It was developed alongside the horror film of the same name and tells the story of a team of five filmmakers exploring an old mansion in search of precious frescos hidden there.

The player must navigate the intricately laid out mansion, battling with the enemies, and the five main characters with the limited weapons and health restorative items available.

Sweet Home was released in December 1989 exclusively in Japan, where it gathered generally favorable reception and was considered better than the film.

In retrospect, Sweet Home is considered a landmark game and is often cited for laying the groundwork for the survival horror genre.

It served as the main inspiration behind Resident Evil (1996) which was a massive critical and commercial success, launching a multimedia franchise.

[1] The five characters each have a unique item that is necessary to complete the game: a camera, lighter, medical kit, lockpick, and vacuum cleaner.

[1] The story is told through cinematic cutscenes and through optional notes such as secret messages and diary entries of past visitors scattered across the mansion,[1][7] which also provide clues for solving puzzles.

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.

[10][11] 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 filmmakers seek to recover the paintings from the abandoned, dilapidated mansion.

He also called it one of the first games to realize the potential of a fully cohesive world as in the Metroidvania genre (even though Metroid (1986) attempted it first), and one of the first to use scattered notes and diary logs to tell a story, an element later popularized by BioShock (2007).

[1] Peter Tieryas of Kotaku wrote that Sweet Home successfully fused the RPG, adventure, and horror genres into a "macabre" in a way most other games rarely have.

Critics believe the game successfully created a haunting experience despite the limited technical capabilities of the Famicom hardware.

"[16] Tieryas wrote that technical limitations created opportunities for the designers to implement clever gameplay which contributed to the sense of horror.

He wrote that the mansion feels unpredictable and the game is paced well, providing items at just the right moment to maintain the tension.

[2] Sweet Home served as the main inspiration for Capcom's Resident Evil (1996), a game which defined the survival horror genre and spawned a multimedia franchise.

[18] Fujiwara believed the basic premise for Resident Evil was to do the things that he was unable to include in Sweet Home, particularly in the sense of graphics.

Both games are set in a mansion with an intricate layout,[1] the story is told through the use of scattered notes, and there are multiple endings depending on how many characters survive.

[7] Other shared elements include the brutal imagery,[16] door loading sequences, puzzles,[5][6] backtracking,[7] and characters with unique items such as the lockpick and lighter.

[22] Peter Tieryas of Kotaku blamed the decline in critical acceptance of modern Resident Evil offerings on Capcom abandoning the basic gameplay design laid out in Sweet Home.