Losing everything in HOME - Mech x Kaiju is better with friends
This mapmaking RPG revealed that I am not drift compatible with myself.
The first pilot’s death sold me on Home - Mech x Kaiju. Marwa and her mech were lost when the monstrous Jotun, its body composed of a teeming swarm of smaller nightmares, rent VOYAGER’s frame apart. Marwa detonated its core at the last moment, ensuring mutual destruction. An electric blue star shone from the mountain peaks west of her home city of Kawatha, and then winked out.
The second pilot failed to stop the incursion of the next two kaiju. Their story, no less dramatic for emerging alive but traumatized, revealed that Home needs other players to really work. The fact that this collaborative mapmaking RPG balances on a single trick isn’t a problem — plenty of games make hay out of tight loops and sparse mechanics. Instead, performing that trick three times all by myself felt formulaic, even pat. Home concerns itself with stories of intense, singular combat with massive stakes, which need someone else driving the point of the metaphorical sword towards my neck.
Designed by Nick Gralewicz of Deep Dark Games, Home supports up to four players who all portray pilots defending their fictional countries from kaiju that emerge from an otherworldly rift. One-on-one battles between mechs and the rampaging terrors encompass the majority of Home’s mechanics; the rest comprises question-based prompts that create room to humanize the pilot and connect them with other people, cultures, memories, and emotions.
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