How ‘No Longer Home’ Left Me Feeling Directionless and Alone
Our thanks to Fellow Traveller for providing a review copy of No Longer Home. May this critical reflection on the game serve as an opportunity for others to engage with it.
I was excited to play No Longer Home, a game that featured an intimate and thoughtful look into the lives of non-binary protagonists. Though the art presentation is charming and smooth, moving set pieces around like a stage play, the tone of No Longer Home brought about a certain kind of existential angst in my gut. And though the story addresses meaningful themes that arguably are underdeveloped in most games, I couldn’t shake a constant feeling of dread and worry until I had finished the experience. Disappointingly, No Longer Home left me feeling as directionless and alone as its two protagonists by the end.
Due to the semi-autobiographical nature of the game, specifically its two central protagonists, Ao and Bo, levying any critique at the story, the writing, or the atmosphere, feels like a delicate balance on a knife’s edge. The last thing I’d want to do by offering my experience as a critical contrast to the game is to come off as disrespectful or dismissive. In theory, No Longer Home is the type of game that I’d usually click with — an emotionally-driven story featuring gender non-conforming characters, an immersive art style, and the like. Furthermore, the choice-driven nature of the dialogue seems, on the surface, like something that would work well for me. I have now replayed No Longer Home, hence my lack of coverage around the game’s release window, but neither playthrough gave me the fulfillment I was hoping for.
The Vulnerable, Introspective Tone of No Longer Home
No Longer Home functions largely like a stage play, with moving set pieces that shift in and out of frame as the mood requires. Sometimes, a bathtub will become the universe for a character, while others, the garden walls surrounding Ao’s and Bo’s flat float away, zooming in on a distant constellation. The nature of this uncanny environment — both familiar and unfamiliar — is all-consuming for these characters, who constantly dwell on the inexorability of drifting apart. It’s as though, in their idle, introspective conversations, the environment signifies the seemingly fracturing nature of Ao’s and Bo’s relationship. Thus, in a physical, emotional, and geographic way, everything seems destabilizing and uncertain.
Obviously, part of the intention of telling No Longer Home’s story is opening a reflective dialogue about vulnerability and existential ambiguity. It hurts to admit that you might have no idea what your future holds, that you might have just wasted four years of time and money studying at a university, the terminus of which might not open the doors you have expected. No Longer Home delves into the contemporary phenomena of misemployment, the mismatching of what one has formally studied and where one has resultantly ended up working. It also acknowledges displacement, economically and locationally speaking, in the face of gentrification reorganizing society for those already inhabiting it.
Topics like gentrification and misemployment are obviously important to address in video games; to that effect, No Longer Home evokes comparisons with some of my favorite indies like Night in the Woods and Kentucky Route Zero. But the delivery of these concerns in No Longer Home wore down my emotional fortitude, alternating between moping — the game seemingly gives no answers or solutions to its posed problems, presenting Ao and Bo as reactive victims of class and circumstance — and hopeless. Anyone can identify a problem, but not everyone can approach that problem in a productive way that tries new things, seeks solutions, and creatively attacks the issue at hand. That said, I get the sense that No Longer Home is self-aware of this potential critique; I just never felt satisfied with how the characters incessantly circled around these issues, apparently helpless in the face of a crisis.
Admittedly, Ao and Bo are faced with problems beyond their external circumstances. From the subject of gender identity and expression, as we see these characters gradually transform between No Longer Home’s two act structure, these people have struggled to carve a supportive and accepting niche of loved ones. One of the game’s lengthier scenes involves an outdoor barbecue where Ao’s and Bo’s friends encircle each other, reminiscing about past revelries, speculating about potential futures, simultaneously gathering and drifting apart in that same way as the environmental set pieces. It’s not easy to move on from these familiar people when so much of society is hostile to non-binary and gender-nonconforming individuals.
