Homesick: Story & Themes

A thorough look at Homesick's themes and motifs as expresses through story and gameplay

Introduction

Homesick is a puzzle-exploration game by developer Lucky Pause. A bite-sized undertaking, it is scalable in a mere two to three hours of gameplay, much of which, truth be told, is rooted in vexing design flaws alongside an artificial encumbrance on player movement.

Where Homesick triumphs is at aesthetic fidelity, atmosphere and emotional resonance. Where it struggles is at mechanical polish, a lack of player guidance, and sloppy logic behind object interactability. To illustrate my point, instead of advancing the plot, half my gameplay time was dedicated to locking horns with the clunky inventory system, puzzling over my next goal, or clicking on every object until something gave in the absence of any visual cues to go by. Oh, and backpedaling, a ton of super slow, super tedious, backpedaling.

I do believe Homesick to be a serviceable narrative journey held back by its own mechanical ineptitude. The game could have easily benefited from a tradeoff of less problem-solving for more environmental storytelling with steadier pacing. That said, while the game failed to grip me as a package, it did move me enough to spark an internal discourse on its merit as a video game with an idea to convey.

Plot Recap

The history of Homesick’s housing complex is delivered through a series of newsletters. If read chronologically, it is possible to extrapolate a timeline of cause and effect, as follows…

I. The story begins with an unprecedented boom in the energy market. Surging stocks in the mining, as in the energy production and transmission industries, drown out advocacies for renewable and less hazardous production methods.

II. Courts legislate for public notices listing the negative health impacts in the event of a failed emergency evacuation; coma, sensitivity to sunlight, muscle weakness, memory loss, melting and bubbling of the skin, necrosis; these are the expected symptoms one should suffer from the fallout of a power plant explosion.

III. And with enough time tragedy indeed strikes. An explosion in the northeast power plant claims upward of 19 lives, as further bodies of missing personnel pile on. Despite this warning, plans for reconstruction are soon underway.

IV. In response to doubt about continued operations in the area, a new cancer study is conducted. It is quickly revealed, to the outrage of many, that workers have been excluded from the study thanks to corporate meddling.

V. Be that as it may, a widespread deficiency in job opportunities eclipses over public concern. The construction of additional company housing allows for a large-scale migration of new employees, this time with indoor amenities as top priority, due to an increasing awareness towards air pollution. So, by ensuring no human need goes uncatered to in the comfort and safety of the apartment complex, interaction with the outdoors dwindles to a minimum.

VI. The industry is, at length, in full swing, practically untouched by the still ongoing debates over governmental subsidies. Proponents of energy manufacturing are at odds with those who would see tax money go towards alternatives and argue for the benefits to the environment on top of the security and health of workers, not to mention the public at large. At the end of the day, these debates amount to nothing but static noise, feckless in averting another calamity.

VII. Fast forward to present time. Homesick is the story of an amnesiac power plant employee who fell victim to company negligence and by whatever turn of fate stayed behind. Short of memory, sunlight-sensitive and down with a mysterious lethargy, he finds comfort tending to the delicate greenery sprouting in the ruins of his late workplace. His days he spends in search of an exit, and his nights amid ghastly dreams, puzzling through a muddied recollection of the past. His eventual arrival at the building’s exit is accompanied by a devastating concession – after all this time exposed to toxic fallout, his body grew too physically intolerant to sunlight. As a result, he can hardly overstep the threshold, and worse, he is slowly dying. With no further recourse, he finds the nearest bed and dozes off into his final rest. Now that his past is clear, nightmares give way to a tranquil vision of the world outside, a dream not of any place in particular but of the vast lap of nature.

