With the game finally getting an EU release on PS4, we bring you our Home Sweet Home review.

The opening minutes of Home Sweet Home are a great example of how to build unease and terror without much in the way of bells and whistles.

This simple Thai folklore-inspired first-person horror begins by leading you around several logic-defying corridors, twisting and turning and repeating in ever-more disorientating ways. Home Sweet Home tells the twisted tale of Tim, a man still coping with the loss of his wife who wakes up one day to find himself the aforementioned nightmare situation. He must escape this hellish labyrinth and uncover the reason for being in it in the first place. He and you have one objective above all others.

Find your way home.

These corridors make it seem like you could be in a dingy apartment building, but the way they turn this way and that just doesn’t fit any regular architectural model, and occasionally the corridors become more like the hallways of a family home (and later, beyond).

There’s a nightmarish quality to your journey, reminiscent of Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear series, where familiar surroundings are set askew, an unreality that does as much to unnerve you as your soon to be introduced foe.

After a few obstacles are overcome, you head into a room, where a woman stands with her back to you. You try reaching out to her, and her head, just her head, turns 180 degrees and screams in a violent rage. You notice she has a weapon, a box cutter in fact. You are defenseless. She begins to pursue you, and you best turn back and run.

But what are you running to exactly? You have no guarantee the way you came will be as you remember it, and where will you hide? This initial dose of blind panic (amplified if played on the PSVR) and unease is a masterful way of handling a very simple, very primal instinct. Running for your life.

Unfortunately, beyond this strong opening, Home Sweet Home meanders towards those answers with your five or so hours spent on it being largely about frustration, trial, and error. The story and changing environment do build towards a satisfying conclusion but the journey there is incredibly erratic in its delivery. When it gets it right, as shown above, it’s pure unabashed horror, fuelled by nightmarish visual tricks and the constant unnerving click of the demonic woman’s box cutter.

When it goes wrong, however, it goes so annoyingly wrong. The enemy AI is an unfortunate problem at times, forgetting its set path routines when trying to seek out your hiding spot (usually a locker or a cupboard) and forcing you out of safety and into failure in order to continue. I’m all for escaping threats by sheer good fortune, but this takes it more than a touch too far. It shatters the illusion of the pursuit and given you’re defenseless, there’s not much you can do but accept your grim fate and start again at the last save point. Not exactly how it’s supposed to be but even in its stumbling, Home Sweet Home creates a bit of horror. Sure, it’s largely frustrating to be forced to start again because of a glitch (and the load times being on the long side don’t help matters much), but there’s an air of unpredictably when it does happen that catches you off guard. A strange compliment to give an unintentional technical issue, but it’s worth pointing out that even in the caves of failure, gold can be mined.

VR presents a similar variety pack of joys and issues. The PSVR implementation is mid-tier for the genre. Never as aggravatingly bad as something like Weeping Doll, but far from the polish and care of The Persistence. It’s clearly an afterthought, but not exactly throwaway. Mainly it just doesn’t click with the control setup all that well, but it does amplify the panic of being chased by a demonic woman wielding a box cutter.

Home Sweet Home is a molten jumble of horror game ideas, poured into a cracked gameplay mold, but its imperfections can’t hide its true horror qualities.

Home Sweet Home review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.

Home Sweet Home is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.