Review: Gone Home

Admittedly, Gone Home, the newest game from the Fullbright Company, stayed off my radar until a few persistent friends insisted that I try it out. I finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago, not really knowing to expect and only having the vaguest of ideas of what it was about. From what I had read, it was originally a mod of the popular indie horror game Amnesia. So I started it up, curious but cautious.

It’s strange…by all accounts, Gone Home shouldn’t be that interesting. There’s no action or creatures to bludgeon (which doesn’t really bother me, the adventure game addict). There are very few puzzles and the ones that are present are not exactly challenging. In fact, the only real thing you do in Gone Home is explore a large, spooky house. That’s it. And yet this, in my and several of my friends’ opinions, has to be one of the best games of the year.

The year is 1995 and you are Katie, a twenty year old college student who has returned home after an excursion to Europe, only to discover that your entire family is missing from the house. The only hint you have is a message from your sister Sam, who tells you that she can’t explain and not to go digging too deep. Which of course is gaming code for “tear the house apart looking for answers”.

Still cleaner than my room.

There is so much that Gone Home just absolutely nails. The atmosphere right from the beginning is fantastically creepy and uncomfortable and the game does a great job keeping you in the dark as to what exactly happened to its inhabitants. Thunder and lightning clashes as you traverse, lights flicker, empty hallways seem to beckon ominously to you. I was on edge the entire time I was exploring the house (which, by the way, is amazing. Seriously, it’s my dream house). Was anyone still home? Were they alright? Was there a ghost?

This was also a very nostalgic game for me as well. It takes place in 1995, at which point I was twelve, and so it was extremely satisfying to see all of the details in place. There were SNES cartridges lying around; there were cassette tapes and an old school answering machine; there was even a TV Guide with the X-files circled in red. It took all of my will power not to squee at my computer screen every time I saw another reminder of my childhood.

Including couch forts! Except…I never really grew out of those…

As for gameplay, it’s fairly straightforward. As I said before, this began as a mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and nowhere is that more apparent than in the gameplay.  You can pick up almost every object in the house.  Most turn out to be unimportant, but rather than put them back you have the option to hurl it across the room instead (which I did… often and with enthusiasm). It should be important to note though that at points the controls felt a little cumbersome but that matters little in a game where you have all the time in the world.

I may or may not have spent way too much time trying to fit a coke bottle into a microwave.

The graphics may not be state of the art, but they are bright and crisp and the attention to detail is extremely enjoyable. It’s good to note the effective sound design as well.  The thunder and lightning is an ever constant presence and does well to keep the tension high. It makes the occasional swell of incidental music all the more effective, punctuating key emotional points such as when you discover what your sister has been up to while you were gone.

Hint: a lot of it involves hideouts.

But what makes Gone Home really stand out, what keeps you exploring that house despite the creepiness and the forboding, is its story and how it’s laid out. It’s pretty impressive just how engrossed I was considering one of the only way to see the story progress was through the various documents you find through the house: school reports, rejection letters from editors, letters from friends, notes that had been passed around in school.

The other way the story progresses is through the recordings you uncover from Sam, your sister. These start playing automatically when interacting with certain trigger objects and while I had to suspend my disbelief a little at hearing a disembodied voice suddenly start reciting her diary entries, the fantastic voice performance and great writing made it very easy to overlook.

To say anything more would reveal too much of the story, and it’s a pretty fantastic story. It’s weird because I think about other releases this year such as Beyond Two Souls.  This game is also story heavy and you meet tons of characters throughout.  And yet I felt more attached to this family I’d never physically met than I did to the perfectly rendered 3D characters in a fully funded Triple A title.

This would normally be the point where I tell you that if you want action or challenging puzzles, you might want to steer clear of Gone Home. But you know what? Play this game. Try it out. It clocks in at just over three hours of gameplay but the experience of it was one I won’t forget for a while and it’s a great example of what games can do to tell an effective story.