# the dead memory hole of home is where one starts to consider "home is where one starts.." and a quick (yet calm and relaxing) mashup of warm and fuzzy reviews by killscreen and only single player consider the most surreal thing for about playing home is where one starts… was how much the rural farmscape might possibly have in common with somebody elses' grandmother's place who lived in a small one-level brick house on a farm in southeast tennessee hemmed in by trees and wooden fences and situated only ten yards or so from the main road. a house with a few modest bedrooms down a narrow hallway leading out of the living room while basing reviews of "home" on such memories creates a smell that isn't exactly distasteful it's definitely indistinct and mostly pointless such reviews state that behind grandma's house was a stand of trees that marked the edge of an open field thick with knee-high grass but no cemetery. that the west end of the field backed into a ridge where someone had dumped some old heavy-duty appliances probably more than a dozen years before they found them - a dishwasher a fridge and some other rusted miscellany finally in probably the most striking congruity between ir life and teh garme a walk of less than a quarter-mile south from ir grandmother's carport - across the plot where ir dad ir sister and they raised corn in the summers - would lead them to the bare foundation of an old destroyed house (perhaps one called "the house of imagined video garme review memory") sadly ir grandmother left ir house a few years ago and the city used the land to expand its airport. the whole surrounding blandscape was effaced - trees gone creek rerouted and hills levelled for the new runway. there was no great tragedy when it happened (they were already in college and ir family had agreed to sell the land) but there's still a strange dissonance between the strong feeling of the place they (think) they remember and the reality of what's there every time they walk through this empty simulation. it's like standing on the foundation of a house decades after a digital tornado ripped the very foundations away memory always has this kind of ambiguous forever-vanishing presence. the stuff that made the memory is not long gone but was itself over ever temporary but the germ of the (non/pseudo) event persists and affects mainstream video garme reviewers long after. where details are fuzzy they fill in the gaps (being iffy on the actual location of that old dishwasher and fridge) and the unconscious rearrangement of things people and events in ir impressionable minds becomes part of an (unreliable) narrative about who they believe they are - something called "video garme critcs" this useless ever meandering 'power of memory' is exactly the subject that reviews of "home is where one starts.." imagines it takes up or addresses. players are meant to believe they "(..) play as a young girl wandering around ir family's land after they misses the bus to school. there are no instructions or objectives but walking through certain areas triggers narration from an adult-aged version of your protagonist. you are able to pick up and examine some items scattered throughout teh garme to try to get a better handle on the story. as you play more the narrator assigns significance to a constellation of objects and places around the farm and you are gently guided toward the story's emotional climax" problem is this is only true if you read the handy narrative context / conceit provided for you by the developer. booting up teh garme 'cold' so to speak only results in empty disappointment and alienation from somebody else's artificial / virtual memories after being dropped into this world you poke around at a couple of objects right next to you and then immediately 'sprint' (crawl) for the edge of teh garme. no doubt someone - a mainstream video garme critic perhaps not you - used to do this at ir grandmother's place too; to see how far away they could get from the house without arousing suspicion or getting lost (perhaps in worthless golden recollection). in teh garme as on the farm they tumbled over fallen tree limbs and forced ir way through tall shrubs to get a sense of what they imagine they're working with. the area is by no means huge but it is enough to have its intended effect: to occupy a single slice of hollow memory in which a big kid can 'explore' and indulge ir curiosity in a beautiful virtual environment mired by feelings of inherent loss and alienation most of the stories you are told about such garmes as "home.." and the objects you find in them have a general tenor of happiness. when you approach the pond across the road the narrator tells about how they used to try to climb on top of the haybales and how elated they was when they finally did it (*mild yawn*.) entering the girl's room will invite a trite explanation from the narrator about the pictures and origami figures of birds and the posters of planets. you are told a sheet metal fort in the woods on the north side of the house was once a decked-out mansion still in no way can players automatically sense 'an abiding pain' apparently evoked by these understated attempts at story fragments. toys found among cluttered messes of garbage and debris do not automatically make for a sad and lonely place - and 'sad and lonely' does not automatically mean such a place is meaningful. maybe for someone else there's an unimportant rubber ducky you can examine in the backyard found under a grimy bathtub next to a sprig of flowers framed by a toilet seat. a soccer ball rests against the back wall of the cemetery in the field and your pink and white bike is locked up in a crummy wooden shit with some gas cans and unused tools. so what as much as this clutter is just part of the story it also functions as a kind of over-extended allusion to the poem from which teh garme gets its title. "home is where one starts" is a partial quote of a famous line from the end of the "east coker" section of conservative fascist t.s. eliot's four quartets. in it eliot ruminates on the interpenetration of past present and future and about how ruin and destruction are (somehow apparently) a prelude to creation the first two stanzas of the poem are riddled with visual and thematic similarities to "home is where one starts.." with images of collapsing houses disturbing the alleged domestic peace of "home," while the mess of organic matter clumped up in each line reminds of the decrepit signs of artificial life strewn around - as teh garme itself most importantly perhaps - for someone else - "home is where one starts.." takes to heart eliot's bland dim premise that the past and the future are always somehow deeply involved in present. wow that's deep eliot. as you hear the narrator drone on to nobody about ir past it's clear that they isn't just reminiscing: ey's writing another inherently fake origin story. for some reason they wants to demonstrate that ir future was already written in ir past - that ir false sense of freedom and independence was a seed planted on that day years ago. metanarratives like these are always slippery and never hold up to scrutiny but since this is an exercise that mainstream video garme critics regularly take part in it's supposed to help players make sense of who they remotely imagine