Tuesdays* of Terror: Sweet Home

(*sometimes Wednesdays)

Welcome to another Tuesday of Terror, or Wednesday of Whooooooo (like a ghost noise) in some timezones, as we once again enter a creepy cursed mansion with no real escape plan in mind. However, rather than last Tuesday's haunted house survey which preceded an age of FMV adventure games full of interminable transitions and rudimentary brainteasers, this week's preceded the survival horror genre. Like, the entire thing. Sort of, at least. We're talking Sweet Home, the 1989 Famicom horror RPG that was the chief inspiration for Resident Evil; in no small part because the developers of Sweet Home were none other than Capcom themselves. It's based on the movie of the same name about a five-person film crew that travels to the dilapidated mansion of the missing artist Ichiro Mamiya in order to create a documentary about his famed frescoes only to be trapped within by the infuriated spirit of his dead wife; the group must then investigate what has transpired to rouse Lady Mamiya from her eternal rest and set her soul at peace once again.

Sweet Home is a fairly typical if uncommonly spooky Famicom RPG at first blush—you walk around the manor via a top-down perspective, getting into random encounters with various monsters like possessed dolls, zombies, vampire bats, random-ass skulls, and a dude whose whole thing is that he looks normal until he turns around and half his face is missing and that's some real scary shit. However, the mechanics surrounding this tried-and-true Dragon Quest adventurin' format are conversely pretty daring and would go on to create what are considered the tenets of the survival horror genre. For one, you have to source weapons yourself, many of which found early on are the improvised types (like fruit knives) and need replacing with something a bit more substantial tout de suite. Second, there's a very limited amount of healing items in the game and you've no other way to regenerate lost health; even leveling up only raises your maximum cap, not your current amount. Third, each character only has two spare item slots so any key items (and there's many) must be juggled around or left in conspicuous locations for later retrieval, while still retaining space for several useful items like a flashlight or ropes that you'll need for traversal through some areas. Fourth, the game's central location is a bona fide maze of rooms and corridors that occasionally connect in interesting ways that you spend much of the game exploring just to get a sense of what you're working with. And last, there's hints all around you if you know who (or what) to ask, the most lore-vital of which come from the very frescoes you were there to shoot in the first place.

Your team of five, the characters from the movie that you are free to rename, all have their own specialized role to play. Kazuo, the director and de facto leader of the team, has a lighter he can use to burn down obstacles in the path or light candles; Emi, his teenage daughter and the token ingénue, carries around a key that can open most (but not all) the locked doors in the mansion, which is invariably followed by a close-up cutscene of the door opening that should be familiar to any RE fan; Akiko, the reliable and no-nonsense producer, has a medkit that can't heal injuries but can remove any status condition, making her indispensable post-battle; Taro, the cameraman, whose only job it is to photograph the frescoes (though the camera is oddly effective against spectral enemies also); and Asuka, the haughty art restoration specialist whose mini vacuum cleaner can not only clean up particularly dusty frescos but remove the shattered glass that can sometimes block your path (I guess no-one thought to wear shoes; well, it is the custom in Japan to take them off when entering someone's home). There are replacement items in case you should lose any of these five characters—which, I have to reiterate, can happen and they're gone permanently if their HP ever runs out—but really the goal is to keep them all alive to maximize the amount of key item garbage that needs lugging around if nothing else.

Sweet Home is a real fascinating game to play on several levels. You need to keep notes and a mental map of the mansion in your head at all times because it's easy to get lost—easier still if a wandering spook spirits one of your members away to parts unknown—and with the heavy emphasis on item usage it feels like an adventure game at times, albeit of the sort with an all-too-realistic depiction of item limits and not the sort of endless pirate pantaloons a certain Mr. G. Threepwood might walk around in (wait, that makes it too obvious: I'll just say Guybrush T.). Since you can't form a party of more than three people you'll spend most of the game managing two or more teams as they split up (always a good idea in horror fiction) to complete various goals. However, any random encounters will give you the option of calling over your inactive friends where you then march them over to where the party is mid-combat to lend their support. Not only does this make fights easier but they all share in the post-battle XP rewards to accelerate their growth. As such, though I could see the utility in splitting up the group to work on different assignments, it made far more sense to keep them in close proximity to take full advantage of this support system. It's a really novel way to handle larger groups of playable characters, though not one that I could see being utilized for the more typical RPGs where puzzles of this format aren't so much a factor (you do see it in stuff like Final Fantasy VI though, or that one memorable dungeon from Skies of Arcadia). The limitations on healing, some sudden traps, and the escalating enemy difficulty does make it a challenging game though; I made ample use of the save feature, which lets you save the game anywhere but only on the one file, to ensure I could redo these puzzle sections with better efficiency and less damage.

