It is rare that a game creates a physical and emotional response in me. Certainly, I have thrown my controller to the ground in a rage after a particular level or opponent has smugly smeared my avatar into the ground. Leave Home hit me in a much more interesting level. My reflexive, repulsed, response to Leave Home's true ending is not something that you would expect from a 2-D Gradius-style game.

On the surface the game is a neon-lit, side-scrolling shooter. The input requirements are simple dodge the enemies with the Left stick, fire with the A button, and use the analogue control of the Left Trigger to spin those shots from forward facing to hitting enemies perpendicular to you or even behind your 'ship'. The controls are tight with the challenge being angling your shots in the right direction with feather light response of the Left Trigger sometimes causing you to over shoot.

The first curve ball comes within 10 seconds, LH has you speeding across a blue and black high way collecting orbs, it keeps getting faster and faster to the point where you cannot follow what it is going on. And then the game kicks in.

After the opening dazzle, your playthrough will never be the same.  You start going from left to right but in a jarring Venetian Snares blast you will find yourself in a rotating arena, the way it rotates, from which direction you approach it and what opposition you encounter is pre-ordained by your performance in the previous section. Then you will move to the next area with as little warning as the transition from level 1 to level 2. The variations of the level design even more splintered by the performance on the previous levels and so on. How the game reacts to you is not completely clear, it seems to be directly related to how many blue orbs you collect but there are some moments where the game just decides that you have lived too long and throws an impossible combination of bullet patterns to decide your demise.

Regardless, you have infinite lives and each time you die the game gives you some respite before killing you again. That is, until you reach the end. At that point you have a certain amount of time to beat the bosses, but trust me you might not want to do that.

The creator of Leave Home might read this and laugh at some of the symbolism I saw in Leave Home, if he does I hope he takes a David Lynch approach and doesn't discourage it. I heard that David Lynch was famous and shit, so who knows?

I am not going to spoil the scene that caused me to discard my controller in horror at the realisation of what I had felt Leave Home had made me do. What I will say is that it was definitely made me wonder about story telling in games (again) and how a game about shooting at pulsing geometrical shapes, to a Warp Records inspired soundtrack, might be a genuine analogy for life and its hardships.

I had to write that before you, the consumers, balked at what I was next going to say. LH is about 10 minutes long. Trust me, the game delivers in visual style and replayability that it won't matter about the length. You won't get the true ending on the first time play through and unless you are a 2-D Bullet-Hell fanatic it won't be the second or third time either.

I think this game is important, in the same way that Braid and Limbo are. LH is using a very straight forward medium with instantly understandable mechanics to tell a story in a way that we don't normally see expressed in that form.

In a way, I would say that LH goes to a much more abstract form of doing it than the other two games I mentioned. 

Of course, I am going to be told by the creator that he had no idea what this game was about and that I am reading into his work waaaay to much. I'll happily stick with my illusion. It works for Lynch fans.  

As a side note if you are even remotely interested in what you have just read, Leave Home is available for just 80 MSP for a limited time only.

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