LogFAQs > #932348396

#79





Years of release: 2013 (PC), 2016 (PS4/XB1), 2018 (Switch/iOS)
Beaten?: Yes

Ahhhh fuck I have to talk about Gone Home now.

I have this one friend - I absolutely love him like a brother and this would never change that - but man he HATES Gone Home. He's not one of these Gamergate chuds, but he played the game, didn't like it, and I think he kind of hangs out adjacent enough to the Gone Home critics to really develop a particular loathing for the game, and honestly I just decided to just go offline on Steam when I played this because I didn't want to have to deal with hearing it. I wanted to play it and make up my own mind! I think he's not really into this type of game and that's cool, but I am into this type of game sometimes.

At the same time, I do think that the praise dumped on this game by a lot of sites is just a little superlative at times? I've seen it rank really high on game of the decade articles written on sites and just a little bit of it feels like they're naming it because it's a prestige game and they want to have a good take; discussing more what the game means for the industry rather than their actual experiences playing it. I know that I am probably being unfair on this one, but the reaction to this game comes off a little weird sometimes.

My reaction was in the middle of course, although it's obviously closer to being aligned with the reviewers who consider this one of the greats. I loved Gone Home quite a bit, and admittedly playing it in 2019 was maybe not as impactful as if I had played it in 2013 - I've already played other games that have taken some of Gone Home ideas and put them to more extensive, or simply better, use, so nothing this game did was anything I hadn't seen before.

I do have to be fair to my friend here. A short, minimalist game that is about going to a house and rifling through peoples' stuff to find out the story of what's been going on in their lives is not going to be to everyone's tastes, and it takes a certain kind of person to really get sucked into it. At the same time, I do think a lot of this game's detractors are sort of refusing to be open-minded about this game's simple premise and taking for what it is, but maybe that's because this game gets overhyped and - you know what I really don't have time for this and I don't care. I didn't play this game because I care about CONTROVERSY, I played this game because I like games that are about walking around a house and looking at shit.

What I love the most about Gone Home is the care that went into designing the house itself - it feels like a really lived in location, and by the time the game was over I got really used to the house and kind of wanted to live there. So much attention to detail here - I love picking up all the little objects strewn around the house and carefully examining them, seeing all the effort put into fake food brand labels and handwritten messages and such. There's a playfulness about it, a sort of parody of everyday real life, that makes exploring every nook and cranny of the house to find stuff exciting.

The story that the game tells through all of this stuff is alright. It's cute, I like the fact that it's LGBT-related, it's nothing super special but I found myself caring more about it in the 3-4 hours of this game's runtime than I expected to, so that's saying something at least. I didn't expect to get absorbed in the game but I was by the end. Again, there are other games that have done this sort of thing better, or more extensively, but I do have to give props to Gone Home for being one of the most influential games of the 2010's; this is a sort of game that would have seemed stupid on paper ten years ago, and then Gone Home went and proved, at least to me, if not to others, that a game about looking around a house can be really interesting.

Some critics try to elevate this game to a higher form of art than other video games which I think is unnecessary, and some try to say it's not even a video game, which is stupid. It's definitely a game, and it's a really good one, if you go into it with the right mindset and you like games about looking through someone's cabinets. I'm done talking about this now.