No Longer Home is a point and click graphic adventure developed by Humble Grove Studios, and tells the story of Ao and Bo, two non-binary friends who met at university and currently live together in London.
For economic reasons, in a short time they must leave their place of residence and Ao must return to Japan with his family. The game deals with the uncertainty of both characters about how their relationship will continue, and about life and the future in general.
It was hard for me to face this review, really. No Longer Home it is, according to its creators, a semi-autobiographical story about their life experiences. This is clear in every aspect of his narrative. You can tell that it is told from a very personal place, and with a lot of love.
AND No Longer Home I did not like. Not a bit.
It’s not a question of trve gamer fundamentalism or anything like that, eh? I’m not in principle against these games that are more interactive experiences than anything else. the theme with No Longer Home it doesn’t really have a story either. Has a premiseSure, but the events on the screen have no common thread or sense of something happening, feeling more like a dialogue-heavy random panel than a proper narrative. They are barely thematically connected to each other, leaping from what should be their emotional core (being forced to leave the place one calls home and our protagonists’ imminent separation) to marginally related conversations: modern city life. great, the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system, the social and family pressure to find a vocation, and various other issues that, although they are among the causes of the situation, end up stealing too much time from the main conflict. In a twenty-hour game that can afford to establish and develop its protagonists, I would have no problem watching a monologue about the collapse of the subway infrastructure, in one of ninety minutes you are eating important time that you should be using to count a story.
At the end of No Longer Home I felt like nothing really happened. yes they talked very much, but nothing changed. Our protagonists don’t have arcs, they don’t have goals (at least not in a way that matters on a narrative level), there’s no satisfying closure. Which maybe is the point, but it didn’t work for me. In the middle there is a roast, a couple of unexplained paranormal events -and that do not affect anything either-, and even a couple of monsters that represent fears and insecurities, everything is very cliché.
And the truth is that at a certain point I feel bad for not having been able to connect on an emotional level with what No Longer Home he tries to say with his narrative, because despite the abyss of distance that separates me from his protagonists in every possible sense, some of his best moments are precisely for being able to channel into words the universal experience of being young today. Knowing that no matter how much individual effort we put in things are sure to keep getting worse, because that’s the world the older generation left us, is something I think we can all relate to a little bit these days. But I could never get rid of that disconnection with the events on the screen, as if I were seeing them from afar. Every time Ao or Bo started to think that maybe it was too late to do anything with their lives and that they were going to be stuck forever they wanted to scream at the screen. They are 22 years old and have studied at a university in Europe. What are they talking about?
I came to wonder: Am I the problem? Would I have been more hooked if I was queer and ten years younger? It’s highly probable, but at the same time I don’t remember having this feeling while playing life is strangeeither gone home, for giving examples of games that also dealt with characters and situations like that. Perhaps because those games not only centered their plots around a mystery to be solved, but their characters also ended the story as different people, having changed as people after the experience. I don’t think it’s bad that a story isn’t told using a traditional structure either, but in return it has to give me SOMETHING. Anything.
It also didn’t help that No Longer Home it has issues with the part of it being a video game as well. Apart from its art direction -which is beautiful, it is worth emphasizing- it does nothing with its format that deserves to be a point-and-click. It doesn’t have puzzles. He doesn’t have a cool gimmick, he just threatens to have one the first time he lets us rotate a room 90% along. Fez. The interaction is generally minimal. The entire game takes place in the same house, in the same rooms that only have a few points of interest. And yet I found several bugs: The prompts to interact with the world or start a dialogue sometimes performed the wrong action, and many times they did nothing, just repositioning my character a bit until I could try again.
The dialogue system is very rare in its implementation as well, allowing us not only to choose between dialogue options for our protagonists but sometimes also for the person they are talking to, generating confusion when following the text on the screen. It is really difficult at times to understand who is saying what. The game has a lot of dialogue between various characters but nothing moves the story forward in any other way and, apart from a small section in the middle counted as a visual novel, there are no alternate routes. The story panels are always given in the same order, only changing a few lines of dialogue here and there depending on our choices.
I wanted to like it No Longer Home. I will always support small studios, which against all odds make hyper-personal games about minorities that until now may not have had much representation, and that need to be counted. But I also think there isn’t enough substance here, with a story that lacks… well, a story and gameplay that basically consists of walking around and reading dialogue for an hour and a half.
I could have been more generous with my appreciation if one of its two facets had hooked me, but to no avail. I’m glad to live in a time where making a video game is within everyone’s reach, I’m glad that there is an increasing variety of voices being able to tell their stories, and I’m glad that it exists No Longer Home, although it has not reached me. Maybe it’s just not for me.
THE BEST
- The art direction and the visual style of the game are very careful
- Some really well written dialogues.
WORST
- A conflict without resolution and that leaves little taste.
- Sin of verbose at times.
- As a game it’s too basic even by genre standards.