Gone Home

Developer: The Fullbright Company

Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux

Release Date: August 15, 2013

Gone Home is a bit of a challenge to write about for an audience that hasn’t played it yet. Everything that makes it special is in the experience of playing it and unfolding its world and narrative piece by piece, and to know much about it is to know too much. For those of you who prefer a pristine play experience, I’ll simply say this: Go play it. Right now. Do it before someone tells you anything about it. Then you can come back. Go on, I’ll wait, it should only take 90 minutes or so.

For those who just finished the game, welcome back. For those who have boldly pressed on, rest assured that I will be as vague as possible. Gone Home is a first-person…well, adventure doesn’t quite fit, but “first-person story” makes it sound a lot less player-driven than it actually is. Other critics have used the term “first-person snooper,” which is probably the most accurate description. Your alter ego in the game is Kaitlin Greenbriar, returned home after a year-long trip to Europe in the middle of the night on June 7, 1995. Your house is empty, with no sign of your parents or your younger sister Sam, and the action of the game involves piecing together the events that led to this absence using the contents of the house.

When I say that Gone Home takes place in 1995, that is no small element of the game. The time period, almost 20 years gone now, is meticulously replicated in every aspect of the Greenbriars’ house, which is full of cassette tapes, VHS recordings of The X-Files, Super Nintendo cartridges, and nary a computer to be found. This pre-internet setting is very much chosen and important, but I can’t tell you why.

I can’t tell you why because learning the “why” is the gameplay, when it comes right down to it. What I can tell you is that the house is tremendously convincing as a place real people have lived and moved, and while I began the game utilizing the usual ransacking method of searching each room, I quickly shifted to closing each opened cabinet, replacing each personal item back where I found it, and developing a real connection to these absent people whose lives were laid open before me.

Gone Home was made by The Fullbright Company, a new developer founded by three people who worked on the Minerva’s Den DLC for BioShock 2, and it shows. There’s a pedigree in the narrative presentation and the environment design, but Gone Home tells a story that is both incredibly small and yet bigger than anything most so-called “epic” games dare to tackle. Gone Home is a tribute to the moments in our lives that tower in our memories, that cast shadows and shine spotlights across years, relationships, and our futures. It is about the fact that much of what we consider mundane in our lives now was once inconceivably new. It is about change, and the fact that every moment is the culmination of myriad events, some of which we may never know of ourselves.

I knew almost nothing about Gone Home when I started it up, only that people in my Twitter feed were praising it in vague and cryptic ways. In fact, I woke up in the middle of the night with a nasty cough, and while I waited for some cough medicine to take effect, I decided to boot up Gone Home and see what all the fuss was about. The credits rolled 90 minutes later, but instead of heading off to bed with a now-controlled cough, I’m writing this at 5:30 AM. I’m writing it because I needed to tell you – yes, you – that you need to play Gone Home. When the credits roll on your screen, I hope you’ll understand why.

Rating: 5 out of 5