Gone Home

I know some people might want to chew my head off, but the game was really underwhelming. As far as atmospheric adventure games go, this one doesn't have much to look at, not much scenery to absorb, but it has a bunch of notes everywhere. The heart and soul of atmospheric adventure games is the adventuring, the visuals, and the emotion. The game lacks the first two, but has emotion, and a nice pro-LGBT narrative about a lesbian relationship. I felt it could've been executed a bit better, or could have been presented in a way that better grabbed my attention as a player. But, if you were compelled by the story of the game, great. Hopefully the developer chooses to create a more hearty adventure experience next, or perhaps something akin to Life is Strange.

Gone Home is a first person exploration game, with an emphasis on narration.

The majority of the narrative elements are focused on Sam, whose letters-in-diary entries you read as you find various items in the house. The story that unfolds is sweet and heartfelt, and while albeit cliched, tastefully delivered through excellent voice acting and strong world immersion.

The majority of the gameplay however, rummaging though the house to find "narrative devices", does not work well, and is incongruent with the both with the mood and setting of the plot. There is no thematic justification for scourging though the house for these items, asides from that the player receives a narration via deus ex narrator, making the game feel quite far-fetched. There are also various distracting plotlines of/from the family which should have been streamlined in favour for Sam's story: more scattered items from her would have been more interesting than of other family members, though the house setting may be more difficult to consider. But in its current form, a decent amount of playtime is tediously spent looking through unimportant scenery, hoping to find a plot trigger.

I do recommend Gone Home, but patience with it is required due to slow gameplay that can even be tedious often. In return, Gone Home offers an earnest story with fleshed out characters, and a pretty ending with a solemn dignity.

Gone Home é muito hábil em conduzir o jogador por sua história principal ao mesmo tempo em que dá um pano de fundo para cada um dos personagens secundários: a mãe, Janice; o pai, Terrence; e o tio-avô, Oscar Masan. A forma como o jogo dispõe todas essas narrativas e permite a descoberta livre provoca uma sensação muito prazerosa ao “quebrar” esses enigmas familiares. O design da casa também é super bem pensado, torna a exploração mais interessante lá pela metade do jogo.

A história principal, da irmã Sam, é muito emocionante e de fácil identificação, ainda que o desfecho seja açucarado demais pro meu gosto e utilize de elementos um tanto batidos.

Especialmente considerando o ano de lançamento, é um marco importante no desenvolvimento de narrativas pró-LGBT em jogos e também uma parte fundamental da explosão dos games independentes no começo da década de 2010.

While I don't think Gone Home is a great game, it is probably the best walking simulator ever made. The house the game takes place in is intelligently designed to not only provide environmental insights into the invisible characters but to also subtly guide the player from one story beat to the next, although it's refreshing that some freedom exists in deciding what order the player can unearth certain plot threads.

The story and characters themselves are not profound but are about on par with what you'd find in an above-average indie dramedy film, and the voice acting is very good. You can tell that although the game was worked on by a small team the creators were very smart and passionate about how they built this game. Despite a lack of hand-holding the game did engross me in its story, and the house by the end started to feel like a living, breathing thing.

Story driven walking simulators are of course not everyone's cup of tea (not mine anyway), but there's no denying that Gone Home represents the peak of this genre.

After years of putting this game off I finally got around to it and I feel kind of mixed about it. What this game does well, it does really well. Mainly the interactive storytelling in which items around the room build our characters stories as we learn about them, and piecing together different notes to learn about each character. While the focus is obviously on Sam and her partner, I still felt what I learned about her parents to be interesting. While the game starts off on a horrorish tone, it quickly turns into something gentler. I honestly felt cozy and intrigued exploring the house.

All the plotlines going on are interesting and it's fun to see the characters evolve, but here lies the games greatest flaw, it's linearity. Despite the open nature of the house, 99% of plot developments you will discover in a set order unless you miss a note somehow. It is immersion breaking that you are led on a perfect string of paths as you learn about what is going on. While this is to keep the player intrigued, some paths in where the player could learn different things at different times could have been useful, as would some puzzle solving.

I don't think the clichés are at fault here. High school romance is full of these clichés in the first place because that's all we really knew when we were high schoolers. So most of the time they didn't bug me. The ending however did. Lonnie never had any doubt before this and them going off and driving is the stupidest thing I'm supposed to empathize with. Love is a powerful emotion which leads us to do stupid things but don't expect me to care for it just because it is love. That being said I was fairly intrigued most of the way so maybe this story will resonate with you more.

Overall I enjoyed my time with this game but I'm genuinely shocked anyone could call it a masterpiece. I appreciate a lot of the unique things it does but the linearity is immersion breaking in a case like this (everything just happens to tell you it in perfect order), and while the story is solid, it really doesn't feel like anything special.

Replayed this game the other day to familiarise myself with the way a game is able to convey a strong sense of narrative progression and atmosphere in a game where you practically do nothing, and to that extent, I've come to the conclusion that this game does what it sets out to do very nicely. The game's entirely set within the confines of an empty house, with the initial focus strongly leaning into the feelings of paranoia one can experience whilst being completely alone in the dark. Nothing explicitly says that there's any danger to be found here, but you can feel it deep down, with each lightning strike from the outside being genuinely creepy in a way that makes the slow, methodical exploration of all corners of the house feel like you're going to be attacked at any moment. This atmosphere elevates the mysterious nature of the house as well as you explore and discover more about the other characters and their stranger traits.

I find the way this spooky atmosphere elegantly shifts towards having a greater sense of wonder and curiosity as you piece together more of a touching, albeit kinda cliche love story through the recordings of another character to be nicely executed as well. Nowhere does it feel like there's an explicit paradigm shift in the approach to storytelling the game takes, but it nonetheless still feels as if the more unsettling aspects of the game fade away for reasons besides the player just getting used to what the game shows you. The design of the house itself is also excellent, feeling truly lived in and interesting to get to know, which is definitely an important to get right in a game where the entire bulk of the game is dedicated to it. There's also a really nice sense of progression to everything here that feels natural within the context of the narrative, never really feeling as if somethings locked just because the game required it to be to work.

While this definitely shows its age as one of the earliest incarnations of the walking simulator genre in its simplicity and brevity, I still like a lot about this. Despite being very predictable and cliche in a lot of regards, Gone Home still feels like there was a lot of love and care put into the game, and I respect it a lot for that, not to mention that the atmosphere is top notch throughout, along with the LGBT representation this has being quite a nice aspect of it as well. Definitely a game I'd feel a bit cheated about if I had paid full price for, but on sale this game's definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of short narrative experiences.