1. Gone Home is a game where you walk around until it is time to stop walking around. It is also very, very good.
2. What actually happens in Gone Home is you arrive home after extensive international travels. Your family has moved while you are out of the country and you find there is nobody home and the house is mostly still in unpacked disarray. You walk around the house and explore it but that is not what Gone Home is really about.
3. The first thing you find is a saying not to investigate the house and shortly thereafter it becomes clear that there are some horror-story type events in this home's history. That is also not what Gone Home is about.
4. Gone Home is actually about exploring people's lives.
5. The lives in particular are not that of the playable character, Katie, but of her family. Katie's younger sister, Sam, is the focus. Sam is just coming to terms w/ the fact that she is a lesbian. She live at home. It's the nineties. This is pretty rough situation all around.
6. A lot of people complained when this first came about that the horror story framework was subverted into a coming-out story and doing so was misleading on the part of the developers. I think being mislead is great in this case. While I can get behind a game where you slowly creep around a house and wait for things to pop out and scare you, I think we get a little more meaningful substance here.
7. According to the developers, the nineties were chosen just so it made sense that Katie was not in constant smart-phone communication w/ her parents and thus her arrival home could still be something of a surprise. They use this nineties backdrop to great effect though, weaving the story line to include contemporary musical movements, attitudes and government policies like don't ask/don't tell.
8. The way the main narrative of Sam's coming out is told is Bioshock-style, through audio-logs. (Well--they are diary entries that are read out lout to you, whatever.) This isn't exactly a groundbreaking storytelling method and wasn't in 2013 either but it works here because it is so well supported by the setting.
9. Voice actor, Sarah Grayson, does a great job selling Sam as a character but equally important is the fact that Sam's room has some pretty notable similarities to my own bedroom back in the nineties or that she's hung band posters and show fliers throughout various nooks and hideaways in the sprawling house in which the game is set. Generally, lived-in details are abound and do a great job not only creating the right atmosphere but telling an entirely separate story on their own.
10. Or, actually, it weaves multiple complementary stories together. You dig into Katie and Sam's parents' romantic lives along w/ their careers and their habits. You get the history of the house and the horror-story stuff that went on in its past.
11. None of it is just filler or backstory thrown in for the sake of it either. It is all baked in, a real part of the in-game universe. Details are about and each and every one seems a necessary piece to the puzzle when you discover it.
12. You don't have to dig through everything to find all this stuff but when
you do it doesn't feel like interesting tidbits thrown in for color but
small epiphanies about why the family functions the way it does. The few challenging bits in the game are all pretty much side-content and your reward for doing them is a a bit more information and a greater understanding of the underlying situation.
13. You could argue that, absent any real gameplay challenge, Gone Home isn't a whole game. And, you know,if you are gonna do that, go right on ahead. I hate this shit half the time too. This said, Gone Home is such a compelling example of world building that I have to recommend it for anyone who has even a vague interest in this sort of thing. If meandering around a creepy old house and getting to know digital people w/o ever actually meeting them sounds like a good time to you, you've just found a great way to spend a Friday Evening.
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