In Gone Home, you play as Kaitlin Greenbriar coming home from studying abroad in Europe but your parents aren’t waiting to pick you up at the airport. That was never a problem since you already had a ride, but when you get home, no one’s there. Hello? The first thing you get is a note on the front door from your sister Sam telling you not to go looking for her. At this point I needed reassuring that Gone Home is not a horror game and, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Let’s be real though, you’re playing the game because you’ve heard people talk about it and want to find out about it for yourself. Obviously it’s not about the action so it can only be about the story and lemme tell ya hwat: the story is beautiful. It’s moving and the narrative feels like a part of The Breakfast Club’s legacy. Strewn about the house are relics actual 90’s kids can feel nostalgic about that help tell the tale of the Greenbriars. It doesn’t give away much to say that you learn why no one’s home and what happened in the year you were gone, but I think I’ve said enough for now. The fun is in the adventure.
The game in its entirety can span 4-5 hours if you’re tearing the house apart looking for clues or 1-2 hours if you already know what you need to do. Technically the game has infinite playability if you like collecting a vast array of loose items and stacking them in various arrangements. The sheer attention to detail the developers put into making the house come alive made me believe its 1995 setting and told me things like the Greenbriars were not the tidiest of families. There are few things you cannot interact with and you’re not discouraged from picking up anything and closely examining it. Once I saw a plate cabinet in the kitchen, I had to resist running through the house and putting all the plates back. For an indie project where the objective is to purely explore the house, the mechanics work perfectly fine. However, the doubt was never in the gameplay but what actually defines a game.
In the endless argument between video games and art, Gone Home breaks through the common narrative and blurs the boundaries between the two. Some indie developers attempt to do so by creating interactive experiences than actual games, citing movement input as the qualifying characteristic. While Gone Home lacks conventional gameplay action, player input is nonetheless required to interact with the environment and completing real objectives is necessary in order to advance. The conflict is not between the protagonist and an antagonist, but between your desire for closure and your ability to find it. The usual mindless action is forgone in favor of spending a day in someone else’s shoes, albeit one that is quite unusual in its circumstances. Even so, Gone Home reminds us of our experiences that inspire the titles which make up the gaming landscape.
One puzzle particularly stuck out to me because the concept was so familiar but its execution was so foreign. At the outset, Katie doesn’t have a key to her family’s new house so she has to find the spare to get in. This simple exercise familiarizes the player with skills and habits required to progress as well as the mechanics to do so which highlights the absurdity. The disconnection between the austerity of a task and the breakdown of its component actions and thoughts is exposed, reminding us to take it easy on scientists for not having successfully developed sentient A.I. yet. Rooting around for the spare key is a situation most people are familiar with but this rendering of the idea made me rethink about all the motions I go through daily. If it takes that much “work” just to find a key, imagine how a game would be where the objective is to clean a messy room, but I digress.
Gone Home is an excellent game for soap opera junkies who aren’t interested in the usual Battlefields of Duty or Leagues of Melee. The sheer repetition of picking up everything in every room in the house can be a boring chore for some but the rewards are well worth it. Exposition is slow in the beginning but quickly ramps up, earning a 7/10 but for the tedium in gameplay and the paranoia it can cause in obsessive-compulsives. More importantly, it’s worth the catharsis and a different way to look at the world.
INDIE-vidual Gamers 