Note: Gone Home is cheap and will only take about two hours to complete. If you have any interest in interactive fiction go play it before you read on.
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| Lived-in environments define Gone Home |
Her family has moved house while she was away and the game begins when she (and the player) arrives on an unfamiliar, rainswept doorstep. Both parents are missing and a note from her younger sister hints at an underlying issue best not discovered. But that discovery isn't just worth making – it will very likely be remembered as one of the most profound in gaming history.
Gone Home invites players to unravel its secrets by creating spaces that demand investigation in a natural way. A locked front door is the first thing you encounter. That forces you to rummage through presses to find the spare key. You know it has to be there because every family has a spare.
READ MORE:
- Blogger Austin Walker on the dark under-current of abuse in the game.
- What is ludonarrative harmony and what's it got to do with Gone Home?
- A sycophantic/interesting interview with Steve Gaynor from Brainy Gamer.
- Previously on Hackett Out: thoughts on Minerva's Den.
- Blogger Austin Walker on the dark under-current of abuse in the game.
- What is ludonarrative harmony and what's it got to do with Gone Home?
- A sycophantic/interesting interview with Steve Gaynor from Brainy Gamer.
- Previously on Hackett Out: thoughts on Minerva's Den.
The dark hallway you step into forces another basic human action – hunting in the dark for a lightswitch. Imagine a game without mechanical complexity or combat. Imagine one without an outlandish setting or simple two-dimensional characters. Imagine a game the sole purpose of which is to experience its world. It's a voyeuristic tour through a family’s secrets.
This is an abandoned house with a history – with a narrative designed to draw you in. But more importantly it's a home, the sort of lived-in space so long missing from video games.
Gone Home presents its story as a series of vignettes. Rooms - spaces both private and shared - contain artifacts - both personal and public - that hold the essence of the people who live there.
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| What happened in the basement of Arbour Hill? |
A bedroom is naturally a personal space, but the shared pizza box-strewn tv room is used by both father and daughter and tells us something about their relationship.
The game presents those stories with the brutal honesty of a Richard Linklater film. The central love-story unfolds believably. The protagonists feel like human beings, in the same way that Jessie and Celine in Linklater's Before Sunrise feel like real people. Both game and film are set in 1995 and Gone Home's mood evokes the time.
The year brings with it the music, the pop-culture, the clothes and the technology of the time. VHS tapes with hand-written labels, tape recorders, and magazines celebrating Kurt Cobain a year after his death. It's a startlingly real-world setting in a medium usually littered with sci-fi and fantasy trappings.
Gone Home was made by a four-person team at the Fullbright Company. The lead designer is Steve Gaynor - the man behind Minerva’s Den (which I wrote about last year). It’s a personal tale, grounded in the real world. The experiences of the team behind it can’t help but seep into the game.
There are parallel stories; a man wrestling with inadequate coping mechanisms he's used to deal with the abuse he suffered as a child; a woman who's fantasies about a man she barely knows threaten her marriage, and a teenager who is struggling with her sexuality. But it's the way these stories interact - with each person dealing with their own problems while struggling to deal with each other - that really elevate the game.
The game presents those stories with the brutal honesty of a Richard Linklater film. The central love-story unfolds believably. The protagonists feel like human beings, in the same way that Jessie and Celine in Linklater's Before Sunrise feel like real people. Both game and film are set in 1995 and Gone Home's mood evokes the time.
The year brings with it the music, the pop-culture, the clothes and the technology of the time. VHS tapes with hand-written labels, tape recorders, and magazines celebrating Kurt Cobain a year after his death. It's a startlingly real-world setting in a medium usually littered with sci-fi and fantasy trappings.
Gone Home was made by a four-person team at the Fullbright Company. The lead designer is Steve Gaynor - the man behind Minerva’s Den (which I wrote about last year). It’s a personal tale, grounded in the real world. The experiences of the team behind it can’t help but seep into the game.
There are parallel stories; a man wrestling with inadequate coping mechanisms he's used to deal with the abuse he suffered as a child; a woman who's fantasies about a man she barely knows threaten her marriage, and a teenager who is struggling with her sexuality. But it's the way these stories interact - with each person dealing with their own problems while struggling to deal with each other - that really elevate the game.
And all this told through only the items and inferences you pick up along the way.
Gone Home's greatest achievement is its positivity. The game’s authors haven’t flinched from addressing serious human problems. But they have avoided the melodrama of so many 'serious' video games in favour of the mundane drama of day to day life.
Gone Home doesn't pull its punches. But it takes each story to a fulfilling conclusion in a way that offers catharsis to you the player at the same time as it offer resolution to the character you play.
The game establishes some boundaries. It wrests control from the player, for example, when the character you play decides not to read a particularly personal note. For the most part Gone Home allows the player to make their own decisions. I, for example, carefully replaced the stack of books that hide a stash of porn magazines in one room. I left the room the way I'd found it. I was so embedded in the world that I felt obliged to offer the same courtesy in-game that I would in the real world.
It uses pathetic falicy to create a clostrophobic atmosphere that will keep you waiting for jump scares. And it engenders a feeling of dred that grows as you progress. The peak and trough of tension and release that Gone Home achieves is expertly handled.
The game establishes some boundaries. It wrests control from the player, for example, when the character you play decides not to read a particularly personal note. For the most part Gone Home allows the player to make their own decisions. I, for example, carefully replaced the stack of books that hide a stash of porn magazines in one room. I left the room the way I'd found it. I was so embedded in the world that I felt obliged to offer the same courtesy in-game that I would in the real world.
Gone Home's greatest achievement is its positivity. The game’s authors haven’t flinched from addressing serious human problems. But they have avoided the melodrama of so many 'serious' video games in favour of the mundane drama of day to day life.
It celebrates the little things that make us who we are. It's a far cry from the power fantasy fulfillment that most games offer, and it's better for it.
