Gone Home is a visual exploration game, with a passive narrative that pulls the player in through its specific detail and creative storytelling, the first release from the Fullbright Company. Players get the first person perspective of Katie, who has returned home from a year spent backpacking through Europe to find her family missing. To find the truth behind her family’s disappearance, Katie ventures into a strange mansion, recently inherited by her family while she was away. While Katie is the playable character in Gone Home, she is not really the protagonist. That role is filled by Katie’s younger sister Sam, who moves the narrative forward through her audio diaries. Explorable world, retrospective narrative, and an ambiguous plot, it is easy for Gone Home to come off sounding like its full of cliches, but lucky for players, Gone Home creates an experience that feels completely unique, thanks to its sure handed subtlety.
There is something ominous about Gone Home, though the game shows its cards to the player rather early on, proving it is going for substance over spectacle, there is an air that hangs about the abandoned home which feels specific and unique to the game. Setting, time, and place mean so much to Gone Home that it is indispensable, but executed so well that it might be easy to miss. The house that you are in feels old thanks to the push button light switches, the era of the setting is obvious with boomboxes and mix tapes, the location is essential given character employment and interests. These details are so easily grazed over in other games that the locations are left–arguably intentionally–feeling nondescript and general. However Gone Home isn’t simply trying to recreate 1990’s rural Oregon, it is using the setting to infuse the game with esthetic and personality.
Not only is Gone Home’s setting strikingly specific in spirit and execution, it is also gorgeous. First person independent games have a tendency to look dated and blocky, but Gone Home looks comparable to visual mammoth titles like Bioshock Infinite. When worlds are gorgeously designed and subtly influenced, it often leads to developers creating a world that is stoic and impossible to interact with. Again, Gone Home has put in the work to stand out and players can interact with almost everything, from scattered dishes and garbage to family heirlooms. Gone Home is the most immersive games that I have played so far this year, drawing you into its gorgeously specific world.
This immersion is what tells half of the story in Gone Home. While audio diaries do the heavy lifting, telling the progressive narrative of Sam, so much of the narrative is embedded in handwritten letters, newspaper articles, and other discarded clues. This presents a bit of a problem for Gone Home as its clues leave the player feeling like they are more of an archeologist than an adventurer, as they are shoved into a passive role, unable to effect the story or participate in the journey. It is a forgivable flaw due to Gone Home’s strong pacing. The clues are dispersed far enough apart that it will have you constantly gnawing back and forth on the current state of your family. What Gone Home does best with its narration is create tension and suspense. So often games can’t help themselves from overindulging in their plot points or showing off their witty writing, but Gone Home refrains from smothering you with style and simply allows itself to draw you in naturally.
It is this natural chemistry that makes Gone Home stand out. Exploring the house makes sense, the intimacy of family allows the game an organic voyeuristic quality, like peeking around in a parents room when they are not at home. This familiarity is countered by the uneasiness of being in a strange house. The sound design on Gone Home is second to none, allowing the creaks and groans of an unfamiliar mansion to radiate in your heart, lending more credence to the feeling that something might not be quite right.
Gone Home is a streamlined and short experience. Every room offers plenty of items to investigate, and there are secrets littered throughout the house that will keep you on your toes, but the game is at most a 3 hour-ish affair. Part of this is due to the razor sharp focus of Fullbright, creating a product that is tight, specific, and cleaned up, rather than bloated and filled with mediocrity. That is not to say there aren’t a few bugs in Gone Home, while I found nothing game breaking, people who are looking to mess with the physics will find the game’s framework is somewhat breakable. The three hour playthrough doesn’t feel like a slight, the story has plenty of time to hit all the right notes, but it is something to keep mind.
Given the lack of combat, the slow burn of the narrative, and the short playtime, people might be quick to right off Gone Home as a niche title for indie fanatics. To do so would be to deprive oneself of the most atmospheric game this year. Gone Home proves how subtlety can triumph, how stories about family and self-discovery can be as interesting as zombies and aliens. To appreciate Gone Home is to appreciate the little things. The game uses its focus, its attention to details, to sidestep the trap of the cliched and dull. It uses the sum of its part, its art, its writing, its acting, its gameplay, to paint a very intentional picture of a girl coming to terms with womanhood and the struggle we all confront as we grow up. Emotionally poignant in a way that so many video games lack, the game pulls at your heartstrings in a way that feels completely unique. You will think you have Gone Home pegged, think that you know where it is going, but it has tricks up its sleeve, and they are really good.
Gone Home feels like the evolution of games like Dear Esther, taking that simple blend of exploration and narrative, then giving it a little more of a foundation. The sense of discovery, the wash of immersion, and a pull of honesty is what makes Gone Home so wonderful. Like the best games, it taps into something visceral with us, something universal. Gone Home is a must play, whether you want to grab it now or wait for a sale to snatch it on the cheap, Gone Home is a game that transcends genre and niche to become something more.
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