One of the most critically acclaimed PC games of 2013 was Gone Home by The Fullbright Company. Gone Home is an indie PC game that tells the story of Kaitlin Greenbriar who comes home at 1 A.M. from a year long trip to Europe to find that her parents and sister are not there to greet her. What is there to greet her is a note from her sister Samantha apologizing for not being there and then asking her to not to go looking for where she is. So with that note the first mystery is set. The rest of the game is a journey through the lives of the Greenbriar family.
If you don’t like games with stories, then you will want to stay away from Gone Home. It is much more of an interactive book, than it is a game. It weaves it’s tale and creates characters through carefully placed notes, objects, journal entries and environmental clues. It’s told through a first person perspective as you play as Kaitlin carefully exploring every nook and cranny of the house. As long as you buy into the idea that “you” as Kaitlin, want to figure out what has happened to everyone, then you will have no trouble becoming immersed into the story. The story is set in the mid nineties, and there are a lot of little details and throwbacks that will be familiar to anyone who lived through that era, further immersing you into the world and story. And the story is a good story. It’s interesting, suspenseful and well told. But in retrospect, it isn’t that remarkable as far as stories go. What makes Gone Home special is how the story is told by using a game as it’s delivery mechanism.
Gone Home strips most conventional gameplay out of the game and focuses on pure story. This is not a puzzle game with some story wrapped around it. This is a story with some puzzle elements naturally occurring in the story. If Gone Home would have been a book or a movie, I’m not sure it would have made a splash with critics. But reading a book or watching a movie are passive activities. When you are playing a game, your are involved in the story. You become more invested in the characters. Your choices cause the story to become more personal. Gone Home is unique in how it creates an environment that is realistic, believable, and mysterious . It makes you want to search a little deeper, explore the next room. It really feeds off the curiosity in all of us. It gives the player control on where to go, what to look at, and how to proceed. It also dishes out pieces of the story in different ways allowing each players imagination to fill in the gaps. Sometimes you might find a letter with some pretty detailed information, other times you might find an invoice or a partially completed list that makes you wonder what the purpose was, and sometimes you just find a picture to help give your imagination more concrete detail. Also, like any good story, there are multiple threads happening at the same time so this will constantly be changing your focus and making your mind try to piece it all together.
Graphically the game won’t be pushing your graphics card to the limits. In fact your graphics card might not even know the game is running and that’s ok. Indie games don’t have the budget to worry about complex shaders, high
polygon counts or using tessellation. And this game looks just fine without all of that. The game makes good use of lighting as you will want to turn on lights and lamps to be able to read the notes and items you find. And there is also a good use of style that really brings out the mid nineties time frame, whether it’s the striped couches, or the SNES games found lying around the bedroom. The graphics do their job, and never take away from the game or make the game harder than it should be.
Speaking of the game being hard…it’s not. There is very little challenge to the game. But again, that is because this is a story wrapped with a few gameplay elements rather than puzzles designed to challenge you with story elements put on top. You might get stuck for a few minutes, trying to find a way to open something but for the most part the answer isn’t too far away, and it’s usually pretty obvious when you find it. Not everything needs solved or found either. The more you find, the more you will understand the details of the story. The game also isn’t that long. It probably falls between two and six hours depending on how thoroughly you like to search through things.
Final Verdict
Gone Home is an amazing accomplishment of story telling and character creation in games. I even struggle to consider it a game when it uses more of the creative side of the brain rather than the twitch or logic sides. But it is still a lot of fun in just exploring, experiencing and figuring out the story. For those willing to give up some of the typical gameplay mechanics for an immersive and interesting story, I would heartedly recommend Gone Home.
