Stalked at Home (Demo) ★☆☆☆☆

Stalked at Home, I think the devs forgot this isn’t our home; it’s our boyfriend’s.

Stalked at Home and every other video linked to it can be seen on our Patreon, and if you’re wanting to know what other games we’ve played and have posts for, here’s our list of current games.

• Horror
• Indie
• Singleplayer
• Walking Simulator

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Not Now Mom Podcast Transcript

This is the transcript of our podcast episode for Stalked at Home (Demo) on Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.

All links within this section do not pertain to the game itself, and don’t need to be clicked. They are affiliate links that take you to random products I think are interesting.

Let’s start with the title screen. 

We got a nice little cozy home so…some cozy homes. Winter setting. Got a tight road where there’s a police car and another car going by and they–I’m pretty sure they scrape sides, so that’s something. 

Yeah and the police car has a headlight out, which is a little bit weird but okay. 

I do like that there is movement to the title screen so it’s not just like a still image. A still background image with just the cars moving, basically. And you got the settings right there which is just resolution, texture quality, and presets, so you don’t actually go into a settings menu. 

I don’t really mind that honestly, even if they kept it for the full game. However when you press play, you get this screen and it’s like…oh. 

I don’t know why they had the screen like this, but again it’s a demo so I’m going to keep telling myself that as well as you, cause I have to keep telling myself that cause the game’s just…. 

Hopefully they fix it in the full game. 

I’m pretty sure the full game is out right now? I didn’t check. 

So we’re dropped off by the bus in the middle of nowhere. It’s cold outside and we need a car to get to our house and so we have the bright idea of speaking to a couple of guys over here, if they know where we can rent a car.

If we’re gonna rent a car, we gotta go somewhere, we gotta walk somewhere. Specifically we’d have to walk to town, right? In order to get to a car dealership, in order to rent a car?

Also, going back toward the start, we are crooked. I don’t know if we’re on a hill, but, it’s a little bit jarring.

But anyway, going back to the guys, it says LMC, to talk. I don’t know what LMC is. Left mouse click, maybe? Instead of left mouse button?

And when you do talk to people, you have this large text box area, but the text isn’t even inside of it. And the text box area isn’t even on the bottom like it usually is in most visual novels.

It’s not a visual novel game, per se, I guess.

Yeah, I guess it kind of is. Like a walking simulator.

It’s not.

Anyway, so we have them talking and the text is above and outside the text box, and you do get choices, however the choices are all basically the same. So there’s really no difference in choosing whatever you want to choose.

So for this choice, we have: “I’m looking to rent a car. Know anyone?” “I need help finding someone who rents cars” “Do you know where I can rent a car?”

They’re all the same responses and questions, just said differently. I just, I don’t understand that.

Like, thanks for giving us a choice to figure out how we want to say it, but it doesn’t make a damn difference. And every time you go into a different conversation point, you get more choices. So every time someone has a different statement, you get another three choices to choose from, instead of just, you know, having them continue a conversation with you.

You have to–you have to–respond to every statement to every question of theirs no matter how much it doesn’t make sense.

And the amount of times you say thanks in this game because of this is absurd.

Like, you are such a nice person.

For instance, some of the choices you get are “Thanks! Where can I find James?” and then “Got it, I’ll head over. Thanks!” “Appreciate it, I’ll talk to him.” “Thanks for the tip! I’ll check it out.” or “Will do, thanks again!” “Sure, thanks for the heads-up.” “Got it, I’ll mention you.”

And it’s just, it’s the same way for every single person you talk to.

By the way, you can step on the fire and not get burned, which is amazing. Most times you step in fire and your characters immediately falls over, but we are fireproof, baby.

So in order to rent a car, we had to come over to James, which is just another random dude sleeping in a tent. I don’t know why there are two random dudes here sleeping in a tent right by a bus stop, but hey, you know what, I guess if they run out of supplies there’s a road right there.

Maybe that’s thinking smart.

So James goes, “Hey there, William sent you, right? Good to see a new face even in this cold.”

How did he know William sent us? Did he like, hear us have a conversation? Did William send a text to him. He just checked like, just started talking to me about wanting a car, can you have her rent a car?

