Video Game / Home Behind

Liberate Scaria!

Home Behind is a challenging Roguelike with RPG elements, developed by TPP Studio out of Shanghai in China. The first game in the series was released in 2016, with a more widely known sequel, Home Behind 2 released in early 2022.

Both games play similarly, where you control one or more characters as you fight against an oppressive government. In the first game your goal is to leave the country & find your family, in the second you are Banan, a college student who returns to the country, taking control of a band of Scarian rebels or order to overthrow the brutal dictator Akadullah.

In the second game the core gameplay is a side scrolling progression through each level, with random events, equipment and supplies being found along the way. Combat inside the levels is a maximum of four heroes per side, with classes called "Jobs", and positions that give bonuses or downsides. Characters level up and have skills relevant to the classic RPG roles of Tank, DPS, Support and Healer as well as specialisations for weaponry & armour.

There is a map layer representing towns, areas & the Government army, and in this layer you can upgrade facilities to gain income and other benefits. Moving between towns can involve combat with your ramshackle truck.

Finally, you need to constantly upgrade your home base. Diplomatic missions from supporting powers, an infirmary for healing, your truck, a high tech aerial drone, command centre, your inventory warehouse, a metal shop for crafting & improving your gear and the vending machine of a local arms dealer all help to progress through the world.

---

Home Behind provides examples of:

• Action Survivor: The first game puts you in the shoes of a refugee whose goal is simply to find his daughter and get out of Scaria in one piece.
• Item Crafting: Find metal scraps, to shape into ingots, to make a better knife...you get the picture.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: If you come across a dead body...well, he doesn't need the meat on his body as much as you do. It'll be a massive hit to your Morale Mechanic, though.
• Qurac: Scaria is a direct analog to Syria, specifically the Syrian Civil War, with the protagonist being a refugee fighting his way to safety in the European Union.
• Scavenger World: The civil war in both games is bad. Abandoned cars, telephone poles, and random heaps of rubble are just a few of the sources you can harvest for the scrap you can use in Item Crafting.

---

Home Behind 2 provides examples of:

