Who likes walking?
Well you’re in for a treat today (I’m going to assume you said yes). Today we’re going to take a look at Gone Home, brought to us by Midnight City if you played the console version and The Fullbright Company if you had the VR version. You may have worked out from that opening sentence that Gone Home is a walking simulator. If you haven’t had much experience with walking simulators before let me explain: you walk around...
Ultimately that is the only “mechanic”, if you can call walking around a mechanic, but you also pick things up and fiddle with them to progress the story like an amnesiac kleptomaniac.
Gone Home starts with Katie, the main character, returning home after her trip abroad. She returns to find the house empty and a note on the door from her sister, Samantha, telling her to not bother trying to figure out what happened. Now, over my years of gaming I’ve come across a couple of things that set off warning signs. A character you’ve never seen telling you not to investigate through an eerily empty house is a definite warning sign for “shit got fucked up”. Katie is a stubborn girl however and delves right into the mystery.
I was being a bit unkind earlier, Gone Home is an adventure game in addition to just walking around a house. Mostly the adventure gameplay is there to justify this being a game rather than just an “experience”. If you actually paid money for Gone Home rather than getting it for free via Games With Gold like I did, you would probably feel a bit hard done by if it lacked the adventure game side.
Back to the vague mystery. I may have been a bit miss-leading when I said that Katie was the main character, despite the fact that you control her the story focuses more on the sister, Samantha. Katie’s family have uprooted their lives and moved into a new, frankly irresponsibly large house for four people and one of them isn’t even there. There’s like fifteen rooms, and most of them are useless or awkward to get to. Anyway, on her trip around this huge mansion in the middle of nowhere Katie, that is to say you, will come across various objects like postcards or a picture that will prompt diary entries made by Sam. Contrary to what she put on the note on the front door warning Katie to stay away, Sam is more than happy to regale Katie with the goings on at almost every turn.
You can tell where the adventure games of old have had an influence on Gone Home. The good ones, like Monkey Island, were about atmosphere which is definitely present in Gone Home, if possibly a tad miss aligned - sometimes it feels like there’s an axe murderer six inches behind you but it usually turns out that it’s some weird punk girl reference. They also had good writing which is where Gone Home falls down. That’s not to say it’s bad writing but it is predictable at times, coupled with the fact that you can find optional text dumps written in cursive that you have to read to get the whole story which would take a better man than me to read all of them.
Speaking of story, Gone Home has a flimsy one the crux of which doesn’t even revolve around the player character. The whole point it’s trying to make over the two hours of game play is acceptance: being out of place and trying to fit in in Sam’s case and understanding their daughter in her parents case.
I wouldn’t say there is a twist ending, as anyone with a brain could have worked it out before they found the second kitchen, but there is an ending that I’m not going to spoil.
Gone Home was made in Unity. I’ve got nothing against Unity, it’s a great way for programmers to get into the business. However, I don’t think Unity should be used in a game that has a first person perspective like this one. There are times when you’re investigating a room that you can see the shaded surfaces that the images don’t fully cover. Gone Home also employs a photo-realistic type thing, this just means the programmer can find some royalty free images to use off of google, though it isn’t the best look all of the time.
These are just petty gripes, for the most part Gone Home is a decent experience. It’s not particularly long or detailed, it doesn’t carry many mechanics other than see a thing and click on a thing, there aren’t even many characters to become invested in and, as we’ve established, the story kinda peters out half way through... ya know, I have a feeling I’m not selling this as well as I could be.
My point is, if you’re looking for a game that’s a substantial length, packed with action and puzzles, this isn’t it. What Gone Home does offer is a thought provoking experience that will tide you over for a few hours. The atmosphere and feel is probably amplified in the VR version thanks to its immersive nature but the console version isn’t without its perks. I can say with certainty that the controls are better because you aren’t bumping into real world furniture constantly.
All in all Gone Home is a decent experience and sub par game, after a while it starts to feel more like a treasure hunt, if you can call the useless crap you find treasure. That side of the game is more for 100% completionists and that might do enough to keep you hooked until the end but if it doesn’t you’re not missing much. You can burn through Gone Home in a morning before moving onto something more substantial, it's not the biggest of games but it is a bite size run through that will give you that satisfaction of actually finishing a game for once.
Keep checking back to Game Changers for more gaming news and updates.
