Black Home Review

After her husband disappears, Lecia Coy sets out to find him. The destination? The abandoned monastery. Unfortunately, this place holds a lot of dangerous secrets.

Black Home Logo

Black Home is a 6-7 hour RPGMaker title that takes place in one location – the abandoned monastery. You’re probably already thinking, wait, it’s all in one location? That sounds boring! Luckily, this “one area” is full of a wide range of different looking locations that, while you know it’s the same place, make it feel like it isn’t one place.

At its core, Black Home is an RPG game with mystery/horror elements. Over the course of the playthrough, you’ll end up with a total of 4 party members. Sadly, it doesn’t really feel like each character adds “that” much that’s unique. Your hardest hitting character is, for some reason, your best mage too. Your healer is your best physical damage dealer. You hardly ever actually need to heal too.

Combat in Black Home is turn based, though really it’s a matter of just overpowering your enemy with your spells. Physical hits are typically garbage, though like I said, you’ll likely have your healer and the fourth party member using them as their spells are even more garbage. In general, damage and general stat values aren’t that high. There are quite a few healing pools available to you, and with 99% of enemies in the field not respawning, it’s a matter of just defeating what’s there.

Black Home Combat

Now of course, this whole “not respawning enemies” is both good and bad. It’s good because when you need to wander through half the area to find one piece of a puzzle, you don’t need to worry about constant battles. It’s bad because it means resources such as experience and money get a bit limited. That’s okay though – I still ended up feeling overleveled after having fought every enemy in the game I could find, and had more than enough money to overstock on supplies at the end. There will probably be a period where you are running low on MP recovery items (if you take my advice and spam magic), but luckily you can just abuse healing pools in this time.

Equipment in Black Home is all found in treasure chests. The game already encourages thorough exploration, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find all the equipment. Near the end, the game even starts giving you extras of some equipment, so even if you miss something you aren’t completely out of luck.

The only real collectible/side quest in the game is to collect a bunch of chess pieces. As I didn’t find all of them, I’m not really sure what the purpose of them was, but it’s something to do. I do wonder where they could have been as I thought I had explored everywhere, but I’m guessing there was somewhere I didn’t check thoroughly.

While most of the puzzles in Black Home are fairly straightforward, a couple near the end may have you fairly stumped. One in particular had really stumped me for over an hour, until I finally realized that there was one area I hadn’t revisited in all my digging. If you do get stuck, just be thorough – look for the blue sparkles that indicate this is something you need. Really, nearly every object you need to find for the story is indicated this way, so it’s just a matter of being thorough. There are a couple that aren’t indicated this way, but the same logic applies – just be thorough!

Black Home Story

Black Home is an interesting little RPG/Horror/Mystery/Puzzle title, that’s one thing for sure. While I did generally enjoy my time playing it, I don’t think the overall story is going to be one that’s really memorable after you complete it. The game does also feel a bit slow at times, and the enemy pathing in the few “chase” sequences is a bit questionable. Overall, the whole game is only around 6-7 hours and as long as you are thorough with your searching, you should be able to find everything no problem. Perhaps you can even unlock all the different endings, as the game features multiple endings! If you’re looking for an RPG that isn’t overly long though, and if you’re okay with a couple jump scares (or just have the music muted, though I don’t generally suggest this as it’s pretty good), then check out Black Home.

Black Home Review Score

3.5/5

Black Home is available now on Steam.

I would like to thank the publisher for providing me with a copy for review.

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