22 Jun

Gone Home

Filed under: PC Games 3 Responses

2014-06-22_00001

Coming home to a huge but empty house.

This is another one of those non-game games that have gained attention recently. Unlike, say The Stanley Parable which tries to play around with videogaming tropes, or The Path, which offers a metaphor-filled, dream-like experience, Gone Home is straight-up storytelling. It’s a very short game, probably two hours or less and there’s not much point in replaying it since it’s very linear. Spoilers will also ruin it, so I’ll only post some very brief impressions.

  • Overall I enjoyed it and found it very much worth the time. The game does succeed at evoking the right emotions. Reaching the end and working out what happened felt way more satisfying than such a simple story had any right to be.
  • At the same time, I feel that this worked only because the game toyed with my expectations and mislead me. The visuals and atmosphere suggested one kind of story. Its denouement turned out quite differently. In a way this is quite clever. Us videogamers are always primed to assume the worst. But this sure won’t work on me a second time.
  • Boy, the house sure felt big. The proportions felt off to me. Maybe houses and rooms in the United States really are this big.
  • The visuals are okay but not great. A higher degree of visual fidelity would I think have helped this game a lot, reinforcing the impression that this is a real house, as opposed to a videogame level you need to navigate.

As I said, I enjoyed this one but I feel like its a one-time thing. I would like to see more games that are just trying to tell stories, but next time perhaps fill these empty spaces with people you can interact with please?

2014-06-21_00001

There sure are a lot notes and letters littered around this house.
Written on June 22 2014 and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Gone Home”

Andy

Y’know, I’m not actually sure I would’ve wanted to interact directly with other people. Computer games have a long ways to go when it comes to immersive and believable human interactions, so I think it was rather clever for the game to use notes and recordings and journals as a proxy for human interaction.

(That said, I haven’t yet finished the game. I’m going around and exploring EVERYTHING.)

wankongyew

One of my favourite parts of Alan Wake is the beginning when you’re just exploring and interacting with people, no combat involved. So I think it can be done, it’s just a lot more expensive to do so.

Also, it’s not like telling stories by way of the stuff they leave behind is particularly new either (BioShock, Fallout 3, Dead Space). Relying on it exclusively creates plausibility problems of its own (isn’t it convenient how you find the letters and notes in just the right order when you would expect them to be randomly scattered about the house?)

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