Homebody is a timeloop thriller with some deep messaging and obtuse puzzles. It tackles ideas of depression, ADHD and anxiety in realistic ways that I can appreciate. The mechanics and overall gameplay however are nothing special.

You’re Emily, a girl who has deep insecurities and that led her to isolate herself from her friends. It’s the time of year where they all meet up at a cabin and have a fun weekend together. She’s not excited about it and almost bails but her roommate urges her to go, so she does. There’s some tension when she meets her old friends and, as the player, you wonder what Emily did. After talking with each of them and catching up, lightning strikes and the power goes out. Shortly afterwards all your friends are dead and the thing that killed them is after you. If it catches you, you die and start over. How many loops until you’re dead forever? How do you escape the loops? Only time will tell. This concept has been done many times and this iteration doesn’t do much to deviate from the norm. Sometimes between loops you’ll get visions of Emily and her friends hanging out. There’s no way to know if these are actual events or just hallucinations and that keeps them from being engaging enough for me. I liked learning more about their friendships, but most of them don’t get enough time for you to feel like you know them and plus the moments that you do get, you have no idea whether they’re real or not. From a thought perspective it adds an interesting layer, but makes character moments disingenuous. I can appreciate the idea, but the execution here prevented me from forming attachments to the characters. I think this choice is one of the downfalls of the narrative here, but the information you discover about the cabin and the lore behind it is intriguing, if not convoluted.

The gameplay is a whole other beast. Every loop you have limited time to solve puzzles to progress throughout the house. After a few loops you’ll discover an ultimate goal, which gives you direction forward. Some of the puzzles though, are not well designed. There are a few that you can solve by trial and error, which I did do, only to discover a hint while solving another one. They also don’t point you in a logical direction as you complete them. It seems that many can be solved in any order, but many need to be solved consecutively. There weren’t any solutions that made me think of another puzzle I could solve after completion, so I was ultimately walking around blindly until the killer got me so I could start over. Once you do have the path (either by guide or somehow figuring it out), the killer becomes irrelevant. The game loses all sense of horror, though admittedly it doesn’t have much to begin with. There are some scenes that are a bit creepy, but nothing disturbing or outright scary. It’s more of a puzzle game with some psychological aspects, but nothing really comes together as you play. The puzzles and the “cabin in the woods” scenarios don’t mesh with one another, leaving the experience hollow. 

Homebody isn’t a terrible game, but it isn’t great. The story is all over the place and while it does tackle some interesting topics about the dynamics of friendship, it doesn’t align with the puzzle-solving, thriller gameplay. It has a lot to say, but the points are muddled by its attempts at a grandeur story rather than a grounded character drama. If it had focused more on the characters or had puzzles that related to the scenario or relationships, it would’ve felt more cohesive. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a mess and left me feeling unfulfilled in the end.