Things that can eat a bag of dicks:

  1. Three Fourths Home

Yep.  That’ll do as an opener.  

First things first, this isn’t a game, it’s a visual novel or something.  It’s not a game.  It sells itself as a minimalist, atmospheric character study.  Does the idea sound interesting to you?  Well, it isn’t.  Imagine one of those interminable Metal Gear Solid codec dialogue scenes from the Playstation 1, but without the voice acting and somehow, SOMEHOW managing to make less sense.

You play as a girl in her early twenties who is driving 20 miles home at night through a storm and towards a tornado.  It is during this entirely appropriate time that her family decide to call her on her mobile and have all sorts of meaningful conversations with her.  Brilliant.  Throughout this mercifully mute unvoice-acted dialogue we piece together a picture of a family with an alcoholic father who has lost a leg in some undisclosed manner, an autistic brother who reads you a story and a mother who is about to lose her job and is absolutely determined to have her daughter killed in a motor wreck on the way home by NOT LETTING HER OFF THE PHONE WHILE DRIVING!

The game element of this experience is that you have to hold down a button to drive, press another to skip someone’s dialogue and another to select a response.  Sadly, none of those responses is, “I’m driving through a storm at night!  Surely this can wait the half hour it will take me to get home?  I might be killed in a car crash!”  No, instead we have overwritten, clunky dialogue that reads like it was written by a 17 year-old drama student.  It is actually fairly unintuitive, as lines of dialogue stay on screen until you press square (or X or whatever), but you can’t always immediately dismiss it, so you find yourself hammering the button, which often leads to bouncing back to the NPC’s line, as pressing square (or X) replays the NPC’s dialogue when your dialogue choice is available.  I suppose it’s to stop you from just slapping cross (or A) until the game is at last blessedly over.

To Three Fourths Home’s detriment, it feels the need to add gameplay into the mix.  This comes in the form of holding down a button to continue driving.  Now, I understand that the point is to create a visceral connection between the player and the main character, and to be fair it adds the tiniest sliver of agency in that the entire game stops if you let go, but it simply boils down to holding R1 (or RT) to make time pass.  I tried not responding to the dialogue and just driving, but nothing happened.  Besides the “driving”, there are a couple of other things you can do, such as honk the horn, toggle the headlights and radio, and zoom in slightly.  It feels almost as if the makers were slightly embarrassed that they had made what was essentially an hour long 2D credits sequence and had to add something in.

I really have to stress that my beef with this experience isn’t to do with a hatred of the minimalist style of indie game, or the visual novel (barring Braille and audiobooks, aren’t all novels visual?).  I was a huge fan of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole on Commodore 64, I loved Gone Home, both of which told very mundane stories in their own ways.  You don’t get much more minimalist that Thomas was Alone and gameplay itself is next to nonexistent in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.  I even really enjoyed The Novelist, which had pretty mixed reviews.  But this?  This is flat and uninteresting.  The concept of being three fourths (when did Americans stop saying “quarter” to describe the division?) from home is hammered in, and the theme is very much that each family member is given a quarter of the journey to chat shit about their lives.  

I can’t even be objective about this.  I actively despise this game.  I don’t mind people enjoying it, or having a different opinion, but I need to quote Wikipedia here:

Gamespresso awarded it a score of five out of five, saying that it “challenges what a game is”. Technology Tell said that the game was “effective in every way”.  GameSkinny said that it should be a contender for the Game of the Year Award.

Fucking nonsense.  I am actually metaphorically walking out of this review.  I award it one out of ten for wasting my time.  This game is a pile of indie wank and should have been called “Family of Cunts”.

Oh, wait!  I’ve got a better end to the review!

Do me a favour and hold down shift while you read this:

 

Phone rings.

Wull:  Hello?

Mum:  Where are you?

Wull:  Twenty miles away.  I’m just driving back.

Mum:  Right y’are see you in half an hour.

Wull:  Cheerio!

Mum:  Tata.

 

Congratulations, you just played “Drivin’ Hame” by Wull Scott.  Where’s my Indie Game award?

 

***SPOILERS***

 

I decided to take this out the main body of the review, because somebody might want to play this through, but I didn’t want to discard it completely.

The twist of the game is that the player character doesn’t die in a car crash (although she fucking should), instead her family is hilariously killed by a tornado when she is…  Three Fourths (quarters) Home!

And the screen slowly fades to white…  PLINK!!

Any pathos…  Any emotion you may have felt is snatched away as the bottom of the stark white screen is suddenly lit up with the cheerful blue (or green) blaze of the end game trophy (or achievement).  “Hooray!” you cheer, “I have something to show for this wasted hour of life!  I am now doubly glad this family of sad-sacks just ate a tornado!”

The same is true for the far more boring, yet superior Epilogue section of the game.  The epilogue is presented as the main character waiting for a bus sometime in the year before she moved back home, imagining a phone call she wished she had made to her mother when she had the chance.  The epilogue has a number of different outcomes and despite its more mundane nature, it is probably more relatable.  Again, though, each ending portrays a different facet of survivor’s guilt, but is ruined by the enthusiastic chime of a trophy (or achievement).

PLINK!  You just felt guilt – Bronze Trophy (or 25G)