Gayme of the Week: Homing
“Messenger birds have been used to deliver letters for decades because of their innate sense of direction. They can always find their way home,” is the quote that greets me when I start up Homing, from Pigeonkind Games.
The meaning behind this quote eludes me for the majority of the game, and frankly? It’s all my fault.
Despite me having read the summary of Homing, a queer, narrative-focused epistolary about navigating a messenger pigeon, I found myself frustrated that I wasn’t able to do what I wanted. I tried to make the pigeon flap their wings, which quickly led to nothing. Okay fine, maybe I can make it turn? Nope. It keeps going back in a straight line. Did I screw up?
I restarted the game and unlike before, I sat and watched as the low-poly pigeon soared through the sky and the sweet, but subdued voice of Charlie Irving, narrator of the contents of the letter it clutched in its claws. The pink, yellow and purple colours paint a welcoming image, which makes the grey and black of the pigeon stand out in a way that serves as a warning, a foreshadowing of the contents that Irving reads throughout Homing.
With even just a few lines into the letter, it becomes obvious that the woman you’re writing to is a past lover. The familiarity of explaining what’s going on in the town, the focus on the relationship between themselves and Jacob, their son. It takes a while for it to be confirmed that you’re writing to an ex-wife, but how Irving uses her voice to express the tired, but affectionate tone of someone very much still in love is hard to miss.
I said ‘you’ previously. ‘You’re writing to’, but I’d be lying if I said that I felt that ‘I’ was a character. Instead, I felt as though my time with Homing was more of me peering into a dollhouse and seeing just one part of the main picture – and I suspect that’s the point. As you get to the end of the game, the pigeon stops at a gravestone where a pile of letters lie. I only know the contents of one letter, a sliver of the life that these two women had together, and yet it was more than enough to know that they loved one another.
Homing doesn’t pull any punches, though. This relationship ended for a reason, and the writer acknowledges that she screwed up, and that she should have tried harder, but it wasn’t always that easy. Fitting then, that she uses a pigeon to send her letters – it aptly conveys the distance between them both yes, but allows the intimacy of letter writing to show that their relationship wasn’t without love.
Overall, Homing is a complicated and complex game that defines what people mean when they say they want ‘messy queer stories.’ Stories that aren’t necessarily always happy, but acknowledges that we’re both flawed and beautiful in our own right.
You can play Homing over on itch.io.
Gayme of the Week is a weekly column by Aimee Hart about indie LGBT+ games that she’s played and what she loves about them. If you’ve got any recommendations, be sure to contact her on Twitter (@AimemeRights) or email (aimee@grayjonesmedia.com).
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