- It's late, hun... you have to wake up...
Home Sweet Home is a Thai episodic VR-based survival horror game developed by Yggdrazil Group and released in 2017. A man named Tim wakes up after a night of too much partying, only to find himself in an unfamiliar room. After finding a flashlight just outside the door, Tim discovers that he appears to be in an unknown, seemingly abandoned university dorm, with trash and stacked furniture blocking several hallways and rooms. He catches a glimpse of what appears to be a teenage girl disappearing around a corner, and chases after her in the hopes of finding out where the hell he is. Little does he know he's about to step into a nightmare...
Home Sweet Home is heavily based on Thai culture and myths, and both the scares and mythology of the game, as well as the world itself, is taken directly from Thailand. The game is first-person, and focuses mostly on stealth and hiding, with only a handful of gameplay segments that can be considered action. Exploration is also important, and many areas do not have any dangers at all, instead the goal is to find diary pages or puzzle items to help you progress.
Episode 2 was released on September 25th, 2019
An Asymmetric Multiplayer Spin-Off Home Sweet Home Survive was released 2021. One play takes the role of a specter hunting four survivors controlled by other players.
Not related to the equally terrifying NES horror game Sweet Home (1989).
Episode 1 contains examples of:
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The third area is haunted by a Preta, or a Hungry Ghost, a kind of being born from the souls of people who committed sins against those who loved them. They are bound to haunt the location of their crimes, with their massive form and disproportionately tiny mouth meaning that they can never eat enough to be full. The one in-game is implied to be a man who robbed and injured his mother, condemned to stay around the house where it occurred.
- Bizarrchitecture: The crawlspace in Tim's house can somehow lead to two different locations, on two different provinces, which themselves make little sense.
- Bloody Horror:
- One of the first signs that something is very wrong is when Tim turns a corner and discovers a corridor covered in blood.
- The Ghost Girl travels through the Dorms using portals made of blood. She also tends to stop and vomit blood and nails.
- The final battle against the girl in episode one happens in a room filled with blood. In that stage, she also becomes covered in blood during the battle.
- Cliffhanger: The first episode ends with Jane (Tim's wife) badly injured and dragged off by what appears to be a mannequin dressed in a worn, old ceremonial dress.
- Driven to Suicide: Late in the game, one of the scares revolves around a student at the dorms committing suicide by hanging himself from one of the balconies. Strangely enough, the Girl stops and weeps in front of his body when you return through the same area later, allowing you to escape. The girl is implied to be his one-sided admirer, explaining why she'd cry at the sight.
- Exorcist Head: When you manage to catch up to the Girl, she proceeds to turn her entire head 180 degrees towards you and let out an ear-piercing scream. Cue running.
- Haunted Technology: The TV in Tim's house, the second time you arrive there, which appears to be counting down to something.
- Hell Is That Noise:
- The Ghost Girl's scream, and the weird creaking noise she makes as she walks around.
- The 'creaking' sound, is, in fact, the sound of her repeatedly sliding the blade of the box cutter she is armed within and out of its sheath.
- Holy Burns Evil: Near the end of the game, you're trapped in a room with the Ghost Girl, and have to use a bottle of holy water to keep her away while you're sawing through a locked door. It's not enough to kill her but it drives her off.
- Ironic Hell: The Ghost Girl was a deeply troubled woman that tried cursing people in life. Now she is a Vengeful Ghost constantly coughing up blood and nails as she mindlessly hunts anyone she comes across.
- Jump Scare: Plenty, considering what kind of game it is. Ironically, the first jump scare you encounter is just a trash bag falling from an upper story past you on the staircase.
- Sanity Slippage: Jane's diary reveals that she had been going through some serious mental issues possibly caused by a supernatural phenomenon.
- Scare Chord: Stumbling across the Girl will trigger one of these, just before her scream. Though you do have a little bit of time to hide again.
- Story Breadcrumbs: The plot of the game is only hinted at through newspaper clips, radio broadcasts, and pages from Jane's diary. Each location has its own story.
- The College Dorms were home to a student who practiced magic, and used it to murder a rival and get the boy she liked to love her back. Unfortunately, the boy committed suicide. The magic-using student is implied to be the Ghost Girl, and her helpers are likely the spirits of the dolls she created in the ritual to make the boy love her.
- The Traditional House was the home of a woman whose son betrayed her by robbing and injuring her. Now, in death, he haunts the place as a Preta.
- Tim's wife Jane was haunted by a supernatural phenomenon, causing her severe stress. She hid this from Tim and tried to deal with it on her own, which did not go well. At the end of the game, she has been kidnapped by something.
- Thinking Up Portals: The Ghost Girl can appear anywhere in the dorms using portals on the walls made of blood.
- You Wake Up in a Room: This is how the game starts. Tim wakes up in an unfamiliar, somewhat dingy-looking dorm room with no memory of where he is or how he got there.
