This review contains spoilers
The first project of the small American studio Fullbright, Gone Home is a small purely story game (about a girl returning from a trip to Europe, exploring an unexpectedly empty parental home), declaring itself, if not as a mystical detective story, then at least something mysterious and ready to surprise. In fact, this really happens, albeit for completely different reasons.
The first thing that is immediately important to understand is the year the game was released, 2013. The era of the birth of indie horror (but already after the success of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender: The Eight Pages), the absence of a “walking simulator” as a genre and the general attitude towards the video game industry as just entertaining.
This is where the origins of flirting with genres in Gone Home come from - initially the game may seem like an ideal premise for a mystical horror about a strange house, and this slight feeling of tension, although it dissipates quite quickly, partly remains until the very end (sometimes the developers themselves can “play jokes” on this theme - a bath "in the blood" or secret dark passages are excellent examples). However, in reality, everything turns out completely differently - we are presented with a straightforward and somewhat naive love story. This may upset some, but fortunately the overall plot turns out to be more enjoyable than what could have happened with a more location-appropriate genre.
Perhaps the best feature of Gone Home is the revelation of the story through the environment, the gradual solving of a puzzle with many parts. The game extremely encourages attentiveness; by reading everything and looking around every corner, you can put together a clear and complete picture of the (not the happiest) family of the main character. In addition to the main story (about the main character’s sister), there are a couple of additional ones that expand and can even scare you part-time (I'm talking about the father’s story (which I didn’t reveal during the first playthrough and successfully spoiled its outcome for myself on the game’s Wikipedia page, damn it!)). Despite the linearity and the existence of the entire house only for the sake of the main plot, the intimate location brings surprises and does not get boring in a couple of hours. A pleasant bonus is a bunch of references to pop culture (according to the plot of the game, it is 1995) - musical groups, films and TV series, writers and actors of that time are literally in every room here, creating the atmosphere of a haven for a rather ordinary (at first glance) American middle class family. Well, the interface, sound, graphics - all this is at an acceptable level, hardly any of this should stand out more strongly in such a genre.
What was missing was more interactions with objects, less obvious papers and notes on every corner, and the most important thing - the thoughts of the heroine herself. Katie literally gives out her memories just a couple of times throughout the game and never her opinion. It would be interesting to see the story not only through the lens of an observer of the family, but also as one of its members. This, unfortunately, does not happen (and it was the sister’s reaction to the actions of another sister that could become an element that would attract even more to the story and add heterogeneity to it).
And of course, in every sense this is an important game. Gameplay-wise, it was Gone Home (among the others) that led to the emergence of the term “walking simulator” and essentially opened the way for this genre, perfectly deceiving people who were expecting another indie horror. And plot-wise, everything is even more obvious here.
It is quite possible that this is the first project in the industry that so openly and directly spoke about the topic of same-sex love, the acceptance of this by the person himself and his environment. The love story of Sam and Lonnie is very simple and has a banal good ending, but at the same time it is very bold and completely new to the gaming industry of that time. The release of Gone Home reignited the debate over the identification of video games as an art form and raised a lot of discontent over the form of storytelling, lack of gameplay and LGBT themes. Is this such a controversial and incendiary game? Of course not. Behind the facade of controversy and avant-gardeism lies a sweet little love story of a dreamer from an unhappy family that does not understand the choice of her heart.
Gone Home is a project small in scale and large in influence, the external story of which almost seems to overshadow the internal one. However, if you concentrate on the game itself, you can quickly understand that behind all this there is only a small, sad, but certainly happy ending story for one pleasant evening. If this is what you are looking for, you should definitely look at what happened to the Greenbriar family on June 7, 1995, at 1:15 a.m., and how Pulp Fiction, the JFK assassination, and the Christmas goose are connected to it.
The first thing that is immediately important to understand is the year the game was released, 2013. The era of the birth of indie horror (but already after the success of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender: The Eight Pages), the absence of a “walking simulator” as a genre and the general attitude towards the video game industry as just entertaining.
This is where the origins of flirting with genres in Gone Home come from - initially the game may seem like an ideal premise for a mystical horror about a strange house, and this slight feeling of tension, although it dissipates quite quickly, partly remains until the very end (sometimes the developers themselves can “play jokes” on this theme - a bath "in the blood" or secret dark passages are excellent examples). However, in reality, everything turns out completely differently - we are presented with a straightforward and somewhat naive love story. This may upset some, but fortunately the overall plot turns out to be more enjoyable than what could have happened with a more location-appropriate genre.
Perhaps the best feature of Gone Home is the revelation of the story through the environment, the gradual solving of a puzzle with many parts. The game extremely encourages attentiveness; by reading everything and looking around every corner, you can put together a clear and complete picture of the (not the happiest) family of the main character. In addition to the main story (about the main character’s sister), there are a couple of additional ones that expand and can even scare you part-time (I'm talking about the father’s story (which I didn’t reveal during the first playthrough and successfully spoiled its outcome for myself on the game’s Wikipedia page, damn it!)). Despite the linearity and the existence of the entire house only for the sake of the main plot, the intimate location brings surprises and does not get boring in a couple of hours. A pleasant bonus is a bunch of references to pop culture (according to the plot of the game, it is 1995) - musical groups, films and TV series, writers and actors of that time are literally in every room here, creating the atmosphere of a haven for a rather ordinary (at first glance) American middle class family. Well, the interface, sound, graphics - all this is at an acceptable level, hardly any of this should stand out more strongly in such a genre.
What was missing was more interactions with objects, less obvious papers and notes on every corner, and the most important thing - the thoughts of the heroine herself. Katie literally gives out her memories just a couple of times throughout the game and never her opinion. It would be interesting to see the story not only through the lens of an observer of the family, but also as one of its members. This, unfortunately, does not happen (and it was the sister’s reaction to the actions of another sister that could become an element that would attract even more to the story and add heterogeneity to it).
And of course, in every sense this is an important game. Gameplay-wise, it was Gone Home (among the others) that led to the emergence of the term “walking simulator” and essentially opened the way for this genre, perfectly deceiving people who were expecting another indie horror. And plot-wise, everything is even more obvious here.
It is quite possible that this is the first project in the industry that so openly and directly spoke about the topic of same-sex love, the acceptance of this by the person himself and his environment. The love story of Sam and Lonnie is very simple and has a banal good ending, but at the same time it is very bold and completely new to the gaming industry of that time. The release of Gone Home reignited the debate over the identification of video games as an art form and raised a lot of discontent over the form of storytelling, lack of gameplay and LGBT themes. Is this such a controversial and incendiary game? Of course not. Behind the facade of controversy and avant-gardeism lies a sweet little love story of a dreamer from an unhappy family that does not understand the choice of her heart.
Gone Home is a project small in scale and large in influence, the external story of which almost seems to overshadow the internal one. However, if you concentrate on the game itself, you can quickly understand that behind all this there is only a small, sad, but certainly happy ending story for one pleasant evening. If this is what you are looking for, you should definitely look at what happened to the Greenbriar family on June 7, 1995, at 1:15 a.m., and how Pulp Fiction, the JFK assassination, and the Christmas goose are connected to it.