There's a certain kind of feeling when you leave a place or people that you've known for a long time and return to find things have changed.
It's the realization that the world, perhaps what you considered your world, has continued spinning without you. Moved on without you. It's not a comfortable feeling and that's Gone Home at its core.
In Gone Home you play a young woman returning home from an extended trip abroad. The game starts you off with you on the front porch, the house dark, and a note on the door.
The game from there has you exploring the house, trying to find where your family is. The gameplay is light. Mostly you lift objects and look at them, find others behind them. Read things. There's a puzzle or two but this isn't an adventure game at all. It's a story.
A story that is told through your interactions with the objects and places as you find them. Some interactions will have a memory relayed to you by a voiceover from your younger sister. Others you can see your own opinion or comment on them when you look at them. Most meaningful though are the conclusions you draw as a player at the same time the character does.
You interact with things in our own way in your own time. Much of the house is open from the beginning but you are naturally led down a path. More elements of the story are added as you go in an, again, natural way.
Part of this is a good understanding of the medium. Much of the story relies on the player searching every part of the house. This would be odd in reality, but a perfectly normal and expected part of a game. It's a good design choice that rewards the player for their investment.
The game is narratively structured such that it wouldn't work any other way. As passive media it would be too slow or too over detailed. By letting the player set the pace the player becomes the character in a way that an FPS game can only dream of.
It's a very odd thing for me to say but Gone Home was both too long and too short. The game only took me a few hours yet by the end I was dreading there being additional rooms I'd have to explore. Other problems being the introduction of multiple plots that go nowhere or at least are not resolved. Also I would have added an option to read documents as text rather than in the lavishly detailed cursive of some notes.
The Good:
-Immersive, real story
-incredible attention to detail
The Bad:
-too much handwriting
-Too many red herrings
Ultimately Gone Home is worth the afternoon it'll take you to play it. There's a lot of it that should have been much more or not at all. You may feel as my girlfriend did that the ending had failed to deliver and you would be right. The game isn't a fantasy though, and it isn't scary in the eldritch sense. The horror from the real feeling of dread that anyone feels when they come home after a long time and things have changed. That's a lot scarier than any monster.
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