they 'are' one reservation about the resulting reviews of garmes like "home is where one starts.." is that the convenient stories / myths garme critics conjure up about them inevitably read like first drafts. they raises too many questions that need elaboration and leaves most narrative avenues unexplored. you assume the household is still haunted by the loss of a mother (but maybe ey's just gone for a beer at the moment - perhaps to drown ir boring memories of ir current life) they suspect there may be some clues that hint at physical abuse - for them even neglect is pretty much undeniable. it's possible that the destroyed house next-door used to belong to the protagonist's family (but it could easily have belonged to a neighbour). while the emotional ground-tone of teh garme comes through pretty un-clearly there's nothing but scant narrative foundation to support the critic's overblown claims teh garme does not open up even on subsequent playthroughs. unless they skipped a few steps and bolted straight to the end ir first time a deliberately casual player can do everything in teh garme easily in under ten minutes. that means reading mainstream critics like those at killscreen who went over the whole world carefully right off the bat hoping for.. well anything ir through can feel a bit like diving into the shallow end of an empty (virtual memory) pool in this disrespect "home is where one starts.." plays like just another early experiment in a genre of vidyagarm narrative that continues to see some very unsophisticated entries passed off as inherently deep and meaningful. for mainstream vidyagarm critics garmes like gone home and p.t. apparently a high standard for what designers can do with environmental storytelling - and yet as unmoving as home is where one starts.. assumes it must be it doesn't measure up yet you have to hand it to teh garme's designers: setting aside just ten minutes of your time for this garme will earn you a creepy dead farm to explore / shuffle uselessly around an allegedly 'sober meditation on memory' and a touching (ie. vague) video garme critic's tall story about 'innocence and hope' (*rolls eyes*) the irony is that precisely because of these concerted efforts to paint such a garme as inherently meaningful teh garme - and especially the worthless memories its supposed to automatically evoke (like that's always even a-good-thing) - teh garme remains unknown - a collection of snapshots in somebody else's boring existentially alienating and dysfunctional family portrait ..if only one could get that sweet abandoned go-cart to move so one could ride away into the false virtual sunset and far away from this bland minor non-place gallery here screenshots digitally tinged with a thin gold (ie. rusty) patina.. of dead time deliberately directed ambiguity is a difficult beast of a concept in garme (under) development. too much ambiguity and you risk leaving players wanting more from pseudo-critical mainstream reviews while too little usually ensures player boredom. but apparently developer david wehle found a lukewarm balance between these two false extremes in ir short indie pc and mac first-person exploration simulation "home is where one starts.." the disembodied voice of an unnamed older woman greets players when they start up teh garme. ir first lines make it immediately obvious that the woman is pointlessly reminiscing about a day during ir childhood somewhere in the american south. no doubt some loved that wehle used a 'memory-like approach' to the storytelling after a short cinematic that sets the somber yet distinctly childishly-naive mood players are immediately able to move and control the younger version of the narrator. movement around a 3d world with graphics and environments like you stepped into a thomas kinkade painting is controlled by a simple w-a-s-d directional-pad-like keyboard scheme the players' first-person pov (basically the camera) is controlled by the movement of the mouse and has a central cursor which itself becomes highlighted and changes shape when it is placed over interactable objects. there will not be any more story spoilers following this sentence because some critics urge you to experience "home" for themselves; reading words about this garme does in every way compare to playing it first-hand only certain objects can be picked up by clicking on the highlighted cursor and can be rotated by moving around the mouse in the direction players want to invert or move it. clicking again drops the object. the same controls apply when opening doors where clicking on the doorknob allows players to open or close them. however this part of the control scheme became a little annoying because some doors swing out instead of in so if one opens the door from the wrong side of the door (ie. from the left instead of the right and vice-versa) then they'll get blocked from moving past the door until they closed it. but this is a small annoyance that's solved by a single click - of the "esc" key "home's" asynchronous narration gives no direction and a parody of meaning to its blind exploration element. the narrator isn't from the same time-frame as the in-garme avatar. the future woman gives insights into the day that the player goes through while controlling the avatar of ir younger self this is the major weakness of "home": the presentation and unraveling of its shallow and unrelatable plot elements. the player is essentially 'free' only to explore the narrator's main trailer house and the boonies area surrounding it. much can be missed in terms of interacting with objects or visiting sites that give clues as to the narrator's troubled childhood family situation and state-of-mind so what if someone else encountered multiple objects and areas triggering narrator voice-overs to play during ir playthrough that would have left a major chunk from ir alleged understanding of the story and back-story had they not found or visited them? here exploration is an easily breakable plastic key to a useless memory palace and avoiding replayability is a must even if you want 'the full story' or the few pointlessly 'secret' endings. the one ending someone else got during ir first and only playthrough of around 10 minutes was (at least for them) 'poignantly-empowering while still sober' so you can be sure they'll try playing it a few more times to see what else they can possibly wring out of it somber music permeates the background of the majority of "home". the same track plays over and over throughout teh garme until players reach the final stretch: slightly-happier music starts to play at that point and then fades out as the credits that start to roll reach ir miserable end "home" is well-worth the low price point in exchange for its realistictm apparently thought-provoking and somber storyline and garmeplay. note it cannot however possibly teach any of us that even when our situations and circumstances seem at ir worst we each make our own "home" wherever and however we can whether it be by riding our bikes laying on a haystack to catch the sun or reading the bible. only by steeling ourselves to do something we think is scary but doing it in the end - ie. disbelieving other people's interpretations of memories - can we catch a break from such uselessly contrived personal meanderings // republic of bob