So I Just Played: Gone Home

Gone Home is an interesting game that came out a bit later in 2013 and I managed to get my hands on over the holiday break. That timing happened to coincide with quite a few gaming sites releasing their game of the year awards and lists. Just before starting the game myself I noticed that it was getting very highly reviewed, often cracking the top 5 in game of the year discussions and even taking Game of the Year from Polygon and Best PC Game from the VGX awards, among others. Sure, there was some negative buzz about the game as well because of the lack of action and the rather short duration for the price. That didn’t deter me, because I’m always down for a great story and I picked up Gone Home for only about 5 bucks. I was pretty excited.

The reports I heard were definitely correct. The game is relatively short, but that’s not a problem at all. I was really invested in my first hour or so of gameplay. I was fully immersed in the story, but more so into the atmosphere. The game had this tense edge the whole way through that made it feel a teeny tiny bit like a horror/thriller game. It was just enough to have you slightly on edge as you were walking around the house, but not enough to make you uncomfortable. Gone Home was a fantastically immersive and captivating experience…….at first.

Let’s talk about the good first. Gone Home is dripping with 90′s nostalgia. That is not always a good thing. Games have been feasting on our 90′s nostalgia for years now by cramming remakes and 16-bit graphics down our throats non stop. I could rant about how what most people call 8-bit graphics is almost always actually 16-bit, but that’s for another time. Gone Home doesn’t offer you nostalgia like that, it offers you a ton of referential and experiential nostalgia. This nostalgia is of the kind that really could only have been experienced first hand, and it’s in all the little details. For example, that Chun-Li moves note is totally accurate. I knew that immediately when looking at it, because I had a similar note sitting in the cabinet near my TV.

Details like that are all over the house, and make it incredibly rewarding to scour the entire house for every detail possible. I love the racks and racks of VHS tapes messily labelled with different TV show recordings. Care and attention to those details is what separates Gone Home in that regard. You find a couple Zines kicking around the house because of course this 90′s punk girl wrote a Zine. You find cassettes floating around from her friend’s band as well. The music is (in my opinion) absolute trash, but it’s exactly the right kind of trash that some random Zine-writing punk teen might have been into at that time. It’s the little things.

All these little details piece together to tell a story that starts out really strong and, I’m really sad to say, terribly disappointed me. I’m the type to get really sucked into a story, and the latter bit of Gone Home’s story turned me off so badly that I really do look back at my entire experience with the game kind of negatively. That’s such a shame, because I had such a great time with certain parts. A lot of the discussion of Gone Home surrounds the homosexual themes. They handled that fine. I don’t think it’s a watershed moment of enlightenment for the gaming industry, it’s more just that they addressed it without having to overtly say “HEY LOOK EVERYBODY. THERE’S A GAY CHARACTER IN OUR STORY!”. It’s refreshing to see the portrayal of homosexual themes done in a mature and subdued way, and that’s not the part of the story that bothered me.

The part that bothered me was the final bits of the story, and without giving away too much, I’ll explain why. The entire story surrounds this tense mysterious tone. Your character arrives home after a long time away and finds her house vacant and, in many cases, in disarray. During several points in the story you find mysterious hidden passageways in the house and allusions towards a suggested supernatural presence in the house. Everything suggests something bad might have happened here, and that’s what generates all the tension. Not only does the final chapter of the story fail to live up to the set up, it actually betrays it.

You find very personal notes strewn all over the house, which some people found immersion breaking, but I let it slide. It is a video game, and strewn notes are the go-to method for story exposition. What I can’t let slide is when the story is nearing the climax you find a note directed to you that says “Don’t go into the attic!”. Naturally, you head right up to the attic and up there you find……a note for you from the same person, in the attic, where they told you not to go. I just felt like the whole game was building up to a moment that never came. It’s like when a story kills off a character, only to find some crazy loophole to bring them back later. The emotion they illicit from you in the death scene is cheapened by the fact that they bring that character back to life. To me it always gives me the impression the writers couldn’t find real ways to reach you emotionally, so they cheated.

The false death analogy does not apply specifically to Gone Home, but the ending to this game left me with a very similar feeling, which is an absolute shame, because I was really enjoying my time up until that point. Unfortunately, my lasting memory of it is the sour taste it left in my mouth.