Home Sweet Home Review – PlayStation 4 / VR

Home Sweet Home sure sounds pleasant enough, but lurking behind that seemingly innocent title is a crap-your-pants first-person horror game that borrows on numerous tropes from past scary games like Outlast, Resident Evil 7, and even classics like the 1996, Clock Tower.   And if you really want to ramp up the fear factor and happen to own a PSVR, you’ll be happy to know that Home Sweet Home supports VR for the most immersive experience possible.

The game starts off much like every other cold open adventure game in that you have no idea what is going on and must discover the backstory along with your motivation along the way.  In this instance you wake in a dark bedroom, open the door and find a maze of haunted corridors and rooms standing between you and…wait for it… Home Sweet Home.  In fact, that is your directive; to simply go home.  Of course nobody warns you about some crazy demon-possessed woman stalking you throughout the corridors.

Soon, after leaving your bedroom and learning how to crouch and use your flashlight you start to follow a girl who is always one step, corridor, or room ahead of you.  Your pursuit ends at a brick wall with a giant bloodstain that you soon learn is how demon girl gets around in this world.  When the scary music kicks in you can be sure that your stalker is about to bubble out of the nearest bloodstain, which means it’s time to run and hide.  Yes, much like Clock Tower, or more recently Outlast, you will frequently need to run and hide.  Most of the time this means finding a nearby locker, but I was often cowering behind a bed, and once I was crouched down in the corner of a shower watching the silhouette of the demon-girl through the shower curtain.

Home Sweet Home plays with your mind and the reality of the game world.   You can enter a room through a door then turn around to find the entire wall is gone.  Doors slam behind you and there is this one picture in my living room that constantly gets turned facedown no matter how many times I fix it.  The game is constantly mixing up the locations and even the threats.  After “escaping” the demon girl you make it back to your house for some more casual exploration as you search for clues to your missing wife, but all too soon you are headed back into the crawlspace, this time being stalked by these creatures that look like burned humans.

The most terrifying part of Home Sweet Home is what you can’t see.  The sound design is fantastic with a surround mix that envelops you in audio terror.  The clicking noise from the demon girl was no less terrifying than the classic sounds from the original Predator movie; perhaps more so.  Squeaky doors, creaking floors, the barking or howling of unseen dogs; it all sends chills down your spine long before you see what is going to kill you.

I dove straight into the VR experience of Home Sweet Home and played for almost two hours before I started to get that first twinge of motion sickness – I was playing with smooth movement and there is a snap option that would likely negate this.  While the VR version offers unmatched immersion and enhanced levels of scariness it also comes with a notable hit to overall visual clarify as well as a significant loss of brightness.   This is already a dark game and VR seems to sap the vibrancy out of any game, but in this case it often meant that you couldn’t see anything without using your flashlight, thus revealing your location to anyone or anything nearby.  Even while hiding in a locker it was difficult to see through the grill to know when your stalker had passed by.  Thankfully, the audio helped a bit with this.  Dropping out of VR and back to the screen experience, the graphics looked fantastic and the lighting was definitely improved, but the level of immersion took a hit.  It’s a tough call on how you should play, but if you do own a PSVR then Home Sweet Home is definitely worth checking out; at least for the first part of the game.

The Thai influence is strong with this game, so be prepared not to understand the text on most anything you might want to read.  Thankfully everything is translated and accessible in one of the cleanest pop-up interfaces of any game in this genre; especially in VR.  You can read documents in crisp text, or spin and zoom in on collectibles.  Items that need to be used are contextually selected when you need them.  The game checkpoints frequently and there is even a chapter select for those wanting to revisit certain parts of the game.  I still want to know what the significance of all that red yarn is.

I love scary games, and games where you are unable to fight back are the scariest of all.  The sensation of helplessness and the unpredictable nature of when something is going to appear and try to kill you is on a level I haven’t experienced since Resident Evil VII.  The added immersion of VR is just icing on the cake.  If you are looking for a truly terrifying game with a cultural twist then check out Home Sweet Home.

Author: Mark Smith
I've been an avid gamer since I stumbled upon ZORK running in my local Radio Shack in 1980. Ten years later I was working for Sierra Online. Since then I've owned nearly every game system and most of the games to go with them. Not sure if 40+ years of gaming qualifies me to write reviews, but I do it anyway.

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