There are cassette tapes, letters, notes, and smaller details scattered about desks, shoved in bookcases, and hidden in drawers.įinding certain pieces trigger voice-over narratives from Sam as she describes her life and school and the new friend she's made, Lonnie. Playing as Katie, you arrive home after a year travelling to find the house empty and your family gone.Īfter letting yourself in, you need to figure out what happened to your younger sister, Sam, and your mother and father, by exploring the house and piecing together different clues. While it's out on pretty much every other platform, it's taken a good while to come to mobile. Gone Home is a first-person exploration that first came out back in 2013. Put them all together, though, and you're left with an experience that's rich and slow-burning, with a couple of smaller issues overall. It's slow and methodical, and its individual elements don't feel all that impressive.
The finale is both predictable and unexpected, jamais vu all over again, and if it doesn’t provoke at least a few goosebumps, perhaps it’s time to put down the controller and see what the real world’s all about.Walking sims won't appeal to those more impatient gamers, but for folks after a good story Good Home might just scratch that narrative itch. By the end of this two-to-three-hour journey, it isn’t just the house that’ll seem lived-in, as the characters are equally realized and relatable.Ī message found in Kaitlin’s father’s office insists “You can do better,” but despite-or perhaps because of-the brevity of Gone Home, it’s hard to imagine anything more the Fullbright Company could have done without padding the game with puzzles or suspending the tension and mood (see Phantasmagoria). If you’ve ever passed a note in school or listened to a mixtape, you’ll instantly connect with certain characters if you’ve struggled to find passion in a dead-end job or relationship, you’ll understand others.
Each room, from the Music Room to the TV Room to the Greenhouse, tells its own chapter of the story, one that stays, well, close to home. The girl with the Magic Eye and X-Files posters on the wall, who has a brilliant mind for fiction (she subverts a boilerplate health-education assignment by comparing the marvels of the uterus to the terrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland) and keeps a log of possible ghost sightings is lost, perhaps for good. As she unburdens herself to you about the trouble she’s had fitting in at school, the connection she feels with a rebellious punk rocker, and the injustices heaped on her by less-than-understanding parents and teachers, the sense that something has gone terribly wrong only grows.
While the game appears open at first, a series of confessional audio recordings from Sam soon focus your attention on key areas and provide an emotional impetus to proceed. Not that impatient players have to dig through the digital detritus of this fictional family’s life to progress. Instead, Gone Home provokes a sense of jamais vu, hoping that the uncanny presentation of the real, intimate, and nostalgic will encourage you to examine the countless mundane objects-tissue boxes, high school trophies, dirty dishes, a condom in your parents’ dresser drawer-that tell a story both familiar and not. Most critically, why has your little sister, Sam, left an ominous note on the front door, explaining that “it is impossible” for her to see you ever again?ĭespite Kaitlin’s family’s conspicuous absence and the haunting atmosphere, there’s no pressure to rush through the game. Is your mother having an affair with a fellow conservationist, or is she trying to reconnect through couples bowling? Examine the watercolor paintings she’s taken up as a hobby. Is your father a conspiracy nut, or is he simply researching material for his latest science-fiction thriller? Read the Post-it notes at his desk and try to ignore the bottle of whiskey hidden atop his bookshelf.
(Her family moved into her uncle’s mansion while she was away.) Set in 1995, as much for the achingly nostalgic effect on its target demographic as for storytelling purposes that cannot be explained without spoiling the game itself, Gone Home drops you at the Front Porch and leaves it to you to figure out how to proceed-and how to interpret the various letters and correspondences scattered throughout the various rooms. Something of a cross between The 7th Guest and Dear Esther, without the pointless puzzles of the former or the stretched-out symbolism of the latter, Gone Home is the tale of Kaitlin’s return from a year-long pre-college trip through Europe, and the much-changed home she finds waiting for her on a dark and stormy night.