Gone Home

Gone Home is a narrative-adventure game that focuses on exploration and environmental storytelling but relies too much on red herrings to fully work: its attempts to build suspense – and even horror – fall flat, serving only to distract us from the important themes being discussed.

We control Kaitlin Greenbriar, a young woman who has just returned home from a long trip through Europe on a rainy night in 1995 and discovered her house empty. A note from her younger sister, Sam, is nailed to the door, apologizing to Kaitlin, and urging the woman to not 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 very simple. We pick up objects from the house and examine them thoroughly. If it is a letter, we can read what is written on it when inspecting it; if it’s a box of cookies, we’ll be able to see the nutritional chart. The level of detail when it comes to objects in the environment is staggering: while in some games some extraneous information – such as articles in newspapers and magazines – appear blurred, in Gone Home everything is readable, even if the contents are not exactly relevant.

Since Kaitlin’s family moved while she was traveling, the house is alien to her, which contextualizes the player’s disorientation: if we have no idea where the kitchen is, it is because Kaitlin doesn’t know either.  The art direction is great not only in making the house believable but also in reflecting the personality of its inhabitants. It is easy to understand the obsessive nature of Kaitlin’s father as we 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: it may not be subtle, but it’s certainly effective. The game is also marked by a sense of nostalgia for the time, with vinyl records and posters of bands of the 90s scattered around the rooms, next to X-Files episodes recorded in cassettes, and Super Nintendo cartridges. There is, however, a certain “videogamey” design permeating the place, with rooms having their access blocked by locks and not a single mirror being found in the house, for example.

Exploration is an essential part of Gone Home. Several notes and items that provide crucial insight into the characters and their relationships are hidden in drawers or stored in vaults. And they offer just enough about the characters to suggest things about their personality and let our interpretation complete the picture – preventing us from becoming passive spectators in the game: we must interpret the words and events to get a clear picture of what happened. And since we can move freely around the house – except for the few locked rooms –, the order in which we discover information on the Greenbriar family is, to some extent, up to us – turning the story of Gone Home into a puzzle whose pieces we acquire little by little.

By examining certain objects, we also unlock some audio files of Sam talking to her sister. We may control Kaitlin, but it’s Sam who is Gone Home‘s true protagonist. Her sensitive and touching story deals with coming to terms with one’s own sexuality, and the family problems that may arise from this. There’s a touching moment, for example, where Sam reveals her disappointment at seeing that her parents’ reaction to discovering her “secret” was not one of fury – as she feared – but even worse, one of denial: “It’s a phase!” they say dismissively. However, since the game mostly uses the environment to tell its story it is simply 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 from feeling artificial.

Gone Home’s biggest flaw, however, lies in another aspect of its narrative, which is perfectly represented by the moment Kaitlin finds bloodstains in a bathtub and a pot of red dye at its side: the game is completely built with Red Herrings. Red Herrings are false clues positioned in the story to divert our attention from the points that really matter: they’re a magician’s trick, the one that makes us look at an elaborate hand movement so we can’t see them moving a card with the other.

In Gone Home, there is an insistence on making us believe that there’s something supernatural taking place in the house. The eerie atmosphere is so well-built that it reinforces this sense of mystery and dread: the only sound accompanying us through the rooms is that of the storm raging outside, with the occasional thunder causing spikes of tension. The lights in the rooms are always dimmed at first, and they even flicker now and then. But Kaitlin will also find Sam’s notes talking about hauntings, apparitions in the hallways, and televisions will suddenly turn on. We will come across an Ouija board, a pentagram drawn on a table, and even creepy secret passages around the house.

The story of Gone Home, however, could not have less to do with the supernatural, as it deals with a girl coming to terms with her own sexuality. All the tension and urgency provided by this supernatural aspect have no greater purpose in the narrative than merely grab our attention in a deceptive way, as if the game were afraid that we would get bored otherwise. So, when it strongly suggests that something else might be happening in the house, it makes us feel a type of tension that is tonally at odds with the grounded story actually being told  – and there’s no payoff either.

Gone Home could have built tension through the conflicts already present in its story, as there’s no lack of them. There’s a moment when we find a letter narrating a shocking situation, but Kaitlin refuses to continue reading after ten seconds, almost keeping us from understanding what has happened without searching online. Some tension in Sam’s relationship with her girlfriend could have also been more explored, making matters more complex. 

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 contrived narrative, which is much more concerned with keeping us “entertained” than with actually engaging with its subject matter.

December 07, 2018

Originally published on April 01, 2015.