So this dude James rents cars.

I wouldn’t necessarily say he rents out cars to people, so much as he’s got an old car and we can use it if we want. In order to use his car, he’s got a couple rules, which are:

Return the car as you got it and stick to the main roads.

Which is a little weird to me?

We’re renting a car because we don’t have a car, so how are we going to bring the car back, cause if we bring the car back, then we don’t have a car once again. Unless he assumes that we’re going to use the car for a certain amount of time, bring it back and get back on the bus to go wherever else we’re going.

He says, “If you need help, come back here. I’m always by the fire with supplies.”

Do you never leave this place? I don’t even know where his supplies are. Like, what supplies? You’re got enough food for you to eat, a sleeping bag, maybe a cell phone. You’ve got nothing, dude. Nothing.

I didn want to try out the run when I was heading to the car and it turns out you don’t run in this game, you…you just walk.

I mean, the screen stretches out so it kind of makes it look like you’re walking faster, but no. You’re walking at the same pace. The environment just stretches out in front of you.

So no, there’s no running, you’re just walking and you get kind of a different stretched out view.

The car is probably the scariest part of this demo. When you get into it, it’s rocking like crazy. So I don’t know the moment you get into it if there’s an earthquake going on, or there’s someone having fun in the back that we don’t know about, or there’s something wrong with the car that he’s renting to us, cause he clearly wants us to wreck and die and then have his car back. 

I guess to give it to another unsuspecting fool. 

But if you get the car stuck I guess you can reset it. I don’t know where it resets to, so I’d be a little iffy to use that. I press space to exit, R to turn off and on radio. 

I actually like the radio on. I like the music that was going on. 

[Music]

I’m not a huge fan of driving in silence, honestly. The only time I have actually noticed, and that’s, it’s one time only, that I drove without the radio on, was the fact that I was so mad coming home from work that I had such loud internal thoughts going on, I didn’t realize the radio wasn’t on. I was–I was fuming that day. 

It’s not often my thoughts are so loud that they drown out the possibility of a radio not being on and stuff.

The lights don’t actually turn on the headlights. They turn on some kind of interior lights. I don’t know where this light is coming from; I think it’s coming from the roof of the car, but I don’t see a light there. It’s just more lit up right there. 

I mean, I’m pretty sure the lights are on, but I don’t know.

And then we get an opening line. It says, “Hi, my name is Emily, and this is my story.”

We had to be told to press the left mouse button to move on. That’s…that’s good to know. Most people do that anyway. Not a whole lot of people like to try to read something and have it move forward without their say so. 

“It all began when I was 21 years old. My parents called me one day and asked if I could come visit them for a week. It had been over a year since I last saw them in person. Sure, we talked every week over video calls, but it wasn’t the same as being together. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to go. Two weeks later, I packed my things and headed to their house. Since I don’t own a car (I’m not working right now) I took the bus to get there. Once I arrived, I realized I’d need a car for the week. With a little bit of the money I’d saved, I rented one.” 

Okay, there was no exchange of money with that guy, by the way.

“During that week, I met two really kind people who helped me when I needed it most. They made the trip unforgettable. Now, I’m on my way back home, reflecting on everything that happened.” 

I don’t know who the two people are, unless it’s the two people that were in the tents, cause that’s the only people that we’ve met so far, and only one of them was helpful cause he’s the one that rented the car to us. 

This ramshackle, shaky ass thing that’s a death trap.

“That’s how I ended up here. And as you join me on this journey, you’ll uncover the rest of the story.” 

So we visited our parents already and now we’re headed back home? To our home? Is that what I’m thinking? That’s right, right? That’s what she said? 

We do need to refuel for a gas station. 

There is a building here that I wanted to check out, but there’s absolutely…it’s just an empty building. I don’t know why there’s an empty building just sitting on the side of the road like, “Hey, come over here and look at me.”

And then you go in there and there’s nothing to look at, and there’s nothing to look at at all cool. I just got out of my car. My rental car, in the cold, to look at nothing. 

It could have been like, at least been graffiti or something, come on. No one leaves a building all alone like that as a blank slate. 

