This is pretty funny being on backloggd. I seriously don't see any difference between it and a visual novel, if anything it has MORE interactivity so it feels more justified in being called a video game.

Homestuck is one of my favorite pieces of art ever. I am rereading it currently and all of the magic is still there. I love the world, I love the story, I love the music, the presentation, the art style. It's all very cash money.

Homestuck comes with a lot of baggage for past, present, and future readers. Whenever Homestuck gets brought up now I can't help but see that the discussion of it is never actually about Homestuck. It's about the fans, it's about the kickstarter, it's about Andrew Hussie's financial woes. I really don't spend a lot of time thinking about any of that. I also don't feel embarrassed about liking Homestuck, which I think is a feeling a lot of would be readers and past readers have a hard time coping with.

But Homestuck at it's core is just a rootin tootin good read.

My favorite aspect is the character to character interactions and the exponential nature of the narrative. At the start you really just have John. Then in Act 2 you throw in Rose. Keep reading and now there is Dave and Jade. And all of these characters are wholly unique and lovable, but then there's also the relationships between each set of characters. A Jade + Rose conversation is vastly different to a Dave + John conversation. They are very nuanced and enjoyable characters in themselves, the combination of two individual kids. Their conversations are so believable, they have their own inside jokes, it rules.

Then you hit Act 5 and 12 more characters are introduced and it's absolutely bananas. The characters are also introduced with a meticulous set of cultural differences. The way the narrative expertly juggles all of this is just such a joy.

I'd be writing forever if I tried to go into every little piece of Homestuck that I think makes it special. It rips ass.

i have attempted to read homestuck on multiple occasions and never gotten past the absolute massive slog that is its first act. just some of the most horrible pacing ive ever seen

that being said, everytime i learn more and more about homestuck the more i wish i was capable of getting past it cuz this sounds like the greatest piece of writing in history. whats that? theres an extended sequence near the end that exists for hussie to make fun of disabled people? one of the characters fucks a dog? tell me more, please

i can understand why this is on here to some extent due to some few and far between gameplay segments but this is mostly a webcomic? and i wouldnt normally review that here but why not.

i was a teenager when homestuck was close to its last legs and i was obsessed with it until i was like 17 and it was a big part of me coming to terms with being trans, and theres a few characters i still kind of like (mainly jade and rose) and the official music is good but otherwise homestuck is kind of garbage and isnt really worth much of anything anymore. theres no real humor and most interactions kind of boiled down to weirdly written romance, awkward melodrama (and not the kind i like) or "i am this one personality," said character one. "i am a clashing personality, what if we interacted" said characrer two. like it sucks because these were characters that helped me come to terms with a lot of things but if you actually pay more than an average amount of attention to them at all 80% of the cast is one note and didnt contribute much by existing other than an underutilized amount of worldbuilding. this is a bad thing because the mess of a narrative that struggles to wrap itself up isnt what most people i know remember liking about homestuck at all, its the characters.

homestuck is still a somewhat fun(?) novelty and to some extent a microcosm of culture of the late 2000s/early 2010s but overall it doesnt hold up and has actively been detrimental to the people i know who got into it later in life.

also ive heard that they have been making official(?) versions of homestuck without hussie's shittiness which is so funny to me and i have to wonder how many teenagers will never have to acknowledge that the guy who made their blorbo comic wasnt a great person when he made it

This counts as a game???

Anyway the only good things that came outta Homestuck were the banger various-artists Bandcamp OSTs (love you, Toby) and the fact that it gave LGBTQ teens & college kids a space to comfortably explore themselves in and engage with other like-minded individuals. This much is undeniable about Homestuck: it was integral in shaping the identities of a lot of queer people on the Internet, and it deserves credit for that.

And only that, because this comic is fucking terrible. Awful, self-centered characters with either too much screentime (Vriska) or nowhere near enough (75% of the cast), unfunny and overlong writing, too many convoluted and unceremoniously-dropped plot threads, annoyingly insistent terminology that drags the coherency of the setting down, meaningless worldbuilding that gets dropped to the wayside in favor of HILARIOUS!!!11 references like Nicolas Cage and Troll Adam Sandler, a horrible NFT-like artstyle that blatantly copypastes the exact same armless character models over and over again ad nauseum, and one of the absolute worst third acts in recent memory, where everything after the Dancestors' appearance nosedives into an abyssal mire of baffling writing and the growing psychosis of the author, this problematic and overly-verbose auteur that literally ships himself with the most unlikable character in the entire comic and tries to pass it off as a joke.

