There Was A Home

There Was A Home is a narrative adventure that follows Noor, a young Saudi woman who returns to clear out her family house. Play is a combination of clicking around to explore her home and using the physical journal to help solve puzzles to find items that bring back memories. It's unusual not only for the way you need to use the journal but its themes of changing times and culture.

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As Noor, you return from years spent abroad and reluctantly take on the tasks of packing up her family's old house. It's a journey of rediscovery of a forgotten childhood and past life. But to save those memories, and that house, you must piece together your family's past using the clues you find and the physical journal packed full of clues to solve the puzzles you encounter.

Maybe you find a Bridal Box in the game but must leaf through the journal to find out how to open it. Or maybe there's a locked briefcase, stack of envelopes or detuned instrument. You are constantly sent back and forth between the physical book and the screen, not only to solve these problems but to find out more about what happened in your past and in this place.

The result is a game about the cultural tension between modernism and traditionalism. But as much as that, it's about the power of a letter, and how that grows once the sender has passed away. These messages then come with something greater - responsibility. A responsibility to explore the past, and see what made us the people we are today.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked There Was A Home 21 months ago. It was re-examined by Ollie Robertson and updated 12 weeks ago.