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
  • Healing is always extremely expensive. Your fellow rebels will also require you to give them supplies or cash even if you're ostensibly on the same side.
  • Averted in many of the exploration area stores. While you will often get the chance to buy something from a vendor, the walls will be covered with free loot you can take without any issue.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: Played with, as the map layer has numerous enemy soldier groups running around that will take over your owned cities and make it hard to take over new ones, but they don't advance in a wall.
• Aerith and Bob: The three starting heroes are Banan, Haroun, and Chris. Justified in that the previous two are supposedly Middle Eastern(ish) and Chris is a Nortonan, AKA American, and has a stereotypical American name.
• Alliance Meter: Banan's unit has one of these with each faction, except for Akadullah's forces (who want to kill her, end of story) and Daisy International (who don't have allies, they have customers). The meter starts after making contact with each group, you build it by sending resources and completing missions, and the maximum level you can get is based on building up your satellite phone. Building the meter increases the amount of weekly support you receive, and also gives you a stratagem to use for each faction.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • In addition to the parallels with Syria, the circumstances leading up to the Civil War call to mind both the Iranian Revolution and Afghan conflict.
  • The actual spark of the conflict, in which peaceful protesters in the Scaria's capital were brutally crushed by the military, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tiananmen Square Incident.
• Alpha Strike: If you manage to ambush an enemy using a random event, or your crew has built their entire morale meter, with the right heroes you can alpha strike the enemy team with your ultimate abilities, and lower level enemies can be killed outright by this.
• All Deaths Final: You can't bring anyone back to life, but you only lose someone if their injuries get too high, which can be healed quite easily.
• Amazon Brigade: The dictator Akadullah has one of these as his main bodyguard, and the player character can take an all female team into missions if they want.
• Anti-Frustration Features: It is very difficult but still gives you some bonuses it doesn't really have to.
  • Characters who get knocked out during a combat will get right back up again if the remaining characters defeat the enemy group, they won't die during the combat layer just from being KO'd. You can then heal their injuries & HP if you want.
  • Only the injury status of a character is retained after finishing an exploration mission, hitpoints only matter during each individual exploration area and in the combat.
  • The Revolutionary Heritage mechanic allows the player to grind a currency that can be used to give upgrades that carry through to new games. These include better starting stats, talents, resources, materials, medicine, weapons, armor & trinkets.
• Anti-Hero: The heroes can definitely act like this, executing captured enemies, stealing from civilians, robbing farmers of their only food.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: 4 heroes at a time, for both sides. You also have a maximum amount of total heroes.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Weapons can get a piercing effect to make them better at taking on heavily armoured heroes.
• The Artifact: The European Union is the only real country in the game, because it existed in the first game. All others are Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of various countries.
• The Atoner: Haroun's backstory is to make up for how his tribe helped bring Akadullah to power.
• Auto-Save: It autosaves into a single slot but it is possible to get around a failed mission by quitting the game.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The hellacious difficulty & game mechanics result in the most common hero selections being a sniper or serial killer in slot 4, a medic or witch doctor healer in slot 3, a damage dealer like a commando in slot 2 and a heavy tank like a shielded soldier or heavy infantry in slot 1.
  • Skipping random events if you don't have a good chance of success is boring, but better than failing and losing health, getting hurt or losing morale.
  • The medic can't restore HP as well as some of the other healers do, but it's ability to heal itself and the lack of any downside to it's healing abilities make the medic class the most common choice for a team healer.
• Break the Badass: Banan suffers from this after Haroun's death, and takes time to recover. Represented in game by loss of stats.
• Camp Cook: Maria performs this role for the squad.
• Character Level: Every character gains levels with XP, and you get 2 stat points per level. Maximum level is 30 for you, but enemies can be as high as level 40.
  • Your truck has a max level of 60 for it's constituent parts.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: There are multiple levels of weapon tier and they have special colours.
• Combat Exclusive Healing: Averted, you can heal XP outside of combat for the cost of supplies. Except for a small number of special tactics, you have to heal injuries outside combat.
• Critical Hit: Very important, with certain classes like the Serial Killer generating one hit kill level damage using them.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: Scaria's religion reveres "God," but He manifests through a Fantasy Pantheon of several avatars, male and female. Shrines to these gods give bonuses when prayed at. However, the Order looks and acts fairly similar to Fantastic Catholicism.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: When you're heavily under levelled this will happen to you, and vice versa. If you're 5+ levels higher you can smash every enemy group in an area without any major damage, especially if you've got a healer on your team.
• Dangerous Deserter: The Rebellion has trouble keeping its squads on mission. Rebel deserters are an occasional threat to Banan's unit.
• Damage Over Time: Certain skills like the Chemist have skills like this.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Pretty much every main character's backstory is this. Haroun & Banan suffer from knowing how their tribes helped or were hurt by the dictator.
• Death Is Cheap: Averted. If you send a hero off to fight on the front lines they will die. And your own team members can die if you misplay, especially at the higher difficulty levels.
