Go Home
For Thanksgiving, the next two games I'll be talking about here are going to be about going home. The first one is the aptly named Gone Home, developed by The Fullbright Company in 2013. It's a game about coming home and finding that nothing is as you left it.
Gone Home fits tentatively into a genre of game called "Immersive Sim," a topic covered extensively by Waypoint on their flagship podcast. It includes games such as Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex, and many more. It also covers games like Gone Home, and Fullbright's sophomore release, Tacoma, though some would refer to these games as "walking simulators" with varying degrees of distaste and admiration.
Gone Home won awards for its passive storytelling mechanism, and won hearts with the fan favorite Christmas Duck. In the game, you play as a college student returning to her family home and finding that no one is there to greet her. The game starts innocently enough, as the player wanders around the porch to find an old key, getting inside, and then looking around to figure out where folks are. As the player continues to search, small puzzles are uncovered and a mystery is revealed. The player chases it down the rabbit hole until finally, all the pieces are together and a metaphorical portrait is revealed to match the real one found downstairs.
Talking about Gone Home in a blog post meant to serve as a review is a bit difficult. Saying next to anything about the game can be construed as a spoiler, and though it is quite a few years behind us now, the blog tries to cater towards new players. That said, the game is excellent for learning the basic skills of walking and moving the camera, which is part of the reason I recommended Life is Strange as well. Despite the spooky setting, the home is as empty as the premise suggests, and the game imposes no time limit. Walking around and hunting down clues is suggested, and there are many secrets to be found that way as well. It's a perfect playground for learning to use either a dual-stick controller or a keyboard and mouse setup. And the game is playable on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and all computer variants to boot.
The reason this game has stuck with me, and the reason I was so ready to replay it for a review, is in it's heart. The game tells a story of a family in the 90's that might as well have been a family right now. It barely references the timeline of the game except in the modality of communication, television, and cassette tapes. The lack of digital communication is important for the storytelling, as the game tells its story not with dialogue, but with notes, letters, and crumpled up pieces of paper found around the house. All of the items feel like they belong there, and all of it makes sense. Nowadays all of that information might be stored on one device, but the game's analog nature forces the player to explore a large, unfamiliar house and learn more and more about a family they will never meet in-game. We see familiarity in this slice of life, and then come back to our own. The game's total playtime is probably about four hours. It certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, but it'll be a long while before it leaves you.
Title: Gone Home
Price: $15
Skills Learned:
Dual-Input controls
Environment interaction
Gone Home fits tentatively into a genre of game called "Immersive Sim," a topic covered extensively by Waypoint on their flagship podcast. It includes games such as Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex, and many more. It also covers games like Gone Home, and Fullbright's sophomore release, Tacoma, though some would refer to these games as "walking simulators" with varying degrees of distaste and admiration.
Gone Home won awards for its passive storytelling mechanism, and won hearts with the fan favorite Christmas Duck. In the game, you play as a college student returning to her family home and finding that no one is there to greet her. The game starts innocently enough, as the player wanders around the porch to find an old key, getting inside, and then looking around to figure out where folks are. As the player continues to search, small puzzles are uncovered and a mystery is revealed. The player chases it down the rabbit hole until finally, all the pieces are together and a metaphorical portrait is revealed to match the real one found downstairs.
Talking about Gone Home in a blog post meant to serve as a review is a bit difficult. Saying next to anything about the game can be construed as a spoiler, and though it is quite a few years behind us now, the blog tries to cater towards new players. That said, the game is excellent for learning the basic skills of walking and moving the camera, which is part of the reason I recommended Life is Strange as well. Despite the spooky setting, the home is as empty as the premise suggests, and the game imposes no time limit. Walking around and hunting down clues is suggested, and there are many secrets to be found that way as well. It's a perfect playground for learning to use either a dual-stick controller or a keyboard and mouse setup. And the game is playable on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and all computer variants to boot.
The reason this game has stuck with me, and the reason I was so ready to replay it for a review, is in it's heart. The game tells a story of a family in the 90's that might as well have been a family right now. It barely references the timeline of the game except in the modality of communication, television, and cassette tapes. The lack of digital communication is important for the storytelling, as the game tells its story not with dialogue, but with notes, letters, and crumpled up pieces of paper found around the house. All of the items feel like they belong there, and all of it makes sense. Nowadays all of that information might be stored on one device, but the game's analog nature forces the player to explore a large, unfamiliar house and learn more and more about a family they will never meet in-game. We see familiarity in this slice of life, and then come back to our own. The game's total playtime is probably about four hours. It certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, but it'll be a long while before it leaves you.
Title: Gone Home
Price: $15
Skills Learned:
Dual-Input controls
Environment interaction
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