No Longer Home
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
I started playing No Longer Home by Humble Grove at my mom’s house, when I visited her over Labor Day. It’s not the house I grew up in, but it’s close enough. The town isn’t spacious enough to make you feel like you’ve left any particular part of it behind, anyway. Little suburban lawns spread out into endless cornfields; there’s a grocery co-op for the university types, a Whole Foods for the insurance company’s petit bourgeois, and two Wal Marts for everyone else. The farmers call it “town.” It’s the gently melancholy place where I used to wander downtown at night and dream about being a writer. It always hurts a little to be back.
Going back home primed me perfectly for playing No Longer Home, a gently melancholy narrative game about two people who are trying to imagine what happens after you leave somewhere behind. Bo and Ao, the game’s protagonists, met in “uni” (it’s set in London) and now have to figure out what it means to part ways after graduation. Ao is on their way back to Japan because their visa will expire when they’re no longer a student; Bo has to figure out what their life is going to look like in London on their own. This strongly-written game offers a rich array of dialogue options, and having finished it once, I feel like I’ve only read about half of the story. Out of all that variety, though, there was one question that stuck out to me because it was repeated a few different times: “Will you come visit me?”
It’s a big question, right? Because when you answer it, you have to commit with certainty to something in an uncertain future. When Bo says that they’ll come see Ao in Japan someday, it comes with a touch of irony. Will that really work out? Where are they going to find the money for that, since they’ve been so broke for the last few years that they lived with five people in a four-person flat? The game leaves these kinds of questions wide open, focusing instead on the moment of inevitable parting. Each point-and-click scene is structured around something that’s coming to an end: getting ready for one last backyard barbeque with a group of friends, quietly contemplating the moving boxes, trying for the last time to make nice with your flatmate’s cat who was never especially fond of you.
The gameplay is pretty straightforward. If you’ve ever played another narrative-based indie game, you’ve already got some experience pointing-and-clicking to interact with objects, then advancing the story by selecting which branches from various dialogue trees to follow. Early on, the game introduces a mechanic that lets you flip the room around, which is used in some really creative ways; a hallway, for example, might reveal a whole other door that you wouldn’t have seen from a different angle, and whatever lurks behind that door might fill in some interesting details of the story. The game also switches perspective periodically, so you might play as Bo at the beginning of one scene and then get to see Ao’s point of view as it plays out. Thematically, this mirrors the game’s investment in separation. It not only allows both Bo and Ao to emerge as characters with rich inner lives, but lets the player actually experience what it is like for them to inhabit spaces from which the other is absent.
My favorite moments, though, were the occasional hints of something cosmic, maybe even Lynchian, that brought the narrative into the magical realist territory for which games are so well-suited. You might, for example, wander into the bedroom while thinking about all the things you meant to get done in the last year, only to be greeted by “shards of unknowable geometry.” These moments happen infrequently enough that the game never slides into full-blown surrealism, but there’s just enough freaky stuff to create space for ambiguity and multiple interpretations of the characters’ emotional states.
No Longer Home doesn’t shy away from the fact that life for its two nonbinary protagonists is difficult and complicated. Some of those difficulties are more universal, like the fact that capitalist slumlords basically run the world, and some of them are particular to the protagonists’ identities, like Ao’s lament about their love of cooking: “People at home tell me it will make me a good housewife. Why does it have to be gendered?” Bo says that sometimes their parents get their pronouns wrong.
In an interview with Gamereactor, the creators (who are nonbinary themselves) said, “Our goal was to normalise the lives of non-binary people and how our issues are intersectional with other aspects of our lives, rather than to solely focus on being non-binary. We didn't want to tokenize ourselves and wanted to express ourselves as actual people instead of keeping to a rigid box of representation.” This intersectional ethos is effective in a story that’s fundamentally about different kinds of worry, but also about different kinds of hope. The game grapples with questions like, “Will people accept me for who I am?” at the same time as questions like “What the hell am I supposed to do with this art degree?”, but by leaving the story open-ended, it also gives the player room to imagine affirmative, hopeful answers to those questions. The ambiguous end of the game is a reminder of the ways that our own stories never really reach an end until we die; what felt like the end of an era a year ago is now just a memory of the way things used to be.
If you’re already a fan of story-heavy games like Extreme Meatpunks Forever, If On a Winter’s Night, A Traveler, or even Kentucky Route Zero, you’ll find a lot to love in this poignant vignette of a game. If you’re not yet a fan of these kinds of games, by all means, pick up No Longer Home and find out what you’ve been missing. There were, I admit, a couple of times when I felt some distance from the characters—it’s a very specific story about characters who, as I understand it, would have to be about a decade younger than I am. Whenever I felt that way, all I needed to do was look out Mom’s window at the cornfields to remember that we are, in so many ways, defined by the things we consider to have ended. That town isn’t home for me anymore, either. But we’re made of what we leave behind.
Code provided by publisher. Available on Switch, PC, Linux, Mac.
