Gone Home Overview

Gone home is much more than the themes is shows you. You may come to find some surprises along the way. The game was developed by the studio who made the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2. It was not only better than Bioshock 2, but pushed what could be done by 1st person environmental storytelling. The game has you directly advance the plot, and you can know as much or as little about this family their dynamics through interacting with the home in question. At first you may mistake this for a horror story, as it tricks the player with tropes from the genre. But it is much more than that. It creates a feeling of home. The game makes a point for the mechanics as a storytelling device; it’s an effective interpretation of the show rather than tell iceberg rule. It allows the player to interpret the message for themselves, as that’s all this game is, messages. The interweaving stories develop and display a fractured family, and allows you to decide the meaning. Its just that non judgmental, making it a breath of fresh air, as it doesn’t hold your hand guiding you. There’s no explicit objective, no combat mechanics, just your own curiosity. While this may sound ‘artsy’ on paper, the immersion and interaction is enough to avoid the ‘anti-game’ debate that surrounds titles like Dear Esther. It rewards exploration, and sleuthing, rather than holding the W key while you receive a barrage of audio-visual cues. You have to work for your story, and as alluded to earlier, you can learn as much or as little as your interest wants. On the point of the story the writing is brilliant, the attention to detail, and even its choice of setting adds to its depth. The game takes place in 1995 for a few reasons. It justifies the use of letters, voice mail messages and notes without making the mediums feel culturally irrelevant. It means that the game feels nostalgic, the kids use notes to communicate in class rather than text each other. It also about the raw emotion that can be transferred through objects, rather than a character showing up with a healthy exposition dump, to show sappy memories of coming of age self discovery. It connects on a purely human level, and that’s very interesting considering it is such a mundane context. That’s not to say there aren’t any twists. There are and they will surprise you. Even the fact and way that they surprise you will surprise you. Things start to click together from references that you thought were irrelevant earlier in the game. The only downside is its price, especially in context of its length. It’s currently at retail for £14.99, which seems steep for a 2 hour game. But there’s is plenty of replayability to the game. The second time you play, there are plenty of ‘oooh’ moments at thing you did not understand before. It tells a story unlike any other in gaming in recent memory, doing so in a non judgmental and natural way that it separates it from anything else on the market right now.