Homebound for Windows

HomeBound is a free point-and-click adventure game with a quirky sense of humor and an unusual setting. You take control of the main character, an anthropomorphic red panda, who is having trouble sleeping. Your job is to guide her around her apartment and find the solution to his problems.

Mixing the quirky narrative-driven aesthetics of Undertale with the point-and-click mechanics of Broken Sword: Angel of Death, HomeBound will appeal to fans of offbeat narrative games. Being both free and short, it also has a casual appeal.

The setting of HomeBound is an apartment that contains ordinary household objects: a television, a box of belongings to be unpacked, leftover food on the table, and so forth. Despite how mundane these objects are, interacting with them will often prompt humorous text captions to appear.

There is very little story or gameplay to HomeBound. The creators acknowledge that it is intended more as a test-run for a larger game than as a full game in its own right. The main appeal is in wandering around the flat and finding out what comical remark the main character will make about each interactive item.

HomeBound suffers from a few glitches that get in the way of the gameplay. If the player accidentally hits the "interact" key twice in succession, this can lead to two layers of text appearing at the same time, rendering the dialogue caption unreadable. The abrupt camera moves can also be disorienting as you traverse the apartment.

As a free game intended to showcase basic mechanics and tell a few jokes, HomeBound largely does its job well. Even the glitches can be overlooked, given the short time it will take to play through the game. The cute graphics and comical script have much appeal.