Closer To Home

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Find the pieces of your dad in a town where death is a tool.

Platforms: PC, Mac
Stores: Steam, itch.io
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (98% of 66 reviews)
Players: 1
Controls: Keyboard; walk, talk to characters and use items from the inventory.
Made by: itamu (isthisamug)
Released: 2022

On Steam: one of the Steam horror games.

What frightens A child wanders a dark, shifting town looking for the pieces of their dad and the town's missing children, following a cold breath from the cracks under the school, talking with uncanny entities and learning to use death itself; grim imagery of gore and self-harm in a world run on dream logic.
Content: death, gore, suicide, self-mutilation, nightmares, drug use.

Closer To Home is a top-down, dialogue-led surreal horror game by solo developer itamu. You play a child searching a dark town for the pieces of their dad and for the children who have gone missing, talking to strange entities, gathering items that open new paths and learning how to use death.

About Closer To Home

Closer To Home is a horror exploration game made by itamu, who built it alone without prior experience, with music and sound by Deltoid. It came out in October 2022 on Steam and itch.io, for Windows and macOS, and was made with GameMaker.

The maker warns that it is very difficult and self-obscuring, with little to no guidance: most of the play is dialogue, getting lost and wandering. There is an internal logic to it all, and a basic guide in the Steam community forum. You find the pieces of your dad, befriend a range of entities by talking to them, try to work out where all the town's children have gone and investigate the cold breath coming from the cracks under your school.

Talking to the world's inhabitants gets you items, and those items open the way on; the ones that grant abilities are explained in their inventory descriptions. The world changes from time to time, so sounds and sights are worth watching, and characters remember you when you come back. Dying is part of it: the store tells you to learn how to use death, by dying. You also choose when the game is over.

The pixel art moves from green fields wrapped in barbed thorns to purple woods of white sacks and black voids with large pale faces. Its content warnings list death, gore, suicide, self-mutilation, nightmares and drug use. It suits players of Yume Nikki and OFF who like to get lost in a strange world and piece it together themselves.

How to play Closer To Home

Walk the child around the top-down town and its surroundings.
Talk to everyone you meet, and come back later: they remember you and things change.
Collect the items people give you and read their inventory descriptions to learn what they let you do.
Use those items and abilities to reach new places, including the tunnels under the school.
Do not fear dying: the game asks you to learn how to use death.

Screenshots

Closer To Home screenshot: a boy in a green shirt talks with a figure wrapped in a yellow blanket on a grassy pixel-art field ringed by thorny barbed vines

Closer To Home screenshot: a lone island of broken planks in a black void, where a red-haired figure crouches by a small fire near a cauldron and red symbols

Closer To Home screenshot: a yellow skeletal creature in white rain in a black void, as a large pale face greets it: Hello little fetus

Tips

Watch and listen for changes in the world; they signal that something new has opened.
If you are stuck, the maker's basic guide is in the game's Steam community forum.
Try the itch.io demo first if you are unsure about a game with so little guidance.