There are also hints of intellectual disability, as indicated by my second playthrough where I chose for Bo to suggest that they might be well-suited to study sociology, something they found intellectually fulfilling during their time at university. Previously, I simply viewed them as an artistic person, not sociologically or philosophically inclined beyond the armchair. As it turns out, Bo seemingly deals with dyslexia and dyspraxia, discouraging them from making this renewed attempt at studying. They don’t have the resources to afford career or educational retraining, and even if they could, these deficits discourage them.
A Feeling of Defeatism and Nihilism
No Longer Home acknowledges the cruel realities of societal apparatuses and structural forces coupled with signifiers of social deviance that are not readily supported by a majority of everyday people and institutions. Again, I think these topics are important for games to tackle as a mature art form, because a large swath of younger populations have been met with cruel indifference. In a world that grinds people up like the internal cogs of a machine, No Longer Home shows us these callous inner workings without ever truly providing a way out.
I don’t need No Longer Home to end with an uplifting message, sugar-coated with naive idealism, to be satisfied with the story it wants to tell. But I was left hanging by the quasi-indeterminate ending that broke apart the one seemingly stable thing that either Bo or Ao had left: each other. Their relationship is not completely rended, nor is their separation presented as permanent. But No Longer Home sends Ao back to their home country — they have been studying abroad in south London — and Bo also moves on. The game thus ends with separation: from the flat they shared, from the relationship they have built, from the youthful promise inherent to any university-bound students.
But if No Longer Home left me restless, then maybe that’s the very point. Maybe the game wants to peel off the scab without itching it, letting you bleed a bit while the credits roll. And if that’s the case, then I think the game succeeds. But I worry that people like me who might be struggling with similar problems of their own will find the game to be a needle to their barely inflated balloon, popping any vestige of optimism I might have neurotically retained as a result of my current life’s trajectory.
But, even if this is the point, I don’t need the deadnaming by some strange monstrous creatures tucked away in locked rooms. I don’t need every single object in the environment to bring about some wistful, woeful associations and memories. I don’t need to see all the cracks in the walls, the nibbled out rat holes, the discarded dirty clothes littering the floor. There is virtually nothing hopeful in No Longer Home even when it tries to conjure that emotion, and I think that’s a shame because I’d argue that hope is what these people need more than anything.
A Modicum of Hope
The only modicum of hope that I felt the game left me with was a deeply uncertain promise between Ao and Bo that they would work on their relationship while separated. These two have been separated before, and even though they have known each other for a comparatively short time, this initial separation seems to have taken an agonizing amount of work. To maintain their relationship, they both acknowledge, Ao and Bo will have to redouble these efforts — with no real guarantee that distance won’t prove to wedge them apart. Perhaps I just can’t shrug my cynicism, having experienced many long distance relationships disintegrate and deteriorate over time.
And thus No Longer Home fell flat for me. It submerged me beneath the surface of my own past regrets, future anxieties, and confronted me with parallels for my own identity crises: concerns about whether my seven years of college education truly paid off, whether I am happy with my current direction in my professional field, whether I will ever fully be acknowledged for the truth of my gender identity and expression, whether I will find a meaningful place to live with people I deeply care about. Like the dioramic picture box that it is, maybe No Longer Home is a stage play for the uninitiated; to someone who regularly dwells on these negative stressors, I was somewhat relieved when the game was over.
There’s no doubt that No Longer Home provides a beautifully contemplative, vulnerable, and brief experience. It’s a tiny game that, despite the negative feelings it spawned in me, didn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, the game is short enough to warrant that extra playthrough I mentioned, which spurned my replay of the self-titled second act — just to collect the remaining two achievements from Among the Leaves, the in-game video game that the characters bond over while playing and saying their goodbyes. I didn’t mind this dive back into the game, but even when I gamified No Longer Home (hunting for achievements), I couldn’t fully detach from the experience at hand.
No Longer Home unsettled me, so I would exercise deep caution if the above concerns remotely reflect your own personal worries. As useful a portrait as this game might be for the uninitiated, it also might stir up some sources of negativity that you were not eager to retread. Living in this world is hard enough already, and I personally don’t need any reminders.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