• Dungeon Crawling: The general gameplay, although there are only a few areas that you might call a "dungeon", like prison cells or underground mines.
• Early Game Hell: The number one tip to new players is that during the customisation of your player character Banan, to make them a medic due to how hard it is for characters to survive each area without being healed, or if you do heal them, it costs supplies. You also have very little medicine, poor weapons and won't have a large team.
• Enemy Summoner: Several classes have drones, and with enough time, there will be so many drones that your heroes can be killed off incredibly fast.
• Equipment Upgrade: You can upgrade your weapons or armour with the metal workshop. The truck & drone both have upgrades.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Many of the exploration areas contain traps, hostile enemy units and random events that can seriously hurt you.
• Evolving Title Screen: Completing the game once changes the opening screen to a peaceful scene.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: Some of the bosses carry special trinkets that aren't the same as the others. One example being a ceremonial short sword which gives +5 damage.
• Experience Booster: Is one of the bonuses that weapons, armour & trinkets have.
• Failed a Spot Check: Many of the random events involve rolling an intelligence, resolve or strength check, and if failed will result in an enemy unit coming out to fight you with an ambush bonus. You can also do this in return in some events.
• Fallen Hero: Banan retroactively is this. In the second game, she's the main heroine, but in the original game she's the Big Bad, having become a psychotic terrorist willing to murder thousands if it means winning the war the first game's country takes place in.
• Festering Fungus: One of the random items in the exploration areas, you need to pass a check to determine if they are edible, or just risk it and potentially take damage.
• Forced Tutorial: The initial section of the game where Chris rescues Banan and the pair have to fight to get to Haroun's truck.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Banan herself, who goes from being a college student-turned-revolutionary to the most prominent figure in Scaria's Civil War and depending on her actions, the Big Bad in the original game.
• Genre Shift: Whereas the first game is a tale of a refugee fleeing the conflict, the second is a war story.
• Government Agency of Fiction: The Norto Republic's Civic Security Bureau, which is an obvious stand-in for the CIA.
• Guide Dang It!: A lot of the mechanics are quite hidden, with the developers often replying to Steam users asking about them.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: There's no doubt Akadullah a brutal monster, but he came to power via a popular revolution of his own and is still widely loved by a large portion of the Scarian people. Banan and the Revolutionaries want to overthrow Akadullah and make Scaria into a peaceful, prosperous democracy but the methods they use are often just as brutal as Akadullah. Also the foreign powers backing Banan have lofty claims, but it's clear they're just interested in Scaria's oil and controlling the nation's future.
• Harmful Healing: The Chemist & Witch Doctor have healing skills that also inflict initial health damage or negative status effects, with the upside being those skills can often heal better than the ones the Medic does.
• Healer Signs On Early: If you pick Medic as your starting class. Otherwise, completely down to RNG when you might get a healer.
• Healing Spring: Several random events involve healing baths, springs or rivers.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Averted by Haroun, who Banan shoots to ensure he won't be tortured by Akadullah.
• Hub City: Your home base functions as this, as a central point for all your upgrades.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: You only have a limited amount of inventory slots for your weapons, trinkets & armour. Characters only have a gun, armour and two trinkets.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Your characters can come across the Pub in several towns, drinking at them for benefits.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: You can sometimes find items stashed into trees, dead bodies and fish them up from lakes.
• It's Up to You: Banan is the only one who can lead the rebels to victory.
• Jerkass: Executing surrendered enemies or random people you 'rescue' but can't afford to heal makes you one of these.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Banan can potentially become more ruthless over the course of the campaign, in the name of victory. Which makes her becoming the Big Bad in the first game more plausible.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: You can retreat from areas, but at a significant cost, as well as you losing all the loot you've earned.
• Lethal Chef: Maria has to learn how to cook each individual dish, and even when she has learned it, there is still an RNG element that can make her attempts fail badly.
• The Lost Woods: One of the areas is a heavy forest filled with mushrooms.
• Luck-Based Mission: You have no direct control over the combat between your hero team and enemies. The snowball effect is significant so failing to take out an enemy team member first can be fatal.
• Magikarp Power: Arguably the most important buffs in the game, reducing supply usage, and injury resistance, start off as extremely limited bonuses.
• Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Banan fled Scaria when she was young. She was educated and trained in the Norto Republic, and has now returned to liberate her homeland.
• Marathon Level: Combat heavy levels, or those with multiple indoor areas are these. Inverted with areas of little resistance.
• Morale Mechanic:
  • Each character uses Morale to power up their ultimate attack.
  • The Morale meter for the rebellion determines how much morale each hero starts each map with, and also represents how the war as a whole is going. It unlocks buffs and a stratagem when it reaches certain thresholds, and loses the game if it reaches zero.
• The Need for Mead: Pubs can be used to drink with your heroes, giving them buffs depending on what you drank.
• New Game Plus: The main benefit of the Revolutionary Heritage mechanic, as you gain bonuses for each new game. Moreover, it unlocks the ability to play the campaign from Chris' perspective.
• Nintendo Hard: This is an extremely difficult and long game.