Well you’re in for a treat today (I’m going to assume you said yes). Today we’re going to take a look at Gone Home, brought to us by Midnight City if you played the console version and The Fullbright Company if you had the VR version. You may have worked out from that opening sentence that Gone Home is a walking simulator. If you haven’t had much experience with walking simulators before let me explain: you walk around...
Ultimately that is the only “mechanic”, if you can call walking around a mechanic, but you also pick things up and fiddle with them to progress the story like an amnesiac kleptomaniac.
Gone Home starts with Katie, the main character, returning home after her trip abroad. She returns to find the house empty and a note on the door from her sister, Samantha, telling her to not bother trying to figure out what happened. Now, over my years of gaming I’ve come across a couple of things that set off warning signs. A character you’ve never seen telling you not to investigate through an eerily empty house is a definite warning sign for “shit got fucked up”. Katie is a stubborn girl however and delves right into the mystery.
I was being a bit unkind earlier, Gone Home is an adventure game in addition to just walking around a house. Mostly the adventure gameplay is there to justify this being a game rather than just an “experience”. If you actually paid money for Gone Home rather than getting it for free via Games With Gold like I did, you would probably feel a bit hard done by if it lacked the adventure game side.
Back to the vague mystery. I may have been a bit miss-leading when I said that Katie was the main character, despite the fact that you control her the story focuses more on the sister, Samantha. Katie’s family have uprooted their lives and moved into a new, frankly irresponsibly large house for four people and one of them isn’t even there. There’s like fifteen rooms, and most of them are useless or awkward to get to. Anyway, on her trip around this huge mansion in the middle of nowhere Katie, that is to say you, will come across various objects like postcards or a picture that will prompt diary entries made by Sam. Contrary to what she put on the note on the front door warning Katie to stay away, Sam is more than happy to regale Katie with the goings on at almost every turn.
You can tell where the adventure games of old have had an influence on Gone Home. The good ones, like Monkey Island, were about atmosphere which is definitely present in Gone Home, if possibly a tad miss aligned - sometimes it feels like there’s an axe murderer six inches behind you but it usually turns out that it’s some weird punk girl reference. They also had good writing which is where Gone Home falls down. That’s not to say it’s bad writing but it is predictable at times, coupled with the fact that you can find optional text dumps written in cursive that you have to read to get the whole story which would take a better man than me to read all of them.
Speaking of story, Gone Home has a flimsy one the crux of which doesn’t even revolve around the player character. The whole point it’s trying to make over the two hours of game play is acceptance: being out of place and trying to fit in in Sam’s case and understanding their daughter in her parents case.
I wouldn’t say there is a twist ending, as anyone with a brain could have worked it out before they found the second kitchen, but there is an ending that I’m not going to spoil.
Gone Home was made in Unity. I’ve got nothing against Unity, it’s a great way for programmers to get into the business. However, I don’t think Unity should be used in a game that has a first person perspective like this one. There are times when you’re investigating a room that you can see the shaded surfaces that the images don’t fully cover. Gone Home also employs a photo-realistic type thing, this just means the programmer can find some royalty free images to use off of google, though it isn’t the best look all of the time.
These are just petty gripes, for the most part Gone Home is a decent experience. It’s not particularly long or detailed, it doesn’t carry many mechanics other than see a thing and click on a thing, there aren’t even many characters to become invested in and, as we’ve established, the story kinda peters out half way through... ya know, I have a feeling I’m not selling this as well as I could be.
My point is, if you’re looking for a game that’s a substantial length, packed with action and puzzles, this isn’t it. What Gone Home does offer is a thought provoking experience that will tide you over for a few hours. The atmosphere and feel is probably amplified in the VR version thanks to its immersive nature but the console version isn’t without its perks. I can say with certainty that the controls are better because you aren’t bumping into real world furniture constantly.
All in all Gone Home is a decent experience and sub par game, after a while it starts to feel more like a treasure hunt, if you can call the useless crap you find treasure. That side of the game is more for 100% completionists and that might do enough to keep you hooked until the end but if it doesn’t you’re not missing much. You can burn through Gone Home in a morning before moving onto something more substantial, it's not the biggest of games but it is a bite size run through that will give you that satisfaction of actually finishing a game for once.
Keep checking back to Game Changers for more gaming news and updates.
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