Leave Home

I don’t think there’s been a time before Leave Home came along that I felt like I’d really managed to completely piss a game off. Oh, I haven’t nearly enough fingers for the amount of times a game has managed to piss me off, but y’know, never before have I felt like I’ve done something to really wind the bloody thing up. Such is the genius of Matt James’ wonderful Leave Home.

First impressions can be deceptive. The game begins with you chained up, the leash breaks and you’re out into the big wide nasty world with the usual array of waves of aliens trying to cut you down.

Then within no time, you find yourself at the end of the game, the obligatory end of level boss doing its best to make your life difficult, you die trying to beat the bugger.

The game ends and you may well think “is this it?”

So, you nip in for another try. Only this time you think you’re prepared for the game. You’ve seen what it has to throw at you. It can’t be that hard, can it? So you do better. You fly through the opening legion of blue dots watching your points meter soar, you annihilate the first few waves then hang on a second, this wasn’t here before… and you explode in a flash of coloured light ready to respawn and try again. And it’s all different from here on in. The game has responded to how you played. The better you play, the more it throws at you, the more you get to see, the harder it becomes to survive. It’s brutal, it’s lovely, it’s procedural. And it works oh so well.

Let’s face it, the capacity for this to go tits up as a concept is pretty high. Shooters, generally, by their very nature are in some ways about pattern memorisation so munging it up with different elements each play could so very easily go mightily wrong. Luckily, we’re talking about the guy who made a pair of my favourite games here (that’ll be Fren-Ze and Super Mario Pac) and someone who quite clearly understands things that wot are right in the world. And so, rather than being a random jumble of ideas, Leave Home is beautifully Designed. Yes, Designed with a capital D for emphasis. There are times when you’re doing exceptionally well and it throws all manner of baddies into the mix (including some especially evil expanding mine-things) that you sit back and think “man, I really have totally pissed this game off”. Marvelous.

See that? That’s basically what Leave Home is. From the opening sound of a Spectrum loading to the loading border lines mid game, it’s a long overdue nod to the beauty of the greatest home computer ever. Throw in some beautiful tunes that (sadly, unusually) don’t make you want to punch someone in the cock and a side order of Minter madness – yes, even down to a tribute to the lost Minter game Unity and you end up with Leave Home.

For those who follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know my advice here. For those who don’t click this link and follow the wisdom therein. Y’see, each individual segment of Leave Home would in lesser hands be fleshed out into a full game and y’know, it’d probably be alright. Throw them all together in a quickfire bundle of inspiration and you’ve got something that heads right into the realms of the incredibly special.

Today is the day the shooter came to XBLIG proper and Leave Home easily takes its place alongside Space Giraffe as one of the best indie shooters of the decade. It’s a fantastic achievement and an absolute bargain at around half the cost of a Digital Eclipse special. Not just a great XBLIG game, but a great game full stop.