Gone Home Review

Proof that bigger isn't always better.
