No Longer Home explains why existing as queer people is a political act
No Longer Home by Humble Grove (Cel Davison and Hana Lee)is a semi-autobiographical point-and-click game published by Fellow Traveller. The game is about two non-binary people, Ao and Bo, who have to leave the London house where they have lived together for a year. They’ve graduated, they are unemployed, they do not know what they should do with what they’ve learnt at art school and Ao, who is Japanese (and half Korean), is soon going to be obliged to go back to their home country.
By alternating between the two protagonists at fixed points in the game, we explore the rooms and the garden of the house they are leaving, small low poly dioramas suspended in space, interacting with objects and talking with other characters. Almost at the beginning of the game we also meet an “unknowable geometry,” an otherworldly mass of floating shards, in our bedroom, and after this encounter, we acquire the ability to rotate these small dioramas in order to discover more objects and reach new places. It’s a work imbued with that kind of magic realism that can remind us of Cardboard Computer and Annapurna Interactive’s Kentucky Route Zero, a game that’s explicitly referenced by No Longer Home. Even the dialogue system, where we can make other characters jump into the conversation, looks inspired by Cardboard Computer’s game (interestingly, another queer video game, Heather Flowers’s Extreme Meatpunks Forever series, has partly adopted this idea from it).
But in No Longer Home choices are mostly there to give us (as the game blatantly puts it) an “illusion of choice.” With a certain mastery of the medium, Humble Grove uses the illusionary freedom and empowerment that video games offer us as an allegory of the disempowerment we experience in our society. No Longer Home could have been a nostalgic story about leaving childhood and entering adulthood and struggling artists, and even so it would have been at least more interesting than many other similar narratives because of its queer and non-white point of view, but here queerness is a lens, and personal experiences are seen in their context. This is a game about two queer people leaving the place they call “home,” but it’s also about the failure of academic institutions, about the difficulty of fitting into traditional (and legally recognized) family structures when you are queer and marginalized, about the collapse of art funding, about the immigration laws that push Ao away from the UK, about the gentrification of London and the necessity of a revolution. It’s a game about the relationship between human beings and space, a space that’s not only the private space of Ao and Bo’s house but also the capitalist society in which they live, and about the stories that these traditionally mundane places can tell.
I can see why the first inspiration listed at the end of the game, in a long Acknowledgments page, is Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. It’s a book about “how it is that we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn,” that is, depending on our orientation, and about the spatial meaning of that specific orientation that we link to sexuality. Queerness as a way of inhabiting a space, of being oriented in a space, of being disoriented (“queer” as “bent” and “twisted”) and reoriented. Even when No Longer Home’s characters play a video game together they play a parser-based interactive fiction, a genre focused on the simulation of the spatial aspects of our experience, games organized into discrete spaces called “rooms” that emulate physical places (while choice-based interactive fictions, for example video games that are developed in Twine, are usually organized into text paragraphs, emotional spaces of a mental map). No Longer Homes is a game where being queer in a place, in a space, in a society, is a political act.
Although it’s a small game (you can reach the end in under one hour if you skip all the optional content), No Longer Homes manages to effectively condense in its short length and in a playable, interactive form, many different ideas. And, as its “unknowable geometry,” it gives us the opportunity to look at our world from different, queer perspectives.
No Longer Home is available for PC and Mac on Steam, itch.io, GOG, Humble Store and Epic Games Store starting July 30. You can download its prologue, Friary Road, for free from itch.io.
About The Author
