PixlBit

Making a game with no puzzles, no combat, and no action to speak of in order to tell a specific and carefully crafted story seems like such a simple idea, and one that could easily turn out to be pretty boring. Luckily, the creators of Gone Home have been paying close attention to the powerful little vignettes stuck in the cracks of other games that have come before. It’s the little notes left in Skyrim’s caves and the journal entries in Myst that paved the way for Gone Home to turn those little nuggets into a pretty amazing story.

Returning home from a trip abroad, you find yourself on the front porch of your family’s home on a rainy night without any hint of what has been happening while you’ve been across the globe. A single note greets you on the front door and gets you started poking around this huge, somewhat eerie house. You’ll dig through drawers, bookshelves, and cabinets. You’ll pull paper scraps from waste bins and read letters in word processors. You’ll come across abandoned still life scenes of pizza boxes and cans of Dr. Jitter. Every single one of these mundane explorations is compelling since it’s a continuous series of discoveries that lead to you and your character’s enlightenment.

Not only will you be figuring out what events have taken place, but you’ll also get a great grasp on what emotions the kids and parents of the house have been going through over the past year. Both the plot and character discoveries are laid out in a general order so that the main points are uncovered at the appropriate times, but other smaller details flit back and forth along the timeline and give you the sensation of seeing a revelatory flashback that completely flips your image of a character upside-down. Little tricks like this abound throughout, and put me in a constant flux between knowing exactly where the story was headed and whether it might be screeching off into a different direction entirely.

A bit of me undoubtedly got wrapped up in the story since it’s set in 1995 and features a lot of angst-filled teenage stuff – a time and state of mind I can relate to pretty well. Since I was wrapping up my own teen years right about that time, finding and listening to dubbed tapes of local alternative bands in this empty house put me right back in that time. Big props are due to the musicians and Chris Remo for creating a backdrop of music that enhanced every emotional discovery and captured an era and style of music in every detail down the perfect guitar pedals.

Other touches, like the distinctly labeled VHS tapes littered around and the various food products and board games show that The Fullbright Company put a lot of care to making a huge house as believably lived in as possible – on the budget they had available. I had no issues with the furniture and surroundings lacking high-res detailed textures like a big budget game, but you will notice this sort of thing and to some it might be bothersome.

There were other times when I started thinking about what exactly I was doing and how it was all playing out. I had moments when I noticed how convenient some circumstances and door locks happened to be. I thought from time to time that this family sure isn’t very good at taking their trash out or at organizing the things they hold dear in some sort of logical way. But then I reminded myself that at least I’m not shooting thousands of dudes in order to prove myself innocent of murder like I would in other games. I think we can give Gone Home the same pass we give every other game on these little necessities to enjoy its well-crafted narrative.

I don’t know if Gone Home is going to create a trend of games done in this manner and in some ways I really hope it isn’t. What I do hope is that other game makers will look at how the environment was used so powerfully and so artfully to add layer upon layer to what was going on and weave that into their own games too. It will be pretty tough to mesh this sort of workmanship with the platforming, shooting, and puzzle-solving mechanics so many games are centered on, but I sure hope people try and get better at it now. In the mean time, anyone looking to see what video games are capable of when a simple idea is allowed to flourish into a full and one-of-a-kind experience should definitely play Gone Home and figure out what’s happened themselves.