Happily, we see a gas station, and we have to pull in to the designated area. These designated areas have like, kind of a gray silhouette to them, and this one isn’t that hard to see, but later on in the game, it’s a little difficult to notice certain things.

So park our car, get out.

This car does some kind of wonky thing. It starts jumping around. I guess I didn’t park it correctly and it was trying to fix itself.

This tall person comes up to me–we are, we are short or they are tall, I don’t know which, and we go through the choices again. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks.

They just walked up to me and asked me if I needed some help.

I don’t…I don’t need help. It’s a gas station. I’m going to get gas in my car, like, it’s a weird thing to say, even for a worker at this place. Like, don’t ask for help, ask if you want them to handle the fuel or something.

Which he says, “It’s freezing out here. Do you want me to handle the fuel?” And of course we agree, and say we want some coffee. He says, “The coffee machine is inside the shop.”

When we start to walk away, they ask, “How much should I fill it up?”

Like, don’t they normally just fill it full?

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for asking that, because if you look at the choices, the choices are: “Full tank, please.” “Fill it up, thanks.” or “Top it off, please.”

So yeah.

Just fill it, fill it up. Do your job.

And before we walk away, they say, “This might take a moment. By the way, there’s a coffee machine inside the building if you need a quick wake-up.”

We already asked where the coffee was. And now he’s reminding us, hey there’s a coffee machine in there.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

I wanted to check out the bathroom, see if there was anyone in the stalls. There’s not. The bathroom is fairly clean, you know. And there’s a lot of stalls in this place, despite it being out in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, how often do they have what–6, 5, 5, 6 people?–coming in here to use the bathroom. Dang, man.

When you step into the gas station, you’re kind of accosted by the person working the counter and it’s fine. But all these people that we’ve met so far are so nosey. They all want to know where we’re going. What’s the reason for our drive. How long are we gonna be on the road.

Like, ya’ll are suspicious as f***.

I understand making small talk, but how do you know I’m gonna be a while on the road. Why do you wanna know where I’m going?

This is game is called Stalked at Home.

I don’t trust anyone.

Meandered around the gas station a bit, just looking at different stuff. It’s not really anything to see, I guess it’s a normal looking shop for these types of games.

And then I get to the door over here and I’m like, Hm, I wonder if this opens to a back area or something. And it does, however, the door doesn’t door properly. A door does not open like that. Like a plank in the middle of the doorway.

I can’t jump up on it, I tried doing that. Ironically, it’s sitting like a plank like this means it is still closed. You have to interact with it again in order to open it. Cause you can’t jump on top op it, I learned.

Instead, when you open it, it swings down. And when it swings down, you can step into the middle or something and close the door again, and you will be standing on the door.

So that’s fun.

Otherwise, there is nothing in this back room really to look, except a clock that has a backwards face on it? And then I guess some stock, but there’s nothing else to look at.

I tried figuring out the coffee machine, and it’s super confusing; I don’t know how I got it to work. I pressed E, which is mostly interact, so I pressed E on every little thing beside the coffee machine and it’s just…it wasn’t doing anything for me.

And I almost stopped the game here, cause I just couldn’t do anything.

You have to get coffee in order to progress the game, and I don’t know if I was standing too close to the coffee machine, but eventually a cup appeared there, I think.

I mean, I even went behind the counter, “Hey what’s up, I can’t get your coffee machine to work,” but yeah.

I was a good distance away when the coffee cup showed up in the machine, and then I had to wait a little bit with interacting for it to actually finish and put a cap on it.

Once done, you can carry it out.

When we leave the gas station, the tall person comes up to us and says, “It came to 50$ total, pretty reasonable today, huh?”

I feel like for that stupid a** car, that is a whole lot of money for a refill.  For a normal car? I got a Trax, and my car is like, 32$ or something to fully fill up from empty? So 50$ is a bit much, I think.

And I didn’t even see a sign for what the gas prices were over here, so guess that’s my fault, but hey if we’re running on empty, we gotta get gas, right?

We’re back on the road and it becomes an hour later.

Now, during this hour later, we’ve got a portion of a notepad sticking to the left side of the screen. All I can read is “ixing.”

