I got the neutral ending where everyone eats cake and goes home where I wasn't a bad person but my girlfriend found me kind of bore. Eventually, I achieved the "lousy neighbor" ending for catalyzing such a successful party! But at least I was not a lousy text adventurer, and that's what's really important.

Home Party reminds me of Simon Christiansen's PataNoir from 2011, or Kateri's Krypteia from 2014, due to the objects that are weirdly literal -- I can't imagine it's the first game to do such things. But having it in the setting of a party is obviously quite different from these other two. And it brings a certain charm to it, as it turns out the YouTube video people are watching is important. You also need to figure a way to create two players to play Mortal Kombat (the actual mini-game was curious, as I just spammed FIGHT and beat some braggart easily,) find a secret passage, and protect bronze statues from the sun in an odd side trip.

A lot of people will probably miss this, and some of the surreal uses of certain items are really stretching things, but they make sense. For instance, you have to wear a sweatshirt to take a certain item. But I think Home Party would be far less of a work and might miss the mark completely if the author tried to be conventional.

Still there are some pretty staggering jumps made just because, and while it's impressive that someone can write something like this and what isn't their first language, the small nuisances do pile up, making it tough to figure what the surreal possibilities are. And one of the endings for the party occurs only after you try to leave. Then people call you back. This isn't well hinted, but on the other hand, the game does say "explore everything."

I'd have been a bit lost without the source code. It's well annotated, and it shows what the writer is getting at. With it, I was able to make sense that a lot more headway. A lot of care was put into it, and that helped me be patient until I figured what was going on. But in a tutorial jam, "look in the source code for help" may not be the option you want. And while I could talk to a lot of NPCs, they did seem to blend together.

For the time travel element suggested by the jam? Well, it is a flashback, driving home from the party. The actual puzzles have a bit of nostalgia about them but not too much. There is an old Playstation, and the thing is, you don't just put CDs into it, you put other weird stuff there's a bookshelf with one book that seems out of place, and you also have friends watching YouTube videos of classic movies. One of the main puzzles at the end is to find a disco ball, which is very 70s indeed. All this stretches belief a bit, but if you operate under the "okay, things must have uses somehow" principle, you can knock things down. You also may have to appreciate the author's nonconventional sense of humor. I took a bit of time to. So I think that while this starts out with a pretty solid tutorial, it eventually has you do stuff which is a bit beyond what you'd expect for an introductory text adventure.

The author has an active and capricious imagination, and this all led me to come back after I found the first ending, just happy to have made some sense of things, and then once again once I found the second ending which was also a bit abrupt. There's a bit of a gulf between them and the successful endings, or relatively, but I was surprised how pleased I was to actually get the party going, even though I don't especially enjoy big parties like this. I enjoyed seeing the names of the NPCs, with no last names but just adjectives, and if it all felt a bit too surreal, well, it was better than a "my lousy apartment" game. It has its own unique style, and that makes it worth playing and, yes, even searching through the source code for the puzzle where you're stuck.