No longer home
![no longer home no longer home](https://images.gog.com/27d4b2bd9ff2e322b4a38b661ae211a9efe0bce23170aaa0298b9a1d1bedbecf.jpg)
Ao, more outspoken than Bo, struggles with Bo’s indecisive nature, but similarly fails to address it directly. When Bo encounters a shifting, fractal orb above their bed, it feels more like a genre flourish than a narrative counterweight.Īo and Bo also have explicable, concrete issues as a couple: Bo resents that Ao is messy, but finds it hard to articulate this. Some of the game’s more surreal aspects, like these shifting walls and boundaries, communicate something important about the characters’ relationships to space and security. It even adopts its magic-realist approach to a narrative that celebrates place, but Humble Grove doesn’t wholly make the genre their own. The influence of Kentucky Route Zero permeates every aspect of the game. The sense of the transitory is embedded in the domestic environments of the game what once felt stabl, and sturdy can now contract, expand and dissolve at a moment’s notice, replicating the dissociative anxiety that can accompany a major life change.
No longer home full#
Their house, where the entire game takes place, is navigable through a point-and-click system that sees minimalist, Kentucky Route Zero-esque annotations arise over objects that are interactive – a particularly charming element of this is when you click to walk, and a small plant unfurls as the character approaches.Īs these conversations play out, the environment around the characters reflects this transitional phase of their lives – their bedroom wall shifts back to reveal a full moon over a silhouetted house as they discuss gentrification, and earlier on, a garden shed from a past sharehouse reconstructs itself before the player’s eyes as the couple discusses former living arrangements with their friends. The point of view shifts between Ao and Bo as they walk around, planning a barbecue, or discussing their future plans. Combined with a muted colour scheme of the low poly visuals, No Longer Home offers a gentle, narrative experience that left me wishing it had an autoplay feature that allowed me to sit back and let the dialogue wash over me, instead of fastidiously clicking through.
![no longer home no longer home](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/uploads/articles/tagline_images/1912142240id12199gol.jpg)
The game can be played in an hour or two, maybe in bed, or in front of the heater, as Rainsberry’s remarkable, resonant score pulls you deeper into the story. This coming-of-age narrative is set to an utterly haunting, intoxicating score by Eli Rainsberry that reverberated through my brain as I navigated Ao and Bo’s small home, and for a long time afterward. Consequently, Ao has decided to return to Japan, while Bo considers the reality that they may be unable to follow them – and moreover, they may not want to.Īs the story unfolds, the pair question, both together and separately, what their plans for the future will hold, and how their economic and personal circumstances will affect their ability to build the lives they want. The couple feel they have failed in key ways to secure the kind of adult life that they expected: they are moving out of their London flat they have struggled to find gainful employment. The story takes place as they pack up the home they have shared for the past two years. Developed by Humble Grove and published by Fellow Traveler, the game tells a domestic, nostalgic, and sometimes surreal tale about couple Ao and Bo, who are grappling with responsibility and stability as they graduate from university into the unstructured world of adulthood. No Longer Home is a semi-autobiographical narrative point-and-click game about two non-binary people in their early twenties.