I don’t know if we’re fixing, or remixing. I don’t know what we’re doing.

But then we also have our phone. And I wonder how long we’ve been holding our phone, cause we’re still driving.

Don’t text and drive, people, okay?

And we’re talking to Babe, heart emoji.

When we bring up the phone, the texts say, “Good morning, I can’t wait to see you.” “One more day, I didn’t saw you 6 days!” “My mom told me to stay.” “You can’t stay at your mother’s house because there have been thieves on the streets lately.” “Oh right you won’t be home for two weeks I forgot about that. Also, is it safe to be home alone in this neighborhood?” “Yes I have to see my family, don’t worry it’s okay, if anything happens message me.”

So our boyfriend is going out of town to see his parents for two weeks, and we’re asking if it’s safe to be home alone in this neighborhood. Isn’t this where our house is? Isn’t that what she keeps saying? I’m gonna go home.

Technically, I think this is our boyfriend’s house, so I don’t think it’s our home, it’s his home.

The game’s really confusing about that.

Anyway, you can’t put your phone down for the rest of this demo. You’re just stuck holding it. You don’t get anymore texts, it’s just, that’s all you get. That’s what you can read, you can’t read anything else. All you can see is Babe and Good Night on the phone.

When we get to some houses, we yell, “I can see my house. Here’s my house!” and I’m just like, where? Where’s our house? Our house does not stand out at all.

Like maybe if it was painted white in a neighborhood of brown it’d be more noticeable.

The parking spot is behind a bunch of snow piles. Meaning we have to drive over the snow piles and park in the appropriate location.

There’s a shed, so I go over and wander this way to see what’s inside and there’s a fridge, a washing machine and a dryer, we got a closet, and I don’t even understand this. Storage space.

It feels like this is a second place for someone to sleep in, but it’s not big enough for a bed or anything like that.

It’s just extra storage space.

And this fridge doesn’t work, by the way, so I suppose it’s perfectly fine to have it out here for, you know, to put that doesn’t need to be refrigerated.

I feel like if you’re gonna have a lot of parties, this is the thing to do. Or at least have a lot of people staying the night over. Have extra laundry machines out here.

Where is the power outlets?

All right, so even though it’s our house, we have to knock on the door, because it’s not our house, it’s our boyfriend’s house.

It’s a little funny cause he’s conversing with us while we’re outside in the cold weather, saying like, “How was your week? Did you do anything fun?” Like, can I come in the house first so we can have this conversation? Why do I have to freeze my booty off in order to talk with you?

Like let me in first.

Hey, honey, nice to see you, come on in.

Instead, we’re getting interrogated how our day was while we stand outside in the winter weather.

So yeah, turns out he’s packing his suitcase for the week, he won’t be around. He’s flying to New York to see his parents. He goes there every year to spend time with them.

Makes me wonder how long we’ve been together, because wouldn’t we know that if we’ve spent more than a year with him?

I didn’t catch this before on my first playthrough. My only playthrough. This playthrough. But he says, “You can take a shower while I finish packing. There are clean clothes in the closet and a towel in the bathroom.”

Cause let me tell you, I was looking all over the place to figure out what to do.

Also he restates that, “I’m going to my mom’s place in New York to visit them. I try to go every year.” He literally just told us that. I don’t know if he has memory problems, there’s something going on, if he’s stressed about it, if he forgot he told us. And uh, there are strange people still hanging around the neighborhood, so that’s fun.

“I’d still recommend staying indoors for a bit, don’t go out too long.” You know, keep the door locked.

He says if anything feels off you can always call me.

If something feels off, people, call the police. Don’t call your parents, don’t call your boyfriend, don’t call your girlfriend. Call the police.

I didn’t have my phone on me once when my mom was calling and she’s like, “I’m glad I I wasn’t having an emergency when I tried to call you.” I was like, “Well I hope if you were having an emergency you’d call 911, not your daughter.” 

I’m just saying, them first and then family.

Can I just say this is such a tight corner to go into another hall. And actually, we go from the kitchen to the garage, cause those are definitely garage doors. And then a hallway that connects to the bathroom and a room–a bedroom. 

This is such a weird house layout. 

