Redial: Three Fourths Home Extended Edition Released
IGF award finalist for narrative
I enjoyed worryful 'visual short story' Three Fourths Home [official site] when it came out last year, and I'll be returning this weekend. Riding high off a nomination for 'Excellence in Narrative' at the IGF Awards, developers [bracket]games yesterday launched an Extended Edition.
I liked it then, and now I'm keen to get stuck into its new epilogue chapter.
Three Fourths Home's a long phone call between a young woman, Kelly, in her car and her family at home, digging into their hopes, disappointments, and innumerable worries. She moved away, then has recently returned home. It's the awkward distance between you and people you care about but don't know how to relate to. And then a storm starts to brew.
There's nothing to unlock, no super secret paths that I've found, just a conversation playing down the paths you lead it. It's well-written and touching, making me fret about my own family. It makes you hold a key to drive the car too, else time stops, so your keyboard/mouse hands mimic Kelly's steering wheel/phone distractions. It's a small touch but draws you into the performance.
The Extended Edition brings a new epilogue, said to take 20-30 minutes, along with nice little extras like Kelly's college photography project and stories by her distant younger brother. It tweaks the main story too, with a few branching bits. I am keen to play this.
I'm still sorry that Bracket's fell short with their Kickstarter for To Azimuth, an adventure game about two siblings searching for a lost brother seemingly tied up in UFO conspiracies. They're continuing to work on it all the same.
A 10% launch discount brings Three Fourths Home: EE to £4.49 on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux, while Humble will give you a Steam key and DRM-free versions for £4.94. Here's a snippet of the epilogue:
