. . . Perfect, if You Need a Good Cry
I've been meaning for maybe a decade to play this one, and I'm thankful I finally have. In Gone Home, you play a twentysomething woman who has been away, and is making a surprise return visit to her parents' home late at night, during a thunderstorm, naturally. The twist here is the home itself: it's a freaking mansion, inherited by your father from his late uncle, and you've never stepped foot in it until now. And your parents and younger sister are all absent. What happened? (Warning: mild spoilers ahead; I will keep the resolutions secret.)
Some people initially dismissed Gone Home as a "walking simulator," but if you're going to say that, you may as well say the same of every classic point-and-click adventure, such as Uninvited, also set in a big mansion.
Other titles like Shadowgate and Myst, while set in immersive fantasy worlds, are pretty much the same as Gone Home in terms of gameplay. Explore eerie spaces, open new areas, find items, and unravel the story as you move along. Gone Home even shares some tropes with earlier games. For instance, you immediately need to find a key outside, just like on the first screen of Shadowgate. You read notes and put together clues to figure out what happened, as in Deja Vu.
I also consider Gone Home to be interactive fiction. It feels like a game that you read, or rather, the playing feels like reading: my mind felt like it formed the same connections between imagery and idea as it does with a book, to create a concept of the characters and story. It's great, really, it's two of my favorite things--reading and playing video games!
A constantly emerging narrative, expressed through letters and journal entries and pretty much any scrap of paper, kept me engaged and looking for more. As a challenge, or a taunt, the game designers placed piles of notes and mail in more rooms than not, so you'll be checking everything. This includes opening every drawer, picking out the fridge contents, and in general getting into anything you can, like some snooping thief (though your character acts embarrassed by some more personal discoveries). If you miss a single scrap of paper, as with the story of your father and his uncle, it can be difficult to piece together what happened, and especially in that case.
What sets Gone Home apart from other adventure titles is the literary and emotional depth of the storytelling. As in any good plot, each family member here has their own internal and external conflicts to resolve: your dad is a failed writer, and has serious issues with his deceased uncle; your mom is disheartened with married life, and possibly looking for romance elsewhere; and your sister is coming out and falling in love and being a teen about everything. Which is great, here, because it's done so well.
The main story is given to your sister Sam, and while another game or movie or anything about teens, really, may come across as too saccharine or out of touch, it all feels very real and relatable here. I identified strongly with Sam's sense of loneliness, and with it the yearning for deep friendship, all of which I felt as a teen. When Sam makes a new friend, I get just as excited as her, recalling that amazing feeling of connecting to others that is so necessary and profound during those high school years. It's hard to deny the importance of irreverent silliness (comic notes) and big bold plans (secret concerts) and, above all, the necessity to be accepted, and accept in return, a friendship closer than you ever knew could be possible. And then you fall in love! We hear Sam's love story narrated through a series of well-spoken journal entries, with plenty of realistic conflict about coming out to her parents and yearning to be accepted by them.
There's something about those high school years, about trust and friendship and love, that both strikes hard at my heart and yet, as an adult, is easy to wave off as teenage drama. Whatever it is, at the time, it's new. It's the cranking of child form to adult prototype. It's big new feelings. It's all so new and beautiful and sad at the same time, and it's easy for me to ignore or forget that. Until this lovely little game reminded me.
Nostalgia helps. Gone Home is set in the 90s, when I also happened to be a teen, so there are plenty of references to grunge and grrl rock and even SNES carts, both real and imagined. And the house is damn cool, its own character, with its own haunting vibe and hidden rooms and secret tunnels. I'm delighted by little side plots like Sam's purchase of necklaces with the lovers' engraved initials, or the many playable tapes from her girlfriend's punk band, or Sam's irritation with an old neighbor boy who won't stop calling (and hey, he wants his SNES games back, too!).
Okay, so I will mention the resolution for this minor conflict, but that's all, I swear. This latter plot resolves in a way that has Sam realize how special her old neighborhood friendship with the boy had been, complete with child's crayon drawings of their younger adventures, and she cries for its loss, and it feels so freaking real. The whole vibe of that side plot took a turn from amusing irritation to straight-up profound revelation. It feels like "We're Going to be Friends" by the White Stripes, which is a song that always gets to me. All the fun and wonder of making a neighborhood friend at a much earlier age, like seven or eight. That was important, too, and it's during adolescence that childhood friends often get dropped. It's okay to grieve in order to accept and move on. It's okay to grow up, but yeah, it hurts.
What hits hardest is the inevitable split of Sam and her girlfriend, who runs off to join the military (the tradition runs in her family), therefore making a life decision that ditches Sam. Again, this could all be overdone, but the context and the expressions are all so real. I totally sobbed for Sam, especially when I found her sketchbook drawing of their lovers' necklace split apart---with obvious tear drops staining the paper (not pictured here).
In the end, everyone's conflicts are resolved and you'll know where they all went (the dad and uncle conflict being the darkest and most difficult to resolve, but it has an ending, of sorts). Interestingly, if you skip the second to last journal entry and go straight to the final entry, it creates a quite different and ambiguous and even tragic end. If you listen to all the entries, though, you'll get a resolution that is satisfying and big and yes, a bit dramatic, but more than welcome. When I came upon the huge final resolution, I realized it tied back to the very beginning of the game, where I had listened to a series of messages on the answering machine that, at the time, meant nothing but noise. Now it all hits. Now it all makes sense. Weep away, if you haven't already.
I have heard complaints that your own character is too much of a blank slate, a device merely to move the story. She may as well be the pages on which the story is written. I think this is okay. Gone Home is about solving the mystery of the missing family. It's their stories that matter here. I do think games can be made with a compelling protagonist narrative (and there are), but within the framework of Gone Home's storytelling style, this argument is irrelevant, if only because the game functions so well on its own terms.
I recommend Gone Home to anyone who wants to experience deeper storytelling and emotional resonance in video games. Gone Home is sweet, mysterious, sad, comic, dark, tragic, true, and beautiful. I'm thankful I finally made time to play it (and it only took a few hours, anyway). From reviews, I had high expectations. These expectations were surpassed. Gone Home kicks ass.
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