Dot’s Home is a free point-and-click adventure about a young Black woman in Detroit who travels through time in her family’s past and sees how various decisions she makes will impact the present. It will probably surprise no one that I loved this since it’s an adventure game set in Detroit about racial and housing justice, and at least one local person worked on it. While there have been other video games set in Detroit, this is the best one I’ve played that’s actually about the city and its history. They’re generally racing games, set in a dystopia like Robocop, or whatever you would call Detroit: Become Human. I know they’re out there but I don’t think I’ve seen any stories in any medium depicting real issues that the city deals with like gentrification, racism in the suburbs, and white flight that happened in the last century.

It’s definitely not a criticism but while I do call it a point-and-click adventure since that’s how it controls, I would say it plays more like a visual novel. You do not really solve any puzzles and most of the choices you make are done through dialog trees. I think this is fine but I don’t want to accidentally set the expectation that you’re reassembling a shredded newspaper to get a clue into a housing crisis. If I did have any criticisms of the game, it’s that I don’t think the game really does a great job explaining one choice may be better than the other at times. There’s a point early on where you can tell a couple to either buy a home or rent it for a while and then buy it, and it’s not really unless you do two playthroughs where you try each that you get an understanding that the couple gets exploited if they buy it without having more money saved up first. It’s a short game too so you can’t save during playthroughs and basically need to play the game twice to get the full picture. At the same time, it’s a short game so it’s not the end of the world having to play it twice either.

That frustration aside, I’m really happy this game exists. I never ever see anything like this documented in video games and very rarely in other forms of media, and by folks that actually care about the city and issues that marginalized people have to deal with. With it being a free game that takes about 30 minutes to complete, I do recommend trying it out if this is something that sounds interesting to you.

Dot’s Home is available for Windows and Mac on Steam