I also have to give props to the game's presentation. There's some really stellar artwork considering this is a game released in the 1980s, albeit only just, with close-ups of certain plot-important elements like the frescoes or, say, a fountain you're meant to draw bloody water from for one puzzle. The enemies themselves are suitably eerie and/or goopy, and some creative ideas like a mirror creature that ambushes you every time you walk past its mirror unless you take the time to smash it with the mallet (a useful item early on for clearing rocks in your path) or powerful suits of armor visibly walking around that you can just about juke past with a small enough group. There are pitfalls that you need to quickly rescue team members from before they fall to their deaths and tense moments where time is a factor and these have frantic music to fit the mood, as does the suspenseful little stinger that plays whenever you get attacked by a random encounter, and the game's sense of atmosphere is impressive given what little they have to work with. The mechanics are surprisingly dense as well, including an odd "pray" system that isn't fully explained but involves paying a mana-like currency to increase damage to attacks or resolve puzzles: typically, if you have the item and put it in the right place, you might need to pay several pray points to make something happen afterwards. Since these points are replenished along with health with the use of one of those limited healing items (which thankfully apply to the whole group, so I had to be sure I'd formed the maximum size of three people to maximize the benefits) you can get away with using them on tougher encounters to dispatch them faster. It's stuff like that, or like how every weapon has two attack scores that presumably account for how effective they are on physical monsters like wolves and non-corporeal monsters like wraiths respectively, or how several items are also effective on certain enemy types, that gives the game the sense that it's breaking ground everywhere it turns, and not just in the literal sense whenever your characters walk over some rotting floorboards and need to be lifted to safety.

Another remarkable aspect of the game is that the sense of progress is subtly conveyed from performing actions that could be seen as beneficial for your mission, though not so much in a direct way that the game yells it out loud for all and sundry to hear. Like, in most RPGs there's some game-wide quest to fetch seven crystals or what have you so you're always at least somewhat aware of the progress you're making; if you just found the fourth crystal you might feel like you're halfway done with the game, provided there's not some wild late-game twist where the bad guys steal them all and force you to jump through even more hoops. In Sweet Home, an early task is to switch on the generator which can be found in the gardens at the far east end of the estate: it takes a while to get there, let alone figure out how to get there, navigating some dark corridors lit up by the occasional lightning bolt from outside (a very cool bit of atmosphere), but when those generators kick on and you no longer have to rely on candlelight—those candles take up one or two item slots that could be used for more vital things like the healing tonics—it's a big relief to know that the game world has become a little less hostile and more accommodating. Most of the game has you exploring new areas with no firm goals in mind, but it's the times when you finally figure out what needs to occur to move onto the next chapter it's like a little reward. Even finding a random key, which might open any of the doors you've had to pass by because Emi's regular key didn't cut it, gives you a boost the same way you might receive a jolt of excitement whenever you find a traversal upgrade in an exploraction game: there's new territory to unearth, new horrors to countenance, and potentially a new thread of clues to follow.

Sweet Home is not an easy game nor is it a short game (though it's certainly shorter than some Famicom RPGs—I'd say it was comfortably around ten hours or more, and that's if you know what you're doing) but it is definitely worth a look if you consider yourself a trueblood Resident Evil fan curious about the ancestral origins of the series, if you haven't tried it already, but even if you aren't there's plenty of intriguing one-off mechanics and ideas found here for anyone fond of adventure games, RPGs, or the horror genre as it pertains to video games in general. Don't be too afraid to consult a map or a walkthrough on occasion, though I'll say that if you're paying attention to every hint that comes along—the dead are very chatty in Sweet Home—there shouldn't be much in the way of obtuse puzzle solutions that'll have you scratching your head in confusion like there was in, say, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest with its similar split focus on horror action and convoluted riddles (though much of that can be chalked up to a mediocre localization; the two fan translations available for Sweet Home are pretty unambiguous in comparison). I've prepared a short clip below of what playing Sweet Home can be like, though it's really only the tip of the iceberg:

Pleasantly surprised by how well this game has held up, especially as those that get passed over for localization typically aren't so hot (though in this case the disturbingly graphic visuals might've contributed—that one animation of the dude melting is pretty horrifying), and even though it certainly became the case retroactively I think this game certainly deserved more attention than it perhaps received at the time. Also, what an amazing way to honor the people involved with the movie: so often we get movie tie-in games that barely pass the bar for "competent", but it's so much rarer for a movie to inspire a game that goes on to be legendary in its own right. Possibly even more so than the source material—this and GoldenEye 007 are the only ones coming to mind right now, though I'm sure there's enough for some manner of a "Mt. Rushmore" conversation for another time. Hell, people are bandying around what RE game Capcom should remake next when I think Sweet Home would be a perfect candidate: there's so much ambition here that they could only just about realize with the limitations of the platform, so even if it's a bit weird to remake a game based on a movie from almost four decades ago I'd probably go to bat for it. Unless it's one of those bats that keeps swooping at me from the ceiling, those guys can go suck a lemon.

On The Next Tuesdays of Terror: It's here! In like a week, maybe!