I don't wanna rummage through more stuff in case I trigger another audio and it overrides the first or even plays at the same time. I don't want to wander off in case the audio cuts out. When did this stuff start, Half Life? Where you're just standing there, listening to story. I don't really like audiobooks, or picking up the story on tapes or whatever you call it. The single-sitting, one-shot story is a really welcome tonic to the norm. Most story games you get the plot of a film, a miniseries at best, stretched out over 30, 50 hours. I finished the game in less than 2 hours and I really like this sort of length for story games. By the end it just feels like a chore, marking off the rooms and hoping you clear them off before it reveals more hidden paths. The horror vibes and tension, the immersive relatable realness of the house fades away as you enter the fourth dark reception room with a three-ring binder in it or the third weird basement zone your sister used to write stories in and listen to cassettes and left a journal entry in the bin for you. It's just long enough ago that seeing a handmade gig poster or a game cartridge lying in bland domesticity triggers half-gone memories of my own childhood. It's before everything would just be online and we'd all have mobiles and the whole game wouldn't even happen. Having the game in the 90s is a nice move.
#Gone home endings full
The house is full of these really nicely pitched bits of stuff, ephemera that are evocative in just the right way: chipped nail varnish in a photo, the way a cassette case falls open when you turn it over in your hand, the black and white actual-film photos. It bothers me when I lift a lid and see something I want to look at underneath, and just let the lid drop (awfully) on the ground. It's a location to be seen and explored on its terms, rather than in terms of how it can benefit me as a player. Except for the ones that trigger audio logs, there's no distinction between items that are important for the story and items that are just a cup, or whatever. There aren't bullets or medpacks hidden in drawers for me to take. But here I won't go in to the next room until I've looked at the bottom of every single thing in this room, and then been in to the closet and looked at the bottom of everything in there too. If I came home and couldn't see my sister waiting for me, I'd just walk through the house until I found her. I don't have pockets full of cigarette butts just because I can pick them up off the floor. This is how I deal with objects in real life. Here, if you pick something up, you can just put it back again in the right place. In Fallout or Skyrim if you pick a thing up off a desk, everything else on the desk jiggles around and tips over and falls off the edge. And the game gives you the option to put things back. I don't get a 400lb backpack to carry everything in.
The first thing I pick up, I just hold it in my hand, turn it over. Gone Home made me play differently in general.
When I went in to a new room I'd have to close the door behind me to feel secure enough to start reading the back covers of leaflets and opening sideboards. At the start when I listened to audiologs I had my back to the wall so I could see everything that could come at me. There's a storm outside, all the lights are off, doors at the ends of corridors are half-open and there are creakings and rattlings just out of sight. I played it in the dark with headphones, and there are plenty of horror tropes. Shut in from the fearsome conditions outside, back to a front door that will be always closed, big stairs in front of me and unknown corridors off to each side, my first thought is Resident Evil.
Gone Home is a game about looking around your house.
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