The beginning is also pretty awful too, so Homestuck is more like a bookends-comic where the first three acts and the final three acts are absolute derivative shite and the middle of the comic is merely "convoluted and noisy and full of far too many half-baked ideas". Ideas so half-baked that Andrew Hussie created a genuinely fascinating and interesting world where Social Darwinism, violence, and a brutally-divisive, discriminatory caste system reigned supreme, only for him to blow it up and leave it behind in the exact same act we actually see Alternia for the first time. Man literally made a world worth setting his story in and decided "nah I'm gonna blow it up and have everyone play this game where most of the locations are also unexplored and death is functionally meaningless".

It is so fucking bad, man. It's so bad it actually defies logic and expectation. How could something be so awful for so long? Homestuck isn't just a quick or even medium-sized burst of campy awfulness, it is a long, dreadful, and often-boring slog where most of your thrilling experience will be spent skimming through colored text logs often inundated with Leetspeak because H4H4 15NT TH4T QU1RKY 4ND R4ND0M??? If that gave you an aneurysm, then imagine the entirety of this review being written like that.

That's Homestuck.

Homestuck is basically one overly-long joke that only the author ever really seemed to get, he just happened to strike gold by inventing some relatable Trolls with a goofy romance system and that was enough to capture the attention of Hetalia fans that had grown bored of shipping countries together. Hell, maybe the fact that no one actually got the joke added to Homestuck's appeal, because at least you could scream loud and funny buzzwords like fuckass and do the windy thing!!! and haha i warned you about stairs bro. It's completely and utterly random and that's the point XD XD XD

I honestly do not think Homestuck could have been made today. Part of Homestuck's mass appeal was the fact that it honed in on the quirky, random, motivational-meme humor of the 2000s and early 2010s where Nyan Cat and Oppa Gangnam Style were the peak of comedy. Humor and internet culture has changed since then, and the brand of comedy and atmosphere Homestuck brought to the table feels antiquated and embarrassing. Every attempt to make Homestuck relevant again ever since its ending (the Epilogues, FriendSim, Hiveswap, Homestuck 2-- fuck, Homestuck 2, that is a thing that exists) died on arrival and have small cult statuses at best. Why? Because the joke isn't funny anymore. We never actually got the joke in the first place, and pretty much everyone has moved on to better and less secondhand-embarrassing stories (Undertale) because the parts of Homestuck that most people were actually into (Acts 4-6 or so I'd say) were a good, long while ago. A combination of way too many hiatuses, too many obnoxious characters, and the distinctive, growing feeling of having your time wasted (not to mention a finale that many people did not like) just made people get bored, grow up, and move on. Indeed, a lot of people grew up and moved on, something Homestuck was genuinely unable to do. Even as time marched steadily onward, it thought it could rely on the laurels of its' own Joke to carry it into the late 2010's. Clearly, Homestuck was wrong, because Homestuck is dead. Art is dead, and Homestuck killed it in its sleep.

If you like Homestuck, then-- I don't fucking care lmao, go talk about it to the lingering fans that are still out there somehow, still desperately clinging to the nostalgia of an unfunny and mind-numbingly boring comic that was lucky enough to capture the attention of a fandom far more progressive than the creator of this fucking shlock. I honestly wish Homestuck was better, I really do. Queer people deserve something less garish to call their own. The sad thing is that somewhere, buried in the ghoulish, pulsating mass of grating jokes and awful Vriska moments and horrible, unpronounceable words like "auspistice" are... good ideas. Some genuinely good ideas. Ideas that threaten to make the comic interesting and fun and special. Ideas that were unfortunately buried by the author's crushing arrogance, auteurism, and likely some undiagnosed ADHD and the lack of anyone telling him to maybe trim the fat and stop typing so much.

Maybe I should do the same and end this here. Homestuck bad. I do not like it. Homestuck? HomeSUCK. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Eridan is the best character. 1/5

A heavily flawed but fascinating work that I can neither recommend nor ever want to experience again.

I read this whole thing in a month because I was depressed.

I crave the abyss.

this game is overhated and i refuse to give it a rating because i know i will get shit for it no matter what i give it
it's complicated as balls, but i would be lying if i said it was the worst thing i ever sat through, because i dont think it's that bad
i guarantee the only reason people hate it is the toxic, troll fucking, sharpie-bathing fandom but like, fandoms are kinda easy to ignore?
in my honest as balls opinion, i enjoyed it. i didnt think it was the best thing ever, but i still managed to sit through it all.
we could get into the strange things that happened behind the scenes, because there's many things i heard about andrew hussie that are kinda questionable, but i don't wanna end up slandering someone so i can't say anything until i know for sure anything is true. even if it is true, you can still separate art from artist.


i think it's alright, not the worst, but far from the best