Sweet Home (video game)

Taguchi and Akiko roam the mansion in the English fan translation.

Sweet Home is a role-playing game (RPG) set within a mansion that has a cohesive, intricate layout. There are five playable characters who can venture solo or explore in teams of two or three. The player can switch between characters and parties at any time.[1] The five characters each have a unique item that is necessary to complete the game: a camera, lighter, medical kit, lockpick, and vacuum cleaner.[2][3] Along with these items are others that can be picked up and dropped anywhere and retrieved later by other characters.[1][4]

Sweet Home places an emphasis on puzzle-solving, item inventory management, and survival.[5][6] The player must backtrack to previous locations in order to solve puzzles using items acquired later in the game.[7] In this sense, the interconnected mansion is gradually explored in the style of Metroidvania games.[8] Enemies are encountered randomly and the player must fight or run away through menu-based combat.[1][3] The battles are presented in a first-person perspective,[9] and there are a variety of enemies, including zombies, ghosts and dolls.[3] The only way to restore health is through tonics scattered across rooms in the mansion.[1]

The story is told through cinematic cutscenes and through optional notes such as secret messages and diary entries of past visitors scattered across the mansion,[1][7] which also provide clues for solving puzzles.[3] The game also features quick time events when the player comes across a trap that requires a quick decision to be made, or else be killed.[2] When a character dies, they remain dead permanently for the remainder of the game.[3] Items that serve the same purpose as the dead character can be found near their corpse. For example, should the team nurse Akiko die, the team may find pill bottles which can be used to heal ailments. Depending on how many characters remain alive after the defeat of the final boss, there are a total of five different endings the player may receive.[1]

The story is based on that of the 1989 film of the same name, but the writers took some liberties and expanded on the film's plot.[10][11] Thirty years prior to the story in 1959, famous artist Ichirō Mamiya hid several precious frescos in his huge mansion before he mysteriously disappeared. In the present day, a team of five documentary filmmakers seek to recover the paintings from the abandoned, dilapidated mansion. Upon entering, they are trapped inside by the ghost of an unknown woman, who threatens to kill all trespassers. The team decides to split up and find a way out, but the mansion is both in danger of collapsing and is occupied by countless monsters.

The team find a projection room, where they find a projector that displays an image of a couple and their baby burning. They discover that the ghost is that of Lady Mamiya, Ichirō's wife. It is revealed that thirty years previously, Mamiya's two-year-old son had fallen in the house's incinerator and was burnt alive, and Mamiya attempted to provide playmates for her son by killing several other children. She committed suicide shortly after and her ghost, unable to forgive herself, became trapped in the mansion. The team arrives in the main chamber and confronts Mamiya in a final battle.

Sweet Home was developed by Capcom and directed by Tokuro Fujiwara. He had previously directed Ghosts 'n Goblins (1985) and worked on titles such as Commando (1985), Bionic Commando (1987), Mega Man 2 (1988), and Strider (1989). Sweet Home was one of his first console game projects after working primarily on arcade games. At times he was frustrated by the Family Computer (Famicom)'s graphics limitations.[10]

The director of the film, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, supervised the game's production.

The game is based on the 1989 film of the same name. Juzo Itami, the film's executive producer, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, its director, served as the game's producer and supervisor respectively.[12][13] Fujiwara took a tour of the film studio to gather ideas to build the game.[10] Kurosawa told Fujiwara to not concern himself with following the movie exactly.[10] Some of the items Fujiwara wanted to include in his game were ultimately left out because they did not match the atmosphere of the film.[10] The game's plot ended up diverging somewhat from the film's. It was unprecedented at the time for a video game to expand on a film's narrative in this way.[11]

Sweet Home was released for the Famicom in Japan on 15 December 1989.[14] It was promoted alongside the movie in the film trailer.[12] The game received generally favorable reviews, and many critics believed the game was better than the film.[11] Famitsu provided a score of 28/40.[14] Critics believe the game's gruesome imagery dissuaded Nintendo's branches in the Western world from localizing the game.[1][8][11][15] Also, the low popularity of RPGs at the time (at least in North America) may have had an influence on this decision.[11] Although the game was never officially released outside Japan, fans translated Sweet Home to English in 2000 and released the modified ROM image on the internet. The translation took over a year to complete. To this day, some hobbyists load the ROM image onto actual Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges and sell the cartridges through online grey markets.[11]

In retrospect, Sweet Home is considered one of the greatest horror games ever made and a landmark in the evolution of horror game design. It is often cited for laying the groundwork for the survival horror genre.[1][5][8][11][15] Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid believed Sweet Home to be the single best Famicom game and dubbed it "one of the very best games ever made". He also called it one of the first games to realize the potential of a fully cohesive world as in the Metroidvania genre (even though Metroid (1986) attempted it first), and one of the first to use scattered notes and diary logs to tell a story, an element later popularized by BioShock (2007).[1] Peter Tieryas of Kotaku wrote that Sweet Home successfully fused the RPG, adventure, and horror genres into a "macabre" in a way most other games rarely have.[8] Marty Silva of 1UP.com wrote that this mixture of genres was a precursor to Parasite Eve (1998).[2] Ben Reeves of Game Informer called it a cult hit and Tokuro Fujiwara's most significant contribution to the video game industry. He continued by saying the entire horror genre "owe[s] a blood debt to this long-forgotten 8-bit game that had no right to be as good as it was."[11]

The horror elements of Sweet Home have received significant praise. Critics believe the game successfully created a haunting experience despite the limited technical capabilities of the Famicom hardware.[1][8][16] The staff of Computer and Video Games called it "one of the Famicom's finest technical hours."[15] Tieryas wrote that technical limitations created opportunities for the designers to implement clever gameplay which contributed to the sense of horror.[8] Pinsof agreed and praised the game's structure for creating a tense atmosphere. He wrote that the mansion feels unpredictable and the game is paced well, providing items at just the right moment to maintain the tension. He also praised the innovative and gruesome cinematic imagery.[1] Silva believed the game had an impressive cinematic quality to it.[2]

• Sweet Home at MobyGames