Gone Home, first person narrative, mystery game

You are Kaitlin Greenbriar (Katie), home to your parent’s new house after time abroad in Europe. The house is locked, and possibly uninhabited, unless your parents are asleep elsewhere in the house as it is midnight. Your younger sister, Sam, appears to have run away, according to a note on the front door.

Gone Home’s game play is pretty intuitive with just a few rules as you start: use the mouse to look around and the keyboard arrows or WASD keys to move your character around. As other controls or keyboard commands become necessary, text explaining their use appears on the screen, such as shift to zoom in and look at an area more closely, or to click to pick an object up, or shift to examine a held object closer. I think this helped to ease entry into the game, by not overloading the user with all of the rules or keyboard commands at the beginning.

After looking at a few of the approved games, I picked this one because it reminded me of the first computer game I played as a child in the early 1980s. A friend had it on his dad’s Apple computer. I don’t remember the name of the game, but it was a mostly text-based, first-person narrative, choose-your-own-adventure-style game. Since it was over 40 years ago, I remember very little, other than it involved scenes in a forest, a castle and dungeon, magic potions, and there was a time limit to solve the mystery of the game. Although I haven’t played Oregon Trail, I think this game must have been a precursor to it, as certain decisions made in the game could lead to failure or death.

Besides the nostalgia of this game’s style, I also enjoyed the spookiness of it. This was achieved through the darkness of the scenes, and the need to turn on lights as you progress through the house. This also was achieved through the ambient noise of rain and thunder. In fact, the occasional louder thunderclaps gave me a jump scare the first couple of times they occurred. Later in the game, I thought I faintly heard a voice, and I wondered if I would turn around to see someone behind me in the house. I was a little relieved when I finally opened a door to reveal a television playing a weather announcement.

I also found Gone Home just hard enough to keep my interest but not too hard to discourage me from playing. For example, you start in darkness on the covered front porch and the door is locked. I’ll admit I briefly thought “am I going to be the one student who gets stuck on the very first scene of a game in a class centered around gaming?” But then I thought “Where would I hide the key if this were my house?” and I found it under a mug behind a cabinet door.

Once again, in addition to my personal nostalgia for the game’s style, I think the storyline uses nostalgia to appeal to players by being set in 1995. Because of the year, and possibly the father’s job reviewing stereo equipment, there is older technology, such as (what is now considered vintage) stereos, televisions and stand-alone cassette players. The bookshelves in the home also feature a prevalence of recorded video tapes listing older movies and tv shows, mostly sci-fi related. Some of the cassette tapes that you can play in the equipment is also nostalgic, although for a smaller portion of the players as it features underground punk bands from the pacific northwest. The two that I had heard of before were Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy.

There weren’t that many negatives for me, but since it’s a first-person perspective game, it occasionally made me mildly nauseous, though not as bad as other, older first-person games like “Duke Nukem” or “Doom.” After a while, I also started to tire of the monotony of going from room to room, opening every cabinet door and drawer, and scanning every bookcase for clues. However, I have to admit that after a period of time away from the game, I would eventually find myself wanting to go back to the game to make more progress towards solving the game’s mysteries.