Closer To Home
Players beware, this is a very difficult and self-obscuring game. There is little to no hand-holding or guidance. The majority of the gameplay is dialogue, getting lost, and wandering. It may seem like an incoherent passage in a dark tunnel, but there is an internal logic to all of the mechanisms of the game. I have made a basic guide in the community forum.
- Find all the pieces of your dad.
- Befriend a variety of entities. (by talking to them)
- Figure out where all the children in your town have gone.
- Talk to people!
- Investigate the cold breath that seems to come from the cracks under your school.
- Help out your friends, and set boundaries. (by talking to them)
- Learn how to use death. (by dying)
- Enjoy the scenery and vibrant music.
- Choose when the game is over. Believe the ending you see fit!
About the game
Closer To Home is a primarily dialogue-focused surreal horror exploration game. As you navigate the world and talk to its inhabitants you will come into possession of items that allow progression through the game. Ability granting items are explained in inventory descriptions. The world occasionally changes, so be observant of audio and visual changes. Check back in on the world’s inhabitants from time to time, as they remember you. Please read the content warnings if you are one to heed them. I made this game entirely on my own, without any prior experience, so do not be surprised if you find a bug here or there. Thanks for checking it out.
All music and SFX created by Deltoid.
Game Discussion
Steam User 4
God darn it's quite hard to put into words how and why this game made me feel the way I did, and this might end up reading like an incoherent ramble, but I wanted to leave a review to bump its numbers up as I think It really deserves it.
Closer to Home is gorgeously designed for evoking feelings of the uncanny and weird - from the little details of textures and layout shifting to the often obtuse scribbles and maps you still have to make sense of in order to progress. While many narrative games take a temporal approach to pacing, aka the events of the story are sequenced based on chronology and the tension arc of the plot is built around that, Closer To Home really utilizes the nature of games as spaces. The story is inherently connected to how you navigate said spaces - getting lost in them, trapped in them, seduced by their morbidity. And it's those qualities that really enable you to put yourself in the shoes of the character - feel what they are feeling, see what they are seeing. It's that feeling of apathy and loneliness that is so perfectly transmitted to this open-ended immersive sim-inspired style of game narrative - you are a blank slate and everything is permitted, everything to have some sort of closure.
Steam User 7
Find more of my reviews on my curator page: Kasurot Recommends
Short Summary
A surreal, lo-fi horror experience that trades combat for conversation. It is a haunting, deliberately confusing journey through grief that rewards patience with genuine emotional depth.
The Breakdown
What We Loved
The "death as a mechanic" system is a brilliant narrative device. Traversing the dreamscape on a skateboard adds a surprising layer of fun to the exploration.
Minor Annoyances
The game is aggressively "self-obscuring"; getting lost is part of the design, which can be frustrating. Some backtracking is tedious, and the lack of a quest log demands intense player focus.
What It's About
A psychological descent into a fragmented world to find "pieces of your dad," serving as a dark metaphor for processing trauma and memory.
How It Plays
Exploration, dialogue, and skating. You wander a non-linear map, talk to entities to unlock paths, and intentionally die to shift between states of reality.
Core Tone
Oppressive and disorienting, yet strangely sentimental. It captures the specific "brain fog" of depression.
Genre Context
Reminiscent of Yume Nikki in its wandering nature, but with the dialogue-heavy focus of a visual novel.
Technical Snapshot
Lo-fi pixel art style that uses visual distortion effectively. Mostly stable, though some areas suffer from frame drops. The clunky interface is a stylistic choice.
The Bottom Line
Who Is This For?
Players who enjoy "getting lost" in a narrative and appreciate experimental horror that requires you to piece together the story yourself.
Who Is This Not For?
Anyone who needs clear objectives, map markers, or traditional gameplay loops; if you dislike "walking simulators" with vague goals, stay away.
A difficult, hostile, yet strangely beautiful little game that asks you to embrace the confusion.
Main Review
Closer To Home is an exercise in disorientation. You are dropped into a world that operates on nightmare logic, tasked with a seemingly absurd goal: finding pieces of your father. The premise immediately establishes a tone of psychological distress, casting the player not as a hero, but as a confused observer trying to make sense of a fractured reality. It refuses to hold your hand, forcing you to learn its rules through trial, error, and conversation.
The gameplay is stripped of traditional conflict, but it isn't just walking. You traverse the world using a skateboard to hop between areas, adding a rhythmic flow to the backtracking. You progress by talking to the bizarre, often grotesque inhabitants of the town, trading items and information to unlock new areas. The standout mechanic is the use of death; rather than a fail state, dying is often a necessary tool to transition between layers of the world or reset a scenario, recontextualizing the horror tropes it employs.
The world itself is the primary antagonist. Visually, it utilizes a lo-fi, distorted pixel art style that feels like a corrupted VHS tape. This aesthetic, combined with the lack of clear direction, creates a palpable sense of isolation. You will get lost, and you will backtrack often. While this aimlessness is clearly an intentional design choice to mirror the protagonist’s mental state, it can occasionally veer into tedium when you are stuck looking for a single trigger to advance the plot.
Despite its hostility to the player, Closer To Home succeeds as a piece of interactive fiction. It is a short, focused experience that respects your time by not overstaying its welcome, even if the minutes spent wandering can feel long. It isn't "fun" in the traditional sense, but it is a compelling, memorable dive into the surreal that sticks with you long after the screen fades.
Steam User 0
A small adorable game, a surreal journey through a small dreamscape world full of unexpectable imagery and memorable characters spiraling into a madness of total derealization. The topics this game brings are creepy sometimes, sometimes are hilariously funny but even then those never felt ordinary. I loved this game much and I will follow the developer for the next game, there already is a demo I saw.
Steam User 0
I enjoyed a lot of the ideas the game puts down, they evoked a variety of feelings. However the over arching one was loneliness and a desperation to end that.
Sometimes the game felt aimless. That I only managed to progress through pure chance. The tunnels under the school especially tripped me up, as seems common based on the several guides there are about it.
The game does a good job of blurring the lines between reality and dreams. Maybe the disjointed nature of the story is a reflection of how dreams are so disjointed.
I think if you enjoy depressed games where dreaming is the closest thing to solace the character has, then this will probably be right up your alley.
Shout out to my friend, Giza, doing the Russian translation! That was a treat to see in the credits.
Steam User 0
My friend showed me this game and i loved every bit of it. The main character looks like Clarence <3
Steam User 0
My dad's dead too. I also was catfished by a cute girl once.
Steam User 0
Deserves way more attention.