While it’s been on mobile for a while, Bring You Home has made its way to PC and now non-mobile gamers like myself can experience the cute joy of watching your permanently unimpressed lead character suffer fates worse than death. Bring You Home is an excellent puzzle game with one simple game mechanic, easy controls, but tons of level variety and charm to keep you heavily invested over 50 levels of peril.
Your unnamed character has a cute pet that is petnapped in the opening cutscene. The goal of Bring You Home is in the title – save your cute lil friend. Each level is a deathtrap that opens up like a movie clip that plays out until your character is killed in some weird or wonderful manner. It then rewinds and carves the level into horizontal slices that the player can rearrange. Depending on the level, you’ll be asked to either move the segments from left to right, reordering them as you go, or you’ll rotate the segments to reveal different versions of that level segment, like a slot machine. Some levels require you to do both, and towards the end of the game, levels will run in stages where you’ll need to rearrange the level multiple times to survive. There’s no time limit for your decisions, so you can get curious with your choices.
Curiousity is one of Bring You Home’s biggest selling points. Levels only have one solution, but there will be anything from 5 to 20 alternative arrangements to consider. Playing around with these will result in your character dying in new ways, and honestly, that was half the fun! It gives the same type of laughs as intentionally choosing the bad options in choose-your-own-adventure games or FMV adventures. Some levels have collectable photos that reward you for making bad decisions, which is a nice incentive. Mostly, you’ll be doing it for morbid curiosity. What I love about the art direction and animation of the game is that all the options contain their own death sequences, and very few are reused. Clearly, a lot of effort was put into creating inventive deaths as the developers knew what gamers were like! In fact, in many ways, this game plays closer to an FMV title than an adventure game, so much so that I’ve tagged it as one in the website’s filtering options.
Speaking of the levels, the 50 of them can be completed in 90 minutes if you click with the way Bring You Home works. Some levels give visual cues to defuse bombs or solve mysteries, whilst a few lead you down a path to success by showing how some of the death mechanics in a level work. There are some levels that contain no reason or logic, and it’s all about the shuffling and rewatching to see the chaos unfold. Whilst I didn’t mind that personally, I can see puzzle enthusiasts complaining that those levels rely on brute force “I’ll get the right combo eventually” tactics. In truth, that’s not great puzzle design, but it means you’ll discover some of the more abstract and weirder deaths in the game through curious play.
Bring You Home is entertaining, with a dash of slapstick Looney Tunes-style humour, and some creative puzzles to solve. Its economical level design and variation means it fits a lot of ideas into a tight runtime, so it never gets dull or outstays its welcome. The graphics and controls translate excellently to the big PC screen, with simple mouse or controller-based controls to manipulate level layouts quickly and intuitively. I had a blast, and whilst it isn’t something that lasts for hours and hours, it’s a game I’ll happily return to when I’ve forgotten the exact solutions for a fun replay again in future years.
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