Home Behind is a side-scrolling survival rogue-style game published and developed by TPP Studio. You play as a refugee who is trying to escape the war torn chaos of his homeland in an attempt to reach the safety of a far-off land.

There are elements of the game that are definitely inspired by games like FTL in that you are constantly trying to escape an encroaching overwhelming force (a rebel army in this case), however the game is played out in real time rather than the turn based jumps of FTL. Similar to other games of this ilk, there is the primary Story Mode which tries to give some form and meaning to your constant character leveling and upgrading of gear.... and the Endless Mode which does away with any story elements and turns the game into a open ended survival similar.

The Game

In Home Behind, you are are a refugee escaping the ravages of a rebel army in pursuit of safety and the hope that you will be reunited with your family. It is a pretty unmemorable story, although there is some effort to introduce some empathy and pathos into the narrative it done in a pretty heavy handed fashion which makes the entire story come across comical at best.

At the start of the game, you get to choose a profession which will determine your starting inventory, skills and any associated job perks and bonuses. As this is one of the rogue genre of games, it means that with each play-through you will be unlocking various bonus classes to start your new adventure with.

After you select your starting profession, you are dropped into the game with this written message to form the backbone for your character motivation. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the way that all the major plot points are going to be conveyed. That said, this is one of the better ones... occasionally I would have some messages in Chinese which was quite weird. I'm not sure if it was a bug or a confusion of assets or if it was supposed to be an intentional unintelligible message for my avatar! I highly suspect that it wasn't the latter.

Upskilling and gearing up your inventory is a critical part of making it to your eventual destination. Many of the tool tips that deal with crafting are not really that intuitive, you aren't always 100% sure of what you need and how to get there.... however, with experimentation over a number of play-throughs you do start to get the hang of it. It isn't really a complex upgrade and crafting tree but it is something that could have been better implemented as UI confusion isn't the most fun form of learning a game mechanic!

Another little quibble is the weight factor of your cart that you are dragging everywhere. In the beginning, it is quite easy to fill up the cart to beyond capacity which tires you out and then leads to a downward spiral to death. It is an useful mechanic to prevent pack-hording of everything that you come across but you do need so much stuff for your crafting (especially on the way to higher tier equipment).

This leads to a certain path through the cart and equipment upgrades which is highly optimal for your survival and most of the other paths will end up hobbling you quite severely. Again, this isn't a great thing for this sort of rogue-like game... you don't want to have the game push you towards an optimal solution, but you want to have a game experience that gives rise to emergent situations that don't rely on you having to make the "right" choices to succeed.

Throughout your travels, you are required to balance your three survival attributes. Mood, Hunger and Thirst as shown in the top left corner of the UI. All of these attributes decline over time, and their rates of decline are affected by the various conditions and strains that you place on your body. So, my choosing to sprint you tire more easily... and by choosing to move in adverse weather conditions will rapidly deplete your Mood.

You can provide positive boosts to the attributes by using inventory items (such as eating foods) or via succeeding at certain in-world tests of your skill (of course, these can give you some negative buffs as well).

Of course, there is also the all important attribute of Health which is the ultimate measure of your survival. Combat is played out in real time, and there is supposed to be some sort of skill in what sort of posture (defensive, offensive...) you adopt as well as in timing your attacks. However, in practice, it appeared end up with swinging as fast and as often as possible as it was impossible to read any enemy telegraphing of attacks.

The combat was also a bit lacklustre in that there was no heft and weight to attacks... so, you were just mashing away to try and deplete the enemy Health bar before yours dropped too far. One very welcome mechanic choice was the fact that you only needed to face a single enemy at a time, the combat was annoying enough without needing to fight multiple opponents. It is a double edged sword though, in that you would need to fight several series of single combat battles without enough time in between to prepare and recover.

There are various NPCs scattered around the place and your interactions with them are pretty limited. Quite often, I found that I didn't have exactly the right thing that was required for trades and the begging option was quite detrimental to your mood meter. So, unless I wanted to be an outright bastard and go around killing civilians, the best thing to do was to chat and then just move on.

When you are in their settlements, you can also interact with various items and containers in their homes, but it isn't always immediately clear what the consequences of doing so are. Sometimes, you are penalised heavily in your stats if you interact with an object.. and other times you are not. Again, it is a very much learning by trial and error sort of mechanic and one that could have been improved upon for a better game experience.

Of course, there are some interactions that are going to be pretty obvious in results and consequences!

Conclusion

I did give Home Behind a good couple of weeks of play but in the end I found the UI and game mechanics just too annoying to keep at it. Now, if a game has annoying mechanics but a good narrative or story then it is often worth it to persist just to see the story to its conclusion. I'm afraid that this was NOT an example of that sort of game. The refugee scenario was pretty damn cringy at best and highly stereotypical (in a really bad bad way) at best.

The game runs a weird line between stupidly ludicrous (the boss fights and character motivations) to the weirdly serious (playing the off key heartstrings pulling...). In fact, I was not ever quite sure if the developer was taking the piss or trying to cast a serious light on a refugee's plight.

The basic concept of a refugee trying to escape a war torn land to try and escape to safety is a great premise for a game... however, in this case the narrative pitching was so off key and jarring which when combined with difficult UI and un-engaging gameplay that it made the game a veritable chore to wade through. I'm afraid that it takes quite a bit to make me give up on a game, but I do have a large Steam backlog... and this game just wasn't worth it for me!

Review Specs

DELL XPS15 (9560)

CPU: i7-7700HQ
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050

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