So I went into the bathroom and it tells us I forgot something. 

It doesn’t tell us what we forgot though. Clearly, you know, from before I need to get clothes, but you would think it’d remind you of what you forgot, and I even look into the closet and see the clothes, and I think I interacted with them, but it didn’t do anything? Maybe I wasn’t close enough or something.

The entire time I’m trying to figure out what to do, he’s sitting on the bed like this and I feel him. This is how I feel when playing this demo. 

Oh my goodness, I didn’t even get a migraine. I am super impressed, when playing this demo. I mean, it didn’t involve like a whole lot of thinking power that kind of produces migraines, but it was more like trying to figure out what to do, not knowing what to do. 

We got a notepad left, it’s not telling us anything except “xing.” We got a closet out in the shed with clothes that I can’t use. We have laundry in the shed that I can’t open or do anything with. 

I end up going back into the bedroom closet and clicking on a shirt, and it says “this shirt is not for today.” 

Does…does she have specific colored shirts for each day of the week? 

And then another shirt says “I want to take something else.” 

So she wants the dark blue shirt, not the black. Not the green, not the red. Okay, fine, whatever. I take the black shirt–no, the dark blue, my bad–into the bathroom and it still says I forgot something.

So I can’t put this shirt down anywhere, I have to go back to the closet, look up, and I think those are jeans? At the top. Those are a lot of jeans. I’m sorry, let me count the amount of jeans we have compared to shirts.

[counting]

29 pants. We do not have nearly enough that much shirts in this areas. I mean like, I guess all throughout the house and in the shed, it could be possible, but, oh my god. Why do we have so many pants.

Anyway, I grab those, go into the bathroom. It says I need to put my clothes on something flat and not dirty in the bathroom. Well, I’m sorry, but the toilet seat shouldn’t be dirty. Like, the top of it, and it is flat.

I normally put my clothes on the toilet seat or on the bathroom sink. Obviously there’s a towel there.

It wants you to put it on the part of the bathroom sink that doesn’t have anything on it.

After removing clothes, I had a lovely little dilemma. So, we can’t leave the bathroom, (obviously cause we don’t have any clothes on right now). And although our boyfriend has probably seen it before, we don’t prance around like this. I tried turning the bathroom faucet on and even noticing the shower head and trying to turn it on, no.

You have to jump.

Jump into the bath tub.

And then close the curtains, and that’s when the shower turns on. Mind you, we’re still holding our phone. I don’t think phones should have water drenching them. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe there are some phones that are fine with it, waterproof, like good for you, but not everyone has those.

Apparently this character does though, so it doesn’t affect anything.

And I don’t know if our character is super nervous about the neighborhood people, that she has to hold her phone in case something does happen and she can call Babe really quickly. He’s still here, he hasn’t left yet.

There is a loud sound. Babe is not answering us when we call for him.

I didn’t wanna leave the shower, because I knew there was a jump-scare coming up. But we interact with the towels first in order to dry ourselves off, we hear another sound, and this time when she talks the text kind of jiggles, which I like that effect. That means like she’s really nervous.

Of course I’m a coward and I jump back in the shower cause again I know there’s a jump-scare coming up. I don’t play these games for a reason, okay?

After I interact with my clothes, put those on, Babe is not in the room. And because I’m a nice person I shut all the door that I’d opened. I mean I should’ve done that in the first place.

I distract myself, because the TV isn’t working, I don’t think he paid his cable bill.

And I know I’m going to dread this moment, so, I just turn around and open the door, and oh my god, he scares me so much. I’m not one to scream or anything, I don’t do jump-scares like that, it’s more like a sharp intake of breath on my end.

I honestly hate content creators that scream whenever there’s a slight noise or jump-scare or anything like that. It’s so over the top. It’s too much. They’re too much.

But you can definitely see me jumping because the mouse goes everywhere, and the thing is I knew there was a jump-scare coming up somewhere, I just didn’t know where. I thought it would be later in the kitchen or something.

We tell him about the noise, and he just brushes it off, like oh it was my suitcase that slipped off the bed, oh yeah, the floor’s been creaking a lot lately. I accidentally threw my bag, it hit the table pretty hard.

