App of the week: Bring You Home review

Be kind, rewind

Play

Or not. Because someone up there likes Polo, and so the game rewinds and invites you to break Polo’s fall rather than his face. Swipe a panel and barrels are swapped for a trailer of hay. A prod of the play button and Polo survives his leap of death, before hurling himself through the portal.

You then get over 40 more single-screen slices of surreal, varied puzzling. In each case, you’re treated to Polo coming a cropper in amusingly slapstick fashion. You then figure out how to change the future by adjusting the scene before you – perhaps by having Polo encounter different obstacles, and hold different objects when he does so.

Initially, you swipe panels up and down to load new content, but later you can drag them from side to side, or a combination thereof. Multi-step puzzles then rock up, instantly making you wonder how the average time traveller is able to keep track of anything.

Make your own luck

Early on, there is a nagging feeling of trial and error – that you’re playing a guessing game until you luck upon the right solution. But slow down a bit and you realise Bring You Home is – in a manner similar to The Room: Old Sins – all about the details. You play through to see how things react, and then consider what might happen if certain combinations of panels are used. Often, the angle of a path or a cunning twist in logic sees you progress.

Naturally, you’ll still be killed often while figuring out the solutions, but this doesn’t frustrate – and that’s because Bring You Home is packed full of grin-inducing failure animations. At its best, the game echoes a classic Road Runner cartoon, with Polo being entertainingly dispatched until he (unlike a certain coyote) eventually emerges victorious.

Home run

So while the mechanics in Bring You Home aren’t anything new, the execution propels it beyond anything similar. It’s relentlessly imaginative, frequently dazzling, and shakes up the pace often. You’ll one minute find Polo bombing along in a mine cart, and then be faced with traversing a deranged, multi-tentacled blob on a unicycle.

One particularly memorable scene involves a graveyard where you must simultaneously deal with a werewolf, a terrifying kitty, and a zombie hand that grabs whatever’s above for a late-night snack. Another finds Polo in a gallery, becoming a rectangle when running inside of a Mondrian.

The game never lets up – and it’s a jolt when it’s over a few hours later. You’ll want more, go back and run through all the failure animations – and still want more. There can’t be much higher praise than that.

Bring You Home is available for Android. It was previously released for iOS and tvOS.