However, they are not characters (nor caricatures) of young women in video games. The three main characters in Gone Home - Kaitlin, Sam and Lonnie - are female. There is room for everyone at the gaming table, including women - which is the other reason the game should be praised. The warm reception the game has received shows that, like several of the games I've talked about here, there is room for these deeper, emotional experiences in games right alongside arcade-style shootfests. Nor should gamers themselves be painted with the same broad brush. Like all artistic or entertainment mediums, they can be big and bold as well as subtle and moving. It also shows that video games can no longer be so simply labeled and dismissed - that they don't all need to fit comfortably into standard categories. It shows that modern video games need not try to be all things to all people. But that's one of the reasons the game is so important for the gaming industry right now. There are no monsters or terrorists to shoot or cars to steal. Technically, there is no real gameplay it's mostly just moving around the house and examining objects. Now of course it should be said that Gone Home will not appeal to everyone. As I immersed myself in the notes and letters, I almost felt guilty, as if I were reading private missives between two of my former classmates.Īll Tech Considered In Space, No One Can Hear You Swap Having been in high school at that time, I found authentic details - notes passed between Sam and Lonnie flecked with teenage humor, Street Fighter II references, a zine the girls make, and punk rock riot grrrl bootleg tapes scattered about - that made the game all the more engrossing. But as soon as I heard that first journal entry, so sincerely read by voice actor Sarah Grayson, I was in - I had to know where the story was headed. I figured I'd get in, explore a bit, get that nostalgic nod and the crux of the story and be done. I'd read a bit about it and had some expectations going in when I sat down to play. I did not expect this game to get its hooks into me as much as it did.
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Though more of a story exploration game or a piece of interactive short fiction, Gone Home (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) weaves its touching story with such deft and narrative grace that it is hard not to be sucked in immediately. But the game also respects the player, much as a really great book respects the intelligent reader, in that it lets you put a lot of the pieces of the Greenbriar puzzle together for yourself and form many of your own conclusions. With these storytelling elements you learn a lot about the Greenbriar family and what is going on in their lives.
Gone home game series#
Sam also narrates a series of journal entries that serve as the main vehicle for telling the story.īilled as a "story exploration game," Gone Home has users exploring an empty house and piecing together why no one is home. The story unfolds as you pick up scraps of paper, notes, letters, photos, cassette tapes and other bits and pieces littering the house. You spend the game in a familiar first-person style, exploring the house.
It is their relationship that forms the narrative core of the game, but there are also some side threads regarding the relationship between the parents, Jan and Terry, as well as the history behind the house's previous owner. Though you play as Kaitlin, the story is really about her 17-year-old sister, Sam, and her initial alienation at a new school before meeting and becoming close friends with a girl named Lonnie.
But instead of a big family welcome, she arrives to an empty house and a mysterious note taped to the door. In the game - created by The Fullbright Company, a four-person team out of Portland - you play 21-year-old Kaitlin Greenbriar, who has returned from a trip abroad in Europe to the new home her parents and sister recently moved into. Let me just get this out of the way: Gone Home is one of the most deeply intimate and emotionally honest gaming experiences I've had in my more than 25 years of playing video games.
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