Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition Review
Added: 03.04.2015 22:41 | 5 views | 0 comments
I can barely hear my car's radio over the storm. It's just a low buzz and a series of rhythmic thumps. I'm alone on the highway, flanked by rows of Nebraskan corn, driving in the shadow of the wind turbines in the distance, steadily spinning along in the rain. Dozens of wind turbines… or hundreds of them. Thousands maybe? They seem to stretch forever--or for at least as long as this awkward conversation with my father does. Three Fourths Home is a short piece of interactive fiction that captures the feeling of late-night driving and millennial uncertainty. You play as Kelly Meyers, a 20-something who recently moved back in with her folks and who can't see a path forward for her or her troubled family. As the player, you're more concerned with the family's past: Across a main story, an epilogue, and a collection of interesting bonus content, you piece together (and even decide) who these people are and what happened to them. The conversations you have with Kelly's mother, father, and brother always work their way back around to some recent trauma--yours or theirs.
The extras included in Three Fourths Home build on this. On top of being able to listen to the game's soundtrack, you're able to flip through one of Kelly's college photography projects and read a collection of her brother's short stories. The photos are flawed and the fiction flirts with cliché, but both are better for it. Central to Three Fourths Home is the notion that creative work helps us work through our trauma, and being able to see the art these characters made sells that. Since so much of Three Fourths Home is about understanding who these people are, this stuff isn't superficial bonus content. It's a true part of the experience. In total, that whole experience only took about two hours of my day. But it left me winded. There is a real velocity to Three Fourths Home. It sneaks up on you, quietly at first, before suddenly becoming overwhelming. Its closest analogs aren't other games, but works like John Darnielle's novel Wolf in White Van or the haunting music of lo-fi artist Mount Eerie--art that rumbles and groans and then springs into action. More than anything, though, Three Fourths Home reminded me of one of those nights where you look down to see that you're going ten… twenty… thirty miles over the speed limit. But you just can't bring yourself to lift your foot off the gas pedal. You've got somewhere to be.
From:
www.gamespot.com
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