Raindrops On Roses (Part Twenty): Gone Home

(trailer)

A lot of people would argue that Gone Home was only good when it came out. That, back in 2013, game designers hadn’t really explored the quote-unquote “environmental narrative” game -- or “Walking Simulator,” if you’re feeling less charitable -- outside of thechineseroom’s Dear Esther and therefore any competently put-together work not just put together as a source mod like Dear Esther was would of course be hailed as a demonstration of how good game storytelling could be.

The problem with that reading is hopefully obvious, though. It detracts from the merits of Fullbright’s game and instead focuses on the media surrounding it. So while there is something to be said at least for how it paved the way for later narrative-focused games, there’s still the game in front of us. Paratext is important, but what about the text?

The text of Gone Home is straightforward enough. You play as Katie Greenbar as she comes back from college to a house she’s never seen before (her family moved in the interim). This would likely be a weird enough experience, but Katie also arrives to see the house seemingly abandoned and all of the electronics missing. The goal, therefore, is to explore the house with the hope of at least understanding what happened while you were away.

Exploration is the main mechanic at play here. Taking cues from point-and-click adventure games, progress is impeded by locked doors Katie has to find a way through, though unlike those games, the solution is invariably finding a key with the right label attached (i.e., the attic gets “key to the attic”). The only other measure of progress is a series of narrated letters from Katie’s younger sister, Sam, describing her own experiences after Katie left.

That isn’t to say that’s the only story, though. The designers had two stated goals when creating the environment: First, they had to make the house feel like an actual house instead of a series of video game rooms, and second, the environment had to tell a story as much as the narration had to. So in addition to Sam’s letters, there’s also the story of their family’s dirty history, their father’s job search and alcoholism, their mother’s trouble at her own job and more. These stories intersect throughout the game, weaving in and out of the spotlight with each unlocked door.

Gone Home wasn’t the first game to have this sort of approach to how its players interacted with it. Dear Esther came out five before it, and there have been other precursors to this sort of genre (the most (in)famous of which being a PS1 game entitled LSD (Lovely Sweet Dream) Dream Emulator). But it and The Stanley Parable, another high-profile game with an exploration focus, did bring the concept into the public consciousness. There are countless games that possibly owe their entire existence to this foundation, and amongst those peers, Gone Home still presents itself pretty well.

-F