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Sweet Home
Japanese Famicom box art. It features a reverse image of the poster for the film.
Developer(s)	Capcom
Publisher(s)	Capcom
Director(s)	Tokuro Fujiwara
Producer(s)	Juzo Itami
Designer(s)	"Hatchan", "Tomo" Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Programmer(s)	Masatsugu Shinohara "Twilight"
Composer(s)	Junko Tamiya
Platform(s)	Family Computer
Release	JP: December 15, 1989[1]
Genre(s)	Role-playing Survival horror
Mode(s)	Single-player

Sweet Home (Japanese: スウィートホーム, Hepburn: Suīto Hōmu) is a 1989 psychological horror role-playing video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It is based on the Japanese horror film of the same name, and was supervised by the film's director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The game, directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, was developed and published by Capcom, and released in Japan on December 15, 1989. The use of brutally horrific imagery prevented its global release.^[2] Sweet Home heavily inspired the Resident Evil series, and is regarded as a survival horror game in retrospect.^[3][4][5]

The game world of Sweet Home consists of a mansion setting, with a cohesive, connected, intricate layout, like in Resident Evil and Super Metroid. Sweet Home has five player characters, who can go solo or be grouped together into teams of two or three.^[5] The player can switch between characters and parties, and items can be dropped anywhere, like in Resident Evil Zero.^[6] Sweet Home places an emphasis on puzzle-solving, limited item inventory management, and survival.^[7][3] The game requires backtracking to previous locations in order to solve puzzles later on, and has save rooms to store items when the player's inventory is full.^[8]

The combat consists of randomly encountered battles which the controlled character or party of characters must fight or run away from. According to Destructoid, it is "best thought of as PlayStation-era, slow-paced survival horror where RPG battles take the place of third-person combat" (like in Parasite Eve). The only way to restore health is through tonics scattered across rooms in the mansion (like Resident Evil's herbs).^[5] When a character dies in Sweet Home, a death animation is shown.^[8] If a character dies in battle, he or she cannot be revived throughout the course of the game.

The five characters have a specific skill that is necessary to complete the game, with each character having an individual unique item, such as a lockpick or lighter.^[9] Items that serve the same purpose can be found if one of the characters dies. For example, should Akiko (the team's nurse) die, the team may find pill bottles which can be used to heal ailments. Depending on how many characters remain alive after the defeat of the final boss, there are a total of five different endings the player may receive.

The storytelling occurs through cinematic cutscenes, which often employ brutal imagery, and through optional notes, secret messages and diary entries scattered across the mansion, like in Resident Evil and BioShock.^[5][8] It has short segments that play out like the quick time events in Resident Evil 4, where the player comes across a trap that requires a quick decision to be made, or else be killed.^[9]

Thirty years prior to the story in 1959, famous artist Ichirō Mamiya hid several precious frescos in his huge mansion before he mysteriously disappeared. In the present day, a team of five documentary filmers seek to recover the paintings from the abandoned, dilapidated mansion. Upon entering, they are trapped inside by the ghost of an unknown woman, who threatens to kill all trespassers. The team decides to split up and find a way out, but the mansion is both in danger of collapsing and is occupied by countless monsters.

The team discovers that the ghost is that of Lady Mamiya, Ichirō's wife. It is revealed that thirty years previously, Mamiya's two-year-old son had fallen in the house's incinerator and was burnt alive, and Mamiya attempted to provide playmates for her son by killing several other children. She committed suicide shortly after and her ghost, unable to forgive herself, became trapped in the mansion. The team arrives in the main chamber and confronts Mamiya in a final battle.

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Sweet Home was directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, who was also the creator of Ghosts 'N Goblins and later created Resident Evil. Sweet Home was one of his first console game projects, after having previously worked on arcade games. The director of the Sweet Home film, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, told him "not to worry if the game didn’t follow the movie exactly." For the development of Sweet Home, Fujiwara "was able to use the movie as a reference", getting "to see the movie and take a tour of the film studio, and use whatever essence" he thought would work in the game. He said he "carefully considered how to go about bringing elements from the movie to the game screen."^[10] The game's creators added horror elements to the storyline itself, mainly told through diary entries left behind fifty years before the events of the game.^[8] Regarding the game's technical limitations, Fujiwara said it "was mainly on the graphics front that my frustration had been building up" but he was "confident that horror games could become a genre in themselves", which would eventually lead to the creation of Resident Evil years later.^[10]

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (June 2014)

In 2010, UGO included Sweet Home on the list of 11 best survival horror games.^[11] In a retrospective at Kotaku, Peter Tieryas wrote: "I am still in awe of the level design and the way the designers help you discover the story rather than to just be told it. The house is, in essence, one big, convoluted and surreal level, the perfect allegory for the tragedy that is Sweet Home."^[12] Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid wrote: "It's a nearly flawless game that isn't only one of the best JRPGs of all time, it's also the best game to ever be released on the Famicom/NES." He adds that, despite it being "the prototype for survival horror, it is in many ways every bit as good as Silent Hill 2 or Resident Evil 2." He also considers Sweet Home's intricate mansion layout to be "superior to those of Resident Evil and Super Metroid."^[5]

Sweet Home served as the main inspiration for the seminal survival horror game Resident Evil,^[7] which was originally intended to be a remake of Sweet Home.^[2] The first Resident Evil borrowed many elements from Sweet Home: the mansion setting; the puzzles; the item inventory management and limited inventory; the emphasis on survival; the "door" loading screen;^[7][3] the use of scattered notes as storytelling mechanics; multiple endings depending on how many characters survive; backtracking to previous locations in order to solve puzzles later on; the use of save rooms to store items when the player's inventory is full; the use of death animations;^[8] dual character paths; individual character items such as a lockpick or lighter;^[9] story told through frescos; and brutally horrific imagery.

The game also inspired Resident Evil Zero, where the player switches between characters, and can drop items anywhere for the other character to pick up.^[6] Sweet Home's short QTE-like sequences are considered a precursor to the QTE sequences in Resident Evil 4, 5 and 6. Sweet Home's mixture of survival horror gameplay and RPG battles is seen as a precursor to Parasite Eve.^[9] Sweet Home was the first game primarily tell its story optionally through scattered notes, secret messages, and diary entries, a precursor to Resident Evil and BioShock. According to Destructoid, Sweet Home was also "the first game to fully realize the potential of a cohesive game world that connects beginning to end (even if Metroid attempted it first)."^[5]

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• Laplace no Ma (1987)

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