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Home / Reviews / App reviews / App of the week: Bring You Home review

App of the week: Bring You Home review

Make your own future with this imaginative, brilliantly designed, frequently devious puzzler for Android and iOS

When first setting eyes on Bring You Home, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in for more old-school cartoonish adventuring along the lines of creator Alike Studio’s Love You To Bits. But this latest effort is very different.

It’s a much more mobile-friendly outing – ideal for smartphones as well as tablets – infused with puzzle-oriented panel-swiping mechanics found in the likes of Framed. And fortunately, this game is even better than its predecessor.

The story begins with doddering blue alien Polo, whose bug-like chum is pet-napped by nefarious hooded types who leap through a portal and scarper. Polo sets off in hot pursuit, but trips out of a first floor window and goes splat on the ground below. The end.

Be kind, rewind

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

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

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.

Stuff Says…

Score: 5/5

A captivating, inventive, gorgeous puzzler, whether you play in short bursts or greedily devour the entire thing in a single sitting

Good Stuff

Varied and imaginative puzzles

Superb design and animation

Failure’s usually a laugh

Bad Stuff

A few levels have had a logic bypass

Linear level unlock with no skip

Profile image of Craig Grannell Craig Grannell Contributor

About

I’m a regular contributor to Stuff magazine and Stuff.tv, covering apps, games, Apple kit, Android, Lego, retro gaming and other interesting oddities. I also pen opinion pieces when the editor lets me, getting all serious about accessibility and predicting when sentient AI smart cookware will take over the world, in a terrifying mix of Bake Off and Terminator.

Areas of expertise

Mobile apps and games, Macs, iOS and tvOS devices, Android, retro games, crowdfunding, design, how to fight off an enraged smart saucepan with a massive stick.