Gone Home: Console Edition (PS4, 2016)
Some time ago, Gone Home was featured as free monthly game on PlayStation Plus. This happened so long ago in fact that not only did I not own a PS4, I had decided I wasn't going to redeem the free PS4 games on offer because by the time I made the switch to that generation I wasn't going to be playing quite as many games. Whoops. It seems Gone Home was included on PS+ in June 2016. Being vaguely aware it was something I might be interested in I kept an eye out to see if it ever went on sale. Looking further at the list it seems the first PS4 game I redeemed was Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, so you can see my interests were consistent.
That was 2016. I made the switch to PS4 as my full time console at some point near the end of 2018. Gone Home was on sale in February 2018 and then wasn't on sale again until April of this year, 2024. It also saw its normal price drop this year, going from £15.99 to £11.99. I promise I'll get to actually talking about the game eventually, but even its current normal price needs to be looked at. Gone Home is a walking simulator which offers, at best, four hours of content. That's one blind playthrough doing your best to take in everything naturally, then another one looking for all the creator commentary bubbles to interact with. It's a game with virtually no replay value, as once you know the story you know the story. As I'm thinking about it I realise I don't actually know what goes into pricing games, but considering the cost of other similar games (about a tenth of this when they're on sale every other month), Gone Home seems ludicrous.
Gone Home is a walking simulator where you play as Kaitlin, a 20 year old girl who's been off travelling in Europe and returns home to Oregon and an empty house. Through environmental clues and a journal left by her sister Sam, Kaitlin and the player find out what happened to her family.
It's a walking simulator so there's no gameplay besides walking around looking at things. The walking is quite slow. Even 5% faster would have been fine, but it's slow enough that I was getting frustrated on my first playthrough where I'm just wandering about exploring. That's a bad thing. Interacting with objects is tactile and oddly thoughtful. In one of the commentary bubbles one of the developers explains that during playtesting people said they felt bad about picking stuff up and then doing the usual video game thing of throwing it on the floor, so there's a 'put back' option where you can replace things where you got them. This is nice, and the sort of mechanic which makes games like this more immersive. You're more likely to treat the premise seriously if you can interact with things the way you would in reality. Probably. Would you go into a stranger's house and throw their ornaments around? Don't answer that, you'll disappoint yourself.
The game's ambient soundtrack is very good. The.... I don't remember their last name. The family have recently moved into a large, old, gothic house filled with lots of large, old, gothic house noises and sounds. As you're walking around, it feels like a real building. The game takes place at night in the rain, and the sound and occasional flash of weather through windows adds to the atmosphere. It feels real, and it feels equal parts comforting and mysterious.
Gone Home is set in 1995 and is, largely, about the life of a 17 year old girl. As a result, the social period and interests espoused within are right up my alley. Sam listens to riot grrrl music. The game uses real music from that time. Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney adds a few thoughts in the commentary mode.
I'm not actually sure how well the game does as a period piece. It features real music from the time. There are fake magazines with pictures of Kurt Cobain and Gillian Anderson on them. Sam has an original Nintendo. There are VHS tapes lying around with X-FILES SEASON 1 18-21 written on them, but I never really escaped from the feeling that I'm in 2024, playing a video game from 2013 that's set in 1995. I'm honestly not sure why. The game does a very good job of creating an immersive and real environment and the characterisation is very real even though you don't interact with them directly, but something about the time period feels like a reproduction rather than authentic.
While I was thinking about what I'd say when I was writing this game up I thought about walking simulators as a genre, how many I've played and what traits they share. I ended up realising I've actually played more games like this than I thought. I also realised that as a format they will almost always have to struggle with telling a story with multiple characters and viewpoints from a single perspective, usually discovering the story after it's happened. Can, then, a game feature (in this case) four meaningful characters who all feel legitimate? Asking questions and then answering them is very annoying so I apologise, but I think Gone Home manages it.
In addition to the journal pages you can find there are subtle clues dotted around the house which when pieced together explain more clearly what was going on in the family. You can get the gist of things with just a few bits of information, but the game strikes a fine balance of giving you information which rewards you enough to want to keep exploring to find as much of it as you can. I don't think your path for uncovering this blind is technically linear, but you can probably find 90% of this stuff just from following one clue after another, which is a good amount.
It might seem silly being at pains to avoid spoilers for something more than ten years old, but I had managed to go that length of time knowing absolutely nothing about this game, so you might too. The story is different. It's normal yet something you might not necessarily have seen in a game, or even that often in other formats. It's told well, with emotion and empathy in a way which never really becomes too preachy. It's a story about the young told from the perspective of the young which always carries a potential to be insufferable, but I don't think it ever is.
I liked the commentary mode you can activate as well. Since the game is short the commentary isn't that much longer than a regular playthrough, and it's just as interesting learning about how the game is the way it is if you're interested and enjoyed it. I remember playing Dear Esther and having no desire to listen to the commentary there even though the game is a similar length, so either I'm growing or Gone Home is miles better than at least one of its comparables.
All in all I must have waited the best part of eight years to be able to play Gone Home. I ended up engaging with it in a way I wasn't expecting and in a way I haven't done with just about everything I've played so far in 2024. I can't really say anything other than that I enjoyed this and would recommend it to everyone, and that I'm going to actively seek out similar games to it.
