Review | Go Home Annie - Home Is Where The Horrors Lie

Go Home Annie takes place in the SCP universe. For the uninitiated, the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) Foundation is a fictional organization that secures anomalous creatures, objects, and even sometimes people, contains them in facilities, and claims to protect the human race from them. It has existed since 2008, and thanks to user submissions, there are now nearly 10,000 anomalies to read about.

It’s important to understand this going in, because Go Home Annie is an SCP game first and foremost; there are small details about the lore of SCP and the games (upgrading keycards!) that may go over the head of anyone that isn’t a fan.

Go Home Annie is a linear story driven game with puzzles throughout the experience, and when you’re not doing a puzzle, it’s a walking simulator. I don’t mean that in a negative way, because those sections gave me time to appreciate the visuals. Graphically, the game is actually pretty good, especially for one that recommends an AMD Radeon RX 580 in the system requirements. For longtime SCP fans, you’ll be happy to know that Go Home Annie has a new take on what an SCP facility would look like, and gives life to lesser-known SCPs. 

Speaking of SCPs, there’s a large variety of them. And I have to give credit that despite being a horror game, a good chunk of the SCPs included weren’t even the spooky ones. While it probably would’ve made the game scarier if more of the dangerous Keter or Euclid-class SCPs were added, I enjoyed learning about various SCPs I was unfamiliar with, even if they were classified as Safe. 

The game’s story follows player character Annie, a member of the Foundation’s D-Class Personnel who is assigned to  SCP-9237, an anomalous house that was created for the game. The player follows Annie as she uncovers her past and figures out her connection with the house. The overall story is good, but I didn’t like the execution. I understood loosely what the overall plot was, but not the specific details. Some of the characters are interesting — one of the standouts is SCP-1974, a talking bathtub that hosts two different individual personalities, a Russian and an American. Others were woefully uninteresting, and felt unnecessary. One such character is Rae. There are hints of character and personality, but she never gets a moment to truly express herself. Mild spoilers ahead: She has a crush on Annie, and doesn’t even get to tell her. Annie finds out by finding a letter on Rae’s desk. What’s more, this has very little impact on the overall plot. This revelation doesn’t make Annie hesitate or waver in her goal to figure out her connection with the house at all, even though it means leaving Rae behind.

Gameplay-wise, some of the puzzles were annoying for one reason or another, and the ones that weren’t were simply okay. The puzzles near the end of the game were by far the worst, because I had to first solve how the puzzle worked, and then the actual puzzle. I can understand why, because at a glance, they’re intuitive. One puzzle involved looking at a children’s drawing, and then walking through a set of doors with similar drawings, which would lead to more doors, with more drawings. The obvious thing to do is to walk through the door with the picture that matches the one you were given. However, none of the pictures matched the one I had, and were even missing certain elements of the original drawing. 

Solution Spoilers

The actual solution, or at least the way I solved it, was by walking through a series of incorrect doors that added all the elements of the drawing that were missing, and then slowly and painstakingly walking through doors that corrected details of said elements. It was mind-numbing. Most of the later puzzles are like this; they’re designed intuitively, but then add something unintuitive. This isn’t to even say that the puzzles were difficult however, just that they felt intentionally tedious.

Go Home Annie is a bite-sized SCP game that is great for fans, and is a great way to introduce someone into the fandom. There’s plenty of SCPs to read about and interact with, some of which, to my knowledge, have never been in a game before. The puzzles are okay up until later in the game and the story is digestible, but you might still be left with some unanswered questions by the end.