Sweet Home

 

Sweet Home for the NES has quite the bit of buzz surrounding it with it being a sort of inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise and finally I got to play it.  This is not to be confused with the recently released Sweet Home TV series on Netflix which is a Korean drama about a monster based post apocalypse, I made that mistake when looking through my listings but more on that another day.  

Sweet Home is an RPG about a group of people going into a haunted mansion to try and un-haunt it.  To do so you must solve a bunch of puzzles and fight a bunch of monsters gaining strength through levels along the way so you can exorcise the big bast ghost at the end.  It's a NES game for fucks sake, the plot isn't that involved.

What is quite involved however is the gameplay.  At the start of the game you have 5 characters, all of which you can name yourself.  Each one of those 5 characters has an item that is specific to them.  For example one guy has a lighter for opening paths, one guy has a medkit for curing ailments and one gal has a key for opening locked doors.  On top of that each character gets 2 free inventory slots and a weapon slot so managing equipment and puzzle McGuffins/healing is an integral part of the gameplay.  But, to make things just a little more intense, the game features perma-death.  So if one of your guys falls in battle, they are GONE, for good.  You won't find yourself stuck because the game provides regular versions of the character specific items so you can progress, but if that happens you are two inventory slots down, a weaker party AND you have to manage your shit even more meticulously than before.

The puzzles Sweet Home range from insultingly obvious to so obtuse I have no idea how the fuck you are supposed to solve them without a guide.  There's one bit in particular where you have to use the look command on a fountain and on the second or third try the fountain starts spurting blood which changes a thing for progression.  What I imagine most people do there is look at it once, decide it doesn't do anything and then get stuck for HOURS until they look at a guide and find out they have to spam the look command a few more times for it to work.

Overall though Sweet Home is a pretty good game and you can see the little aspects of it that were lifted for Resident Evil, almost like looking at the rings on an old tree stump.  The inventory, the way items are managed (identical to RE0 pretty much) and even the little animation that plays when you unlock a door for the first time.  Yeah, it's got some jank to it but it's not that long either so go give it a try.