Color Design & Mechanics

Nowhere is Homesick’s subject matter more tangible than in color and level design, both of which play a central hand in establishing the game’s thematic tension between nature, denoted by vibrancy, and industry, its tonal antithesis. The player awakens to a glum reality, encased in a maze of colorless objects: washed-out paneling, decrepit furniture and suffocating corridors. The player’s sole reprieve from this reality is a crayon drawing as well as sparse patches of budding vegetation. Nature’s blues and greens are an oasis from the drab monotones of the industrial dilapidation, a sight which appeals not only to the player but also the insomniac protagonist they engender, insofar as breathing new life into wilted greenery serves as a mechanical condition for resting, and with it, game progress.

Homesick’s echo-friendly rhetoric partially emerges from the actions it demands of the player, here being the rejuvenation of dying plant life in an industrial context, at times even, through the direct symbolic denouncement of industrial figureheads, as seen here. To the game’s credit, and perhaps somewhat to its fault, this objective is very subtly communicated from the colorful drawing picked up at the game’s outset. In theory, this is supposed to the draw the player’s attention to the mismatch between the artwork’s blossoming flowers and their wilted counterparts at the player’s feet. The thought process: “How do I make these flowers be more like these?” instigates the search for water. That is, at least, how it’s supposed to work if the message doesn’t fly over your head as it did over mine.

Back on topic, nature has a ghostly presence in Homesick’s story and environment. For something so often brought up in text, vestiges of the natural world are tellingly absent. Thereagainst, the game features a catalogue of real-life pictures showing industry at work, with little natural imagery to speak of save but in a state of pollution. Take this shot, for instance, comparing untainted soil to the grime it contorts into under industrial exposure.
There’s melancholy in this ghostly depiction of plant life, yet at the same time, something of hope and reclamation. After all, such traces of budding vegetation are the retaliatory cry of nature in the wake of manmade catastrophe. You cannot, then, resist at least a soft measure of awe at this interplay of color and object placement.

A Machine Oiled in Misery & Tragedy in Retrospect

Letters and personal diaries provide a glimpse into the private lives of the building’s former occupants. These writings share themes of homesickness and separation from a loved one in some way or another. It’s separation from family, in the case of Sabine and Mariah, who both write to their siblings, Tosh and Shane. For the Willows couple it’s the yearning for an adopted child and the opposition it’s met with from their parents. For the unnamed Bachelor next-door to Sabine it’s a rough breakup from a long-term relationship.

Recurring also in these writings are motifs of longing for the countryside coupled with a personal responsibility to one’s environment and colleagues. Sabine laments her role in facilitating the surrounding devastation. So heavily weighs her conscience that she develops insomnia. If only, she writes, she could live in a green-powered village, like the one she had visited on the way here and describes to Tosh as a “refuge from this crazy world.” Mariah, who hails from such a village, had to leave her family farm to help its financial recovery. Much as Mariah misses home, she cannot return without funds. Lastly there’s Mr. Riggins, a would-be whistleblower seeking legal protection upon deciding that he could no longer turn a blind eye to his company’s horrific negligence of human lives. Terrified for his job security, having built up a career over many years, Riggins hesitates for the longest time before conceding an obligation towards his fellow workers and community.

As a collective, the occupants of Homesick’s apartment complex come off as this ensemble of malcontents whose bleak internal realities clash with the assuring façade projected by company statements in the papers. People like Sabine, Mariah and Riggins are the cogs to an industrial machine oiled with misery and fueled with a corporate zealotry that is borderline satirical in its race for more and more energy without asking at what expense.
In its brief runtime, Homesick likes to remind us how easy it can be to fall in line with a broken system, to look away from concrete problems, to snap back into to our senses only past the point of no return. Aspects of retrospective revelation or inevitability recur at least once throughout each type of text across the game, from diaries to books to newsletters.

• In his diary, the unnamed bachelor next-door to Sabine struggles to pinpoint at what stage things took a turn in his relationship. Looking back, it was a gradual decay, so slow, yet so sure-footed in its destination that at some point, not unlike the protagonist, he became blind to it.
  