  • The main mechanic behind the difficulty is that being under levelled compared to the enemy makes it very hard to win, as enemy groups that are higher level will have more hit points, and be faster to use their weapons and their skills. An enemy group 5+ levels above you is exceptionally hard to defeat.
  • Pouring points into upgrading your facilities doesn't really help that much, it simply helps you maintain equality with the increasingly hard to kill enemies. The biggest help is buying injury resistance via the field hospital, then upgrading the satellite connection to get more benefits from friendly factions, and late game you can get high quality rations that include a significant drop in supply usage, and upgrading your weapons & armour.
  • The final battle involves significantly higher levelled enemies, as much as 10 levels above your 30 level cap.
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: The various outside countries are only involved in Scaria's civil war to get oil out of it. While the Norto Republic has more defined objectives, they're also the thirstiest of all the factions.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Scarian dictator Akadullah is cleary supposed to represent Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad.
• No Communities Were Harmed: The game uses vague stand-ins for real world nations. Scaria is obviously supposed to be Syria, the Norto Republic is the United States, the Boreal Federation is the Russian Federation, etc. The exception would be the European Union which is just the European Union.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Implied in several random event areas that the "meat" you are eating might be human.
• No-Sell: The invincible and undying buffs can completely prevent damage & dying respectively.
• Pamphlet Shelf: Various notes & journals can be found scattered across the game.
• Permadeath: If a hero manages to die, that's it.
• Playing Both Sides: The various factions both support Banan and Akadullah's forces. It's not unusual for Banan's team and one of Akadullah's units to each call in a Nortonan airstrike on the other in the same battle.
• Point-and-Click Map: The overview of Scaria, with nodes of control for cities, forests, swamps and so on.
• Random Number God: Combat & events are almost all RNG based. There are only a few puzzles or events that are based on logic or reading information.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Banan's band of rebels is made up entirely of these. It can include serial killers, surgeons, commandos, arms dealers, witch doctors and ex-slaves.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: You start with nothing but a crappy old truck, a place to store equipment and a clapped out barely useful command centre. Eventually you gain access to satellite communications, cooking facilities, an aerial drone, equipment market, crafting workshop and a field hospital.
• Score Screen: When you complete a mission you get to see all the loot you've recovered, as well as what specific traits any equipment you've gained has.
• Shoot the Mage First: In the normal combat you cannot do this, but in the vehicle combat sections you can specifically attack enemy soldiers, killing them off so they can't heal the enemy vehicle.
• Side View: When you explore & fight, with the combat system based on being in one of four slots, which have specific bonuses or debuffs. It is not enforced, but generally advisable to use a long range attacker in the last slot, a healer in the third slot, a damage dealer in the second slot and a tank in the first slot closest to the enemy. Each type of gun also has preferred locations, such as the shotgun preferred in the second and first slots with sniper rifles in the last two.
• Skill Slot System: Averted, you don't get the choose skills, each character comes with 3 specific skills based on their job class archetype.
• Sprint Shoes: Trinkets can give a buff to speed, which in this game improves reloading.
• Space Compression: It doesn't take very long to explore areas, and you will often have fights starting with multiple groups on the same screen, but they suffer from Mook Chivalry, and you don't get ganged up on by 8 or 12 enemies at a time.
• Squishy Wizard: The chemist is the most similar class for this, as they can heal and provide offensive attacks.
• Stat-O-Vision: In combat your hits, blocks, misses and so on are shown on the screen.
• Status Effects: A variety of combat effects are included, that can be called up as skills or gained over time from random events or cooking.
• Stone Wall: The heavy infantry & shielded soldier classes are the best tanks in the game.
• A Taste of the Lash: The slave trader uses this.
• There Are No Tents: Averted, as you need to rest to raise energy levels back up.
• Those Two Guys: You always start the game with Banan and Chris then quicky add Haroun to the party.
• Total Party Kill: If you continue to play even though you're on the downslope towards defeat this will happen.
• To the Pain: Can be inflicted in various random events and motivation for certain parts of the storyline.
• Universal Poison: All types of negative poison effects have the same type of damage.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The final battle takes place in the very top right corner of the map, and just in case you weren't aware, includes a crown icon next to it.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The mission to deal with King, Chris' missing commanding officer, is one to Apocalypse Now.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian: A moral dilemma in the final mission. A general asks Banan to swear before God not to harm civilians and just to go straight to Akadullah. Immediately afterward, Chris' Nortonan handler suggests employing an airstrike that will wipe out Akadullah's defenders but also kill hundreds of innocent bystanders. It's your call whether you blow the place to hell, use a more targeted airstrike with less effectiveness but fewer civilian deaths, or refuse to kill civilians and deal with Akadullah's soldiers yourself.
• You Can't Go Home Again: After Chris failed to assassinate Akadullah, his superiors left him for dead in Scaria. He gets to return to the Norto Republic at the end of the game, after you deal with Akadullah.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: If you have too many heroes, gain a hero in a class you don't want, or they're too under levelled to be useful, you can dismiss them to fight on the frontlines. It provides a negligible bonus to revolutionary support and all but condemns them to die fighting.