Like…no. No, we’re not hearing the same noise.

So we’re like, didn’t you hear me? He said, “Sorry, I was packing and didn’t hear” when I was calling for him. I think he’s going to be in on this stalked at home ordeal, because he is so shady right now.

So he says the taxi is here and I choose I’ll walk you out, and then he just leaves. He just doesn’t even wait for us to walk him out.

He’s got this huge a** suitcase that he’s carrying one handed. It is more than half his body. I don’t know how many clothes he’s packed in there, but wow. I mean, it clips through his body, I don’t really care about that, but it’s just the size of the dang thing.

Well I’m not one to leave my boyfriend to walk out into a taxi alone, so I follow him out there. In hopes for maybe a hug? I mean, he is leaving, we are his girlfriend. Like, dude, come on.

It was really awkward.

I was running into him, asking for a hug and it took him a moment to actually say something.

Eventually, he says, “Come here, let’s hug before I go.” And I chose the hug option, and he just immediately gets into the taxi and gets driven off. We did not get our hug. He’s breaking up with us right now. I think he bribed these people to come stalk us at home and he’s going to his parent’s house as an excuse to get away from us so it will happen. Cause there ain’t no boyfriend going to be shady like that and have feelings for us.

I wanted to get in my car and leave, but the game was like I need to close the front door.

Fair. Fair enough.

When we get back inside, we’re hungry and want something to eat. There’s a recipe on the refrigerator door. If you get close to the recipe note you can’t see it, but if you step away from it, the text becomes a bit clearer. It’s really weird.

But once you grab the note from the fridge, you can press escape, and you have an inventory.

You can only carry one thing in your inventory. So we have this spaghetti recipe right now. The ingredients we need are tomatoes, tomato paste, and spaghetti.

This is where the fun part of the game came into play.

As if it’s not already been so much fun.

So I can’t grab the tomatoes because my hands are full. Which means I gotta go into my inventory and I have to drop the note. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be holding the note to know what to get for the items you want to eat, the ingredients are still up there right next to the other freaking notepad that we don’t need.

And on the counter there’s actually those gray silhouettes I was talking about early at the gas station with the car. They’re really hard to see right here. I wish they could’ve made it a little bit clearer, cause I don’t know at this point where to put the tomatoes, because I don’t think I saw the silhouettes.

Which means I just drop the tomatoes on the floor. This is probably the best part of the demo right here.

So, I go into the shed where there’s another fridge, where it’s holding the tomato paste as well as spaghetti. I take out the spaghetti and when I drop it, my character flings it off into the distance. Literally just fires it away.

You need that spaghetti in order to progress the game, and the thing is, once I threw it out there, I could not find the spaghetti. It was nowhere to be found.

And even though there are other spaghetti packets inside this fridge, I can’t grab another one, it won’t let me.

So I grab the tomato paste, dropped it onto the floor of the house, went back to the shed, tried to grab the other spaghetti container and I couldn’t.

This is the part where I looked all over the place for this spaghetti container that I flung out the door and it’s just nowhere. I’ve no idea where it went, if it just flew off into the distance and never stopped flying, or it got lodged in the logs so I’d never be able to find it even if I wanted to.

I finally figured out where the silhouettes were, so I put the tomatoes up there, and then I couldn’t pick up the tomato paste because my hands were full.

I just placed the tomatoes down. There’s nothing in my inventory. My hands are not full, unless it’s counting the fact that I’m holding my phone, in which case, I can’t put my phone down.

So no.

My hands are not full. I can not pick up that tomato paste. And the spaghetti is long gone.

Therefore, I can not move forward with this game.

However, we’re not done yet, because after another thorough search of the area for that darn spaghetti, I decided it just wasn’t happening. I wasn’t going to be able to find the spaghetti and I did something to hit an invisible wall.

This invisible wall made it so I could not get back inside the house.

So the demo ends here, where I can not pick up the tomato paste because my inventory is full, despite the inventory not being full. I can not get the spaghetti because it’s done poofed out of existence. And now I’ve hit an invisible wall, where I can’t get back into the house, and the door is open.

Great.

That would be the demo.