No Payne, No Game

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...

Over the past few years since the popularization of licensed game productions by Telltale Games, such as The Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, choice-based episodic series have become more and more popular. One of the other companies leading the charge has been DONTNOD Entertainment, creator of the award-winning video game from 2015, Life is Strange . Life is Strange won its awards for its raw emotional appeal and brilliant soundtrack at a time when emotional experiences were lacking in games. It's appeal was largely in its story of struggling youth in a private arts school in a lonely Oregon backwater. Many celebrated various story beats which hinted at a deeper relationship between two young women, while others were upset that the game's ending forced their hand in a tough decision. Life is Strange is a narrative experience that did what it set out to do and create a true-to-heart experience for its players, and while its  writing got its fair share of heat , the game was ...