Episode 2 contains examples of:
- All for Nothing: Tim finally reaches Jane near the ending, only for her to die moments later.
- All Just a Dream: Tim wakes up in his bedroom, thinking the events of the last episode was all a dream. He's not that lucky...
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Played with. You see a gigantic monster roam in the forest, but it never does anything other than look and then walks away.
- Big Good: The Novice Monk, already mentioned in Jane's diary in Episode 1. He ends up doing a Heroic Sacrifice for Tim to finish the Nano-Dagger.
- The Dead Can Dance: The Dancer does this when she's patrolling through Teleport Spam instead of walking, accompanied by music.
- Downer Ending: Jane got killed in the spirit world, Tim is still suspended from his beloved job, he now has an empty house and when the phone rings, it is from Dew. And then it's revealed that he still has the Nano-Dagger which glows threateningly as he invites Dew over...
- Embodiment of Vice: The entire storyline of Episode 1 and 2 happens because Chai needs these for his ritual and both Jane and Tim embody one. In this game, instead of the Christian Seven Deadly Sins, the vices are Murder, Theft, Sexual Misconduct, Falsehood and Intoxication.
- Empathic Weapon: Sorta. At one point, Tim receives the Nano-Dagger which can hurt spirits as long as it's in defense without a malicious thought. When Tim stabs Chai as he is meditating (aka not threatening), it becomes corrupted and the ending implies that it has turned into an Evil Weapon.
- Fingore: Tim looses two fingers when first meeting the executioner.
- Freudian Excuse: The game seems to be setting this up with The Dancer, who was raised by abusive grandparents who massively favored her younger sister. It's then inverted when it's revealed that she IS the younger sister, who turned into a Manipulative Bitch because of the favoritism.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Upon defeating the Dancer, Tim's health is set to one and is scripted to collapse after seeing a vision of the Dancer's sister performing her offering to the spirit that ultimately possessed Ratri. Any attempts to use the bolus to heal will be ignored by the game for this segment.
- Giggling Villain: The Dancer is prone to giggling fits while chasing or searching for you.
- Green-Eyed Monster: The Dancer. It's first implied that she was The Un-Favourite of her grandparents, but her sister was chosen for a role over her, and she broke down as a result.
- Hell Is That Noise:
- The clinks from the jewelry worn by The Dancer as she walks around, trying to find you. Additionally, the music she dances to in her patrols.
- A inversion happens late in the game: Tim's way of survival is to disturb the executioner by using big gongs.
- Human Sacrifice: Chai needs to offer five people who commited the major sins to gain unlimited power. You were chosen for intoxication and Jane for sexuality.
- Logical Weakness: The Dancer can be stunned if the mannequin she attempts to teleport into has a holy needle stabbed into it, and she can be barred from using that same mannequin ever again if she's attacked with the knife while stunned.
- I Love the Dead: Chai is accused of that according to a letter at his house. It's unclear if he actually does anything with corpses other than reviving them.
- Murderous Mannequin: Well, sort of. The mannequins don't do much other than look creepy, but they're actually tools for The Dancer, who can use them to teleport around the building. This is key to defeating her in the last battle.
- This is also inverted with the pointing mannequins, who are instrumental in helping Tim reach places he otherwise couldn't be able to. As well as pointing out which mannequin Ratri will be teleporting into next during the final confrontation.
- Necromancer: The Big Bad is an old man called Chai that controls the dead and tries to finish a ritual that would give him unlimited power.
- No One Gets Left Behind: The monk offers Tim to bring him back to the normal world without Jane as he's not as far gone yet. Tim doesn't take it.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Red-eyed corpses stalk the majority of Episode 2. Later, Tim also meets headless zombies and a massive man who's invulnerable everywhere except for his eyes.
- Parental Favoritism: Turns out to be at least part of The Dancer's descent into evil, having been turned into a monstrous brat by her grandmother's favoritism and snapped when she reached adulthood and she wasn't just handed everything anymore, though there's some implication she might have been a sociopath to start with.
- Story Breadcrumbs:
- Picking up where the last episode left off, we have The Dancer who took away Jane at the end of the last episode is a possessed dance student named Ratri, but she wasn't exactly a saint before either.
- There is also the story of the Executioner who was invulnerable due to protective tattoos all over his body. When someone made him kill someone out of corruption, they decided to off him too. So they stabbed him with poisonous plants into the eyes to stun him and then drowned him.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The final confrontation with the Dancer uses chimes and a calm drum beat as the song that plays throughout.
- Spoiled Brat: Ratri.
- Taken for Granite: What happens to the executioner upon Chai's death. It doesn't last.
- Too Dumb to Live: The coffin nail bed story. It's one thing to curse the bed of your ex so he splits with his new lover and a different thing to sleep in the same bed after reconciling with them, leading to you two shooting each other.
- Unnaturally Looping Location: A hallway of toilets.
