Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition

I won’t spend too long over this piece of shit. I spend £1.50 on a quick completion that nearly bit me in the ass because of shitty development and poor ownership of issues and this review will serve as a review of the problems with indie games. But first, Three Fourths Home.

Three Fourths Home is a... Visual Novel game. That’s right, it’s a book game. Basically a game without the game element. Although that’s a little unfair but more on that part later.

My main issue with the game is that shortly after I purchased it in a sale, all of the achievements became bugged and no one could get them. I had to wait until it was safe to play the game again but even after it was safe, all of the people that played the game while it was broken could not gain the achievements. The developer did eventually manage to implement a fix but the whole thing just stank of people who were unable to communicate with the public and constantly blamed Microsoft for all their problems. At the end of it all (September 2016) the developer deleted their Twitter account due to the amount of messages the gaming community was sending them. Poor, poor customer service.

Speaking of poor and lazy, that’s a summary of the game element of the game. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into painting the picture of a family in distress, and a protagonist you just want to hate, but the gameplay element is pressing right of the directional pad. The second part of the game (which I imagine comes from the ‘extended edition’ part of the title) adds an additional game play function... walking left. Oh, and it puts you on foot rather than in a car which adds an unnecessary amount of time to the game due to the slow character movement. This extended portion however, does see you making decisions for yourself as you are able to get on one of several buses that come past.

The story itself can be summed up as depressing. And pretentious. I’m all for the creative arts but I didn’t find this one emotively engaging and in my opinion, there seems to be an increase in the amount of protagonists who are horrendous people. How are we expected to engage with characters if they are completely unlikeable and, in the most part, unrelateable? This is 90% of a narrative experience. If you fail to create immersion and engagement then there is no point in telling a story. However, I’m fairly certain the developers knew this as the story is really short. Despite this, I fell asleep twice during my first session of playing it (and it should only have taken one session to start with).

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

So a short game and short achievement list but they don’t half drag it out for the 1,000 points. Aside from completing the main story and the epilogue, you have to complete the epilogue 3 times, read through all the crap in the extras menu, listen to all of the pretentious music on the radio (you can turn the TV off while this one plays out and it takes about an hour!) and doing some other things to trigger a different cut scene at the end. This is where you essentially get the ‘good’ ending where not everyone thinks you are a massive twat.

That’s it which is good because by the time you have done all that you will be reaching for the delete button faster than you previously thought possible.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Three Fourths Home is my first venture into the visual novel genre and it hasn’t exactly warmed me to these types of games. Everyone will have their own opinion over whether this works but I think a game should be a game first and pretentious idealist bollocks second. Three Fourths does the latter first which is why I won’t recommend it. Or anything else [bracket] Games develops for that matter.