  
• The short story Desolace follows a tribe on the verge of extinction. Their last hope is a map charting a path to the fabled land of plenty where nothing shall ever be wanted for. Children of the tribe are bred and trained for this one fateful expedition to decide the future of their people. Alas, in place of paradise is desert, lined with the cadavers of previous envoys. By the time anyone could make it back to warn the others their provisions will have already been spent, and more lives shall perish to feed the false dream of a nonexistent paradise.
  
  
• Then there’s of course the aforementioned news articles delineating the chain of eventsר leading up to the explosion. Perhaps the clearest instance of foreseeable calamity is the remiss conduct of energy corporations who, no matter the data, signs or precedents, refuse taking measures to prevent another tragedy, which is exactly what follows.

Text aside, the most palpable expression of a 20-20 hindsight transpires in the game’s twist. Upon reaching the lobby, the player, at long last, steps into the light of day only to discover an invisible wall blocking their path. On re-entering the building, another door, previously obscured, now stands illuminated by a stream of sunlight. Inside is a bathroom mirror, and therein reflected is a sad grotesquery, too frail to make it back to civilization, too repugnant to be welcomed back even if it could. This anticlimax renders the entire journey, along with any hope of returning to civilization, destined for failure from the word go. Once more, by the time we learn of this, it’s far too late.

The signs were there all along - the protagonist’s strange ailment, his memory loss. Hell, his aversion to sunlight alone is enough to tip off the player that even should he ever set foot beyond the building, he is forever barred from contact with the rest of the world. The saddest thing about the ending is how readily does the protagonist succumb to his predicament, as if it was the obvious and irreversible endpoint of everything that led up to this moment – the negligence, the willful ignorance, the disregard of individual lives and the environment. All this for a lonely death in some remote facility faraway from human contact.

Critique of the Twist & Potential Solution

On a note of criticism, I have this to say.

A powerful twist is built on a trail of breadcrumbs, faint pieces of evidence as easily ignored on first blush as they are taken for granted once the cards are on the table. This twist, albeit passable, is a little short on crumbs. True, the game does encourage certain questions, like why is the protagonist so sleepy, what’s up with the blinding lights, and so on. Problem is, since there is not much info to speculate on preceding the twist the player is robbed of the opportunity to misread or overlook the truth.

It’s for this reason I believe the game’s outset, as opposed to its finale, would have been the more thematically apt spot for info on the player’s symptoms. The concession of having had downplayed or outright missed this large a clue right next to you would have packed quite the poetic punch. By having the player face their own ignorance in hindsight, the twist’s sense of shock and disappointment are complemented by self-reproach. This way the player might play out the point as opposed to passively observe it, the way it works in cinema and literature.

Final Words

Homesick is by no means a dialectic work. Its rhetoric against corporate vampirism, labor abuse and crimes against nature is viciously one-sided. It denies the player a fair and cool-headed assessment of two poles on the energy debate, overstating the merits of one while denigrating the shortcomings of the other. And that’s completely fine, because Homesick is more feels than logic. It doesn’t presume a position of authority or academic sophistication. Rather, it plays like half a cautionary tale about the imminent loss of the outdoors, half a funeral letter to humanity’s sacrificial offerings at the altar of industry.

It’s hard to say whether Homesick has a “message” per se. What is clear to me is that Homesick is not strictly about nature or industry. It’s about people, from the very first moment, it’s about people. So, to me, the contrast of nature and industry as depicted in the game is more so a reflection of human sociability under opposite climates, with the environment representing a state of social flourish and healthy bonds, be they communal or interpersonal, bonds that unravel and twist under pressure to advance and produce and never take a moment to just be. In such an unsustainable climate people go out of touch with one another, as with their surroundings, paving the way for rampant exploitation.

If I had to come up with a good-faith interpretation for Homesick’s supposed message, it would be for human civilization to rethink its charted course, lest in the not-so-distant future we ourselves might catch a homesickness for the world we left behind, becoming too estranged, both from each other as from the light of day to find our way back. Come this day, the dying embers of this yearning will be nothing but a distant dream and reminiscence.