Leaving Home
Some time ago, Hunty pointed me toward the XBLA Indie Games title Leave Home. Due to my lack of a 360, I didn’t get a chance to try it at the time, but a PC port has recently been released- so I fired it up over the weekend.
The Big Idea of Leave Home is that it’s a procedurally-generated shooter, taken from the Kenta Cho mold. It has a ‘ranking’ system built in- as you destroy enemies and collect the items they leave behind, your “anger” increases and the game gets more difficult. This is manifested multiple ways; obstacles grow denser, paths grow narrower, enemies spawn more frequently and are more aggressive, and your flight path through non-strictly-sidescrolling levels grows more erratic. The game is a fixed length- you have infinite lives, and play for a few minutes each runthrough.
The promise of a procedurally-generated game like this is infinite variety- new, fresh content each time you play through the game. While there are parts of Leave Home that work well, my main complaint is that they’re not nearly common enough- most of the time you’re seeing not ‘fresh’ stages but small variants within a fairly tight ‘theme’.
Although the exact content of Leave Home’s stages varies from run to run, you’ll always be traveling through four major areas, followed by a boss fight against a pair of major enemies. The first and third stages are Gradius-inspired sidescrolling affairs, while the second pits you against a rotating ‘pegboad’ of obstacles and the fourth sees you navigating through a number of rotating rings. The third of these stages is probably the best in the game- it features a variety of obstacles and features which change drastically from run to run. The rest, however, seem like they’re simply variants on the same small idea- the motions in the second stage grow more erratic and the obstacles denser, but on a fundamental level it’s always the same type of stage. The first stage is built more-or-less randomly out of a number of obstacles, but there are few enough different types that the stage looks more or less the same every time you see it.
I may just be reading way too much into things, but unlike most of Kenta Cho’s products, Leave Home forms something of a narrative- albeit an abstract one- telling the story of the drama surrounding a son’s decision to leave home. It’s easy enough to ignore if you’re not interested, but putting two and two together is kind of a nice “Oh, that’s what’s happening here!” moment.
At its’ core, Leave Home is a solid game, and I’d say that it was worth the five bucks I spent on it. I’m hoping that the producers expand on the ideas in Leave Home in the future- a sequel with more variety in stages could be really fantastic.
- HC