Gone Home

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Gone Home

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Gone Home is an interesting but flawed adventure game. The atmosphere is very well built and its main theme is certainly important, but the game stumbles with its artificial narrative, which constantly distracts the player instead of raising relevant questions about the subject matter.

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Gone Home is an interesting narrative experiment. The developers set out to tell a story only through elements of the environment, guiding the exploration but at the same time giving players some control over the narrative. However, they also rely on artificial elements to keep the story engaging, which ultimately contradicts their primary purpose.

Players will be Kaitlin Greenbriar, a young woman who has just returned from a long trip through Europe, on a rainy night in 1955, to come upon her house empty. A note from her younger sister, Sam, nailed to the door, apologizes and advises her not to look for her. The goal is to find out what happened to every member of the Greenbriar family while trying to unravel the mystery behind the note. Players will explore the house and search each drawer, desk, and closet for answers.

The gameplay is simple. Players will pick up an object from the house and examine it thoroughly. If it is a letter, they can read what is written; if it’s a box of cookies, they’ll be able to see the nutritional chart. The level of detail when it comes to the environment is staggering: while in some games some irrelevant information – such as articles in newspapers and magazines – appear blurred, in Gone Home everything is readable, even if not relevant.

Since Kaitlin’s family moved while she was traveling, the house is alien to her. This contextualizes the players’ disorientation: if they have no idea where the kitchen is, it is because Kaitlin doesn’t know either. There is, however, a certain video-gamey design permeating the place, with rooms having their access blocked by locks, for example. Despite this, and some occasional eccentricities – there is not a single mirror in the house – the art direction is effective not only in making the house believable but in reflecting the personality of its inhabitants. It is easy to understand the obsessive nature of Kaitlin’s father as you see his office full of clippings about John F. Kennedy and discarded drafts, or notice the revolt and adventurous spirit of Sam by the pirate poster over her bed and the intense colors that decorate her room. The game is also marked by the nostalgia of the time: there are disks and posters of bands of the 90s scattered around the rooms, next to X-Files episodes recorded in cassettes, and Super Nintendo cartridges.

Exploration is essential to understanding the characters. Several notes are hidden in drawers or stored in vaults. But unlike what happens in some games – like Bioshock Infinite – this information is not just pure exposition, often suggesting things about the personality of the characters. The developers outline the characters’ primary characteristics, but let the player’s interpretation complete them, preventing them from becoming a passive spectator.

Moreover, since the player can move freely around the house – with the exception of a few locked rooms – the order in which they discover information on the Greenbriar family is, to some extent, up to them – which gives them some control over how the story of Gone Home is told.

By examining certain objects, for example, some audios of Sam talking to Kaitlin are unlocked. Sam is Gone Home‘s true protagonist. Her sensitive and touching story deals with homosexuality, and the family problems that may arise from it, like the disappointment in seeing that her parents’ reaction to discovering her secret was not one of fury but of denial: “It’s a phase!

However, since the game mostly uses the environment to tell its story it is jarring to come across Sam’s voice emerging from nothing after the inspection of a random object. The game tries to justify this structure by showing letters written to Kaitlin with the same words, but it doesn’t stop this narrative structure from feeling artificial.

Gone Home’s biggest flaw, however, lies in another aspect of its narrative, which is perfectly represented by the moment the player finds bloodstains in a bathtub and a pot of red dye at its side: the narrative is completely built with Red Herrings. Red Herrings are false clues positioned in the narrative to divert the attention of the player/reader/viewer from the points that really matter. In Gone Home, there is an insistence on making the players believe that something supernatural is taking place in the house.

The atmosphere of the game is so well built that it reinforces this supernatural aspect. The only sound accompanying the players through the rooms is that of the storm rumbling outside, with the occasional thunder causing spikes of tension. The room lights are always dimmed at first, and they even flicker now and then. Players will find Sam’s notes about hauntings, apparitions in the hallways, and televisions suddenly turning on. They will encounter an Ouija board, a pentagram drawn on a table, and even mysterious secret passages around the house.

The story of Gone Home, however, could not have less to do with the supernatural: it deals with a girl discovering her own sexuality. All the tension and urgency provided by the narrative has no greater purpose, merely serving to catch the player’s attention in a deceptive way. The developers must have faced a deadlock: if the players would control Kaitlin and the story would be about Sam, there would be no conflict surrounding the character: she would only be discovering what has happened to her sister. What they do to overcome this is to suggest that something else might be happening in the house; an artificial solution that not only frustrates attentive players, by making a promise that the developers do not intend to fulfill, but also continues without inserting any real conflict in the story.

Some parts of the exploration are equally irrelevant, forcing players to search for passwords in vaults and drawers, and rewarding them with information that doesn’t interfere with Sam’s story in any way. The secondary characters are well developed – players will even know their mannerisms without ever seeing them on the screen – but they do not affect the main plot.

It is also somewhat alarming to attest that the Fullbright Company basically decided to turn a blind eye to more serious issues involving the relationship between Sam and her girlfriend, painting it as completely wonderful, when they could have built a more realistic relationship. And there is a also scene in which players are faced with a letter narrating a shocking situation, but  Kaitlin refuses to continue reading after ten seconds, keeping the player from understanding what has happened without searching online.

In the end, Gone Home is an interesting but flawed adventure game. The atmosphere is very well built and its main theme is certainly important, but the game stumbles with its artificial narrative, which constantly distracts the player instead of raising relevant questions about the subject matter.

December 07, 2018

Originally published on April 01, 2015.

Overview
Developer:

The Fullbright Company

Director:

Steve Gaynor

Composer:

Chris Remo

Average Lenght:

5 hours.

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About The Author
Rodrigo Lopes
I'm a book critic who happens to love games as well. Except Bioshock Infinite. Ugh.
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