Hometown Story review: I want to love this game but I can’t

In Hometown Story, you take on the role of shopkeeper. Your deceased grandmother – who you don’t even remember having – died a while back and left her shop in your old hometown unattended.

You’re notified of her death only recently by a letter sent by a floating, talking hamster thing called Pochica. When you finally get to the shop, Pochica tells you that it needed you to work the shop because it couldn’t stock the shelves with no hands. (You’ll wonder how it wrote the letter but that’s besides the point).

You gallantly jump to the task. Of course you’ll revive your grandmother’s old shop and rebuild the quiet sleepy town of your childhood! So you get to work placing shelves and stocking products and finally open shop. Congratulations! Here’s where the game rapidly starts to head downhill.

Considering the absolute star power that weighed in on it, it’s a letdown, a disappointment and a farce. Harvest Moon fan or no – Hometown Story is a brand new IP from Yasuhiro Wada, the father of Harvest Moon – the game is still a poor one.

Here are its main problems summed up.

No motivation to put on a pair of pants and leave home

Unless you have experience with life simulation games, you’re likely not going to ever leave your shop, because you don’t have to. Customers come and go in a steady stream, and your neighbours visit often. Sometimes they even make special orders, which they expect you to fulfil. This is the point where you would leave your shop, except that you won’t need to. You do eventually have to go forth and deliver things to neighbours, but this happens only after a while.

So why don’t you need to leave? There’s an old dude in Hometown Story who is unnamed and unhoused. All he does is come to your shop every two days, right when you’re running out of stock, to offer all kinds of items. Sometimes he brings rare jewels; other times, he brings milk and eggs. He always has all the key items your neighbours want from you. He also has one of a kind items in stock too, which brings us to another terrible point of the game.

Lacking in communication

It’s not uncommon to have quirky scriptwriting lost in translation. I get that. Sometimes one language lacks the native phrasing and poetry another has. But while poor translation resulted in the empty and uninspired one-liners that your NPC customers spout, it is no excuse for the rest of the game.

Many things go unexplained in Hometown Story, the worst of which is how you are not informed of your shop’s closing time. I kept going to sleep early because I didn’t think there actually was a closing time. When you finally discover it, which I did quite by accident, by seeing if it could remain open for 24 hours, you are treated to a ledger which sums up your income but proceeds to confuse you with its five other unlabelled tabs. Note that this ledger is not even available for viewing; you’ve got to wait till midnight each day to look at it.