Gone Home is the cat’s meow, you’ll see what this means when you’ve discovered the foreboding interiors of Gone Home’s titular house. You begin your exploits facing a couple of huge double doors, behind them lies a Resident Evil-esque hall with a staircase just ahead of you and branching doors off to the left and right. The house is quite aptly yours, as you see it through the eyes of a seventeen year old girl named Kaitlin Greenbriar in the year 1995. Within this perspective lies a compelling, exciting and voyeuristic mini-adventure in reading and listening. You’d be a total quack if you love literature but don’t get on with this game, it’s a wonderful experience that bolsters the PS4s Indy specialisation.
Some detractors will say in obvious frivolity that Gone Home isn’t a game. Such lethargic remarks should be ignored because Gone Home is most certainly a game. The game in question is voyeurism, the act of watching, or more appropriately in this case reading. By reading and interacting with the world, you uncover artefacts of a teenager’s life, her parents and her journeys abroad as well as her social interactions and interests. The stylishness is rooted in 90s girl culture, the excitement of misadventures and the difficulties of teenage life. You might be walking slowly most of time and picking up junk, but this is a world you inhabit and you can tamper with most things in this world. So to clear things up, this is indisputably a game, and a pretty damn good one at that.
Your central objective in Gone Home is to find twenty-four journal entries around the house so you can piece together the story on your own. You’ll be rummaging through the place like a noir detective, trying to grab every piece of insight you can in order to understand the story and the characters. Some places are hard to locate and you might be searching around a lot to find all the diaries, but the payoff is worth the effort.
Gone Home doesn’t take long to complete, only a couple of hours tops, but there is much to see and discover. School reports, books, posters, fanzines, tape recorders, tapes, notes, safes and more can be found by moping about and massaging your curiosity. The rooms themselves are like sanctuaries of youth and kinkiness, check out the parents’ bedroom for some titillation and Katie’s for teenage angst. Hidden areas and lockers provide giddy motivations to unlock secrets that enhance the story, so there’s always an incentive to explore.
You can access modifiers to improve your experience in Gone Home too. You can start with all the lights turned on and all the doors unlocked or you can turn on developer diaries, which you’ll be able to listen to whilst walking about the place. You should take it all in because there is a great slice of intrigue if you decide to listen to every single diary and read and listen to everything in the game. Gone Home is as short or as long as you make it, not so long that you’ll top up more than five hours mind, but you can do a lot of digging to make those hour go beyond a couple if you’re willing to. There are even hidden references to videogames and films in here, showing the nuances and influences of Gone Home.
Don’t be fooled by the length of Gone Home, divert and you’ll find a house stuffed with 90s ephemera and plenty of nourishing documents and paper with words on them. There is no question that Gone Home is inspired, but it manages to have a personality and beauty all its own, characterised by the place and time in which it is set. For the Playstation 4, Gone Home is right at home as an Indy title fully capable of arresting your inquisitiveness. Play it and find out that Gone Home isn’t merely a slight walking simulator, but a full story composed of pieces if paper and assembled into a whole by the player.
+A Home full of ephemera is nostalgic grace,
+Many influences beautifully integrated into the home,
+Developer commentaries are a delightfully generous inclusion.
-Ok, it’s too short……for some,
-Not for the illiterate or those who hate to read,
-The girlie upward inflections can irritate.
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