Hi
Got some new followers on here because of shoutout for debug room piece (Thanks, Austin!). These days I mainly post on the 50 Short Reviews page, but I’m also an editor for The Arcade Review, which is a young magazine/site that publishes essays and reviews of experimental games. I want to encourage everyone to please go check out the work we’ve done!! We launched a new reviews section on the site after new year’s, and I’m really proud of the first two pieces! Here’s an excerpt from Emilie Reed’s review of Homesickened:
Uncomfortable changes occurring too quickly and an unnerving sense of immutability exist side by side in a single moment of revisiting the hometown. In every way, this environment fails to either improve or problematically remain the same. It's a deeply unpleasant nostalgia that gets at the core of the word's etymological meaning, a combination of the Greek words for "a return home" but also "pain." This kind of nostalgia exists alongside the initial magical fantasy of nostalgia in Homesickened, the kind which is lighthearted and pleasurable but has little connection to the origin of the word.
While playing Homesickened I found myself working through the initial, fantasy nostalgia to an unpleasant nostalgia that reminded my of my own trips back home. But the game heightens the effect even further to match the vibe of a horror game. The concept of the uncanny, of things that are familiar and yet also slightly wrong, creates a sense of unease related to the gap between what is remembered as normal and what you are instead confronted with. Memories are rebuilt and re-inscribed every time we recall them, so one's hometown is, logically, a very sensitive site of this constant rewriting and construction of reality. The childhood home can become uncanny without anything really changing after all. When you return home after a long absence, many things may not have changed, but you have, which often leads one to wonder "were things always like this?" as the site of formative memories becomes increasingly unfamiliar.
