Game: Home Domes
Genre: Simulation
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: GivenKittens Games
Controller Support: Partial
Price: US $11.99 | UK £10.23 | EU € 11,83
Release Date: November 1st, 2024
A review code was used, and many thanks to GivenKittens Games.
Home Domes is a simulation title in which you start with a dome and have to make it home. The outside is dangerous, and the inside is empty when you begin, but you have to make it a safe and friendly place to live.
What is Home Domes Like to Play?
Home Domes starts out with a pretty expansive character creator. You get to choose your Zodiac, your skin tone, hairstyles and colors, down to things like the height and size of your eyes and nose shape. I spent a lot of time fiddling with my person, looking to make her perfect. One of the main weird things I immediately noticed is that there are weight and height meters that change how big you are. When you make your model as short as possible, the head gets squashed, making it pretty obvious that you are actually just squashing a model and distorting the shape of it to make it shorter.
Once your character is made, you are tossed out onto what I can only assume is Mars or something. You have a whole, empty dome to run, and you need to power it and fill it with stuff. The controls are all over the place, and Home Domes doesn’t make it obvious how you are supposed to be doing all these things. The tutorial isn’t super helpful, either.
However, I did manage to fumble through the first couple of moments of the game, building up some power and mining some ore. I managed to get some water-gathering devices and even a toilet before my starting materials started to run out. I had to mine to keep collecting algae and keep my water collectors running. You need to eat as your hunger meter runs down, use the restroom as your bladder fills up, call home for social energy, take showers when you are gross, etc.
But you don’t get enough starting materials to build everything you need to keep going, like a toilet and shower and bed and all, so you need to collect materials. But it’s really, really easy to build until you just don’t have enough stuff to make the things you need to make to collect more of that thing. I ended up not being able to get more of what I needed because I had exhausted my character trying to figure out the controls.
I ended up having to delete my save and start again from the beginning now that I had a better grasp of what Home Domes had the opportunity to teach me, but I didn’t do very well.
Goods Exchange?
Now that I understand how to do everything I need to for success, I dove into my second playthrough with a better start. I had power, a working toilet, and some food collectors going. I began mining my required items, like water and stone, filling up the meters on the right side of the screen so I could build myself a shower.
I saw on the left side of the screen that I had access to something called a Goods Exchange that I could put items into, but it wasn’t super helpful. It’s a way to borrow items that you had run out of to build something, and it costs Civic Score currency, which you can only get by donating other objects. So it is nice if you have a whole bunch of one item and are short on another, but that was never a problem; the problem was always that I was short on everything.
Moving from one place to another, building things, and switching from building things to doing anything else was always super awkward. I can see that the game would be a lot of fun if the developers put more effort into the UI and thought more about the best way to interact with Home Domes instead of what is there now.
Conclusion
Overall, Home Domes just wasn’t very fun, wasn’t intuitive, and it feels like it needs a UI overhaul. I think there are some interesting ideas there, but none of them were done particularly well. I don’t think I can recommend Home Domes, even to someone who loves the sim genre.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It.
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