Gone Home

Steam Sales always catch my interest. When a game is listed as “one of the greatest of all time” be it due to sales, critical acclaim, or the occasional internet blog it lands on my radar.  When such a game is priced at $4.49, and holiday cash is cooling in my account, well, I often act on impulse and add to my collection of “indie hits” and “contemporary classics.”

My wife had told me “Ah, I think I saw a clip of that, it was listed as one of the scariest games of all time!” I was anxious. Early in our marriage we would sit and play through games, be it Playstation, Playstation 2, Super Nintendo Entertainment system, Xbox, or even Xbox 360… we would watch each other (or at least before we’d fall asleep during the more grindy parts of Kingdom Hearts) and if it was a scary game we’d stick close by, eyes wide open. We had earned a red badge of courage by beating Resident Evil 5 together, and sat through nearly every Silent Hill side-by-side.

I ran the game on an hP ENVY m6 Entertainment PC, not the best build to attempt a game developed with the Unity Engine, but sometimes it is less about the frame-rate and more about the content of the frame.

Gone Home is an exploratory narrative-driven adventure. It invites the user to soak in every stain on every coffee table, dig through every waste basket, and question every aspect of your surrounding. You will attempt to piece together the puzzle and remove the tangles from the threads that hold its carefully crafted world together.

It is a period piece, set almost 20 years in the past, to a time when The Smashing Pumpkins were winning MTV Video Music Awards (read: MTV was still playing music on their tv station) and My So Called Life echoed the plight of every teenage girl  I have ever met.

I played through the game sitting side by side with my wife,Eden,  both the night before, and the night of our anniversary. The words she spoke “one of the scariest games of all time” kept repeating  in my head and were written upon my heart. Every corner turned, every light switched, every note fragment unfolded… this could be our ultimate doom.

When I play a game I typically play it four times: Once on my own, once attempting a one-hundred percent maximum level of completion, once approaching it as a bare-bones, lowest-possible level minimum run-through, and the fourth again as the first… just attempting it on my own; usually a balance of all my other experiences. Gone Home forced me to approach it as a guideless-100% run from the first. I did not want to miss a detail, as my wife stated “this is one of the scariest games of all time” and if I missed just one detail I was certain Balvadeer himself would reach through the walls in front of me and strangle me dead while sitting at the screen; these were serious tasks at hand with dire consequences for failure.

Or at least I thought so.

First person games, in the vein of the Elder Scrolls series, where you savor every detail, feel every foot-step, and embrace the ambience are highly enjoyable to me. In the words of Melvin Udall “I work all the time.”

I am responsible for providing for a family, and I work very hard at that. Video games, cinema, and multimedia in general are my escapist route, my relief from the duties I tend to with the majority of my time. I intend to make it last, for as long as possible, until the next crisis needs to be put out.

Gone Home replaced the crisis of sitting at the head of my own household and put me in the place of visiting another. I had my own theories as to who I was (after all, this is one of the “Scariest Games Of All Time) but what the game led to was imagining the most terrifying scenarios possible… the slightest noise would send chills to my marrow and I would imagine the worst fate possible for all interested parties.

A narrative approach is always an interesting one, and I would like to try it out as an opening sequence for a game of my choosing, employing switches to introduce details about the protagonist. Next week I am going to work on an intro-demo for a game I’ve been outlining, Four Brothers, and we can see how I might take the narrative elements of Gone Home and work it into a game of my own.

Thursday, January 2^nd, I will be doing a live playthrough, there is an option to add developers commentary (which we won’t be doing) but if you care to join me I will be on Twitch.Tv at http://www.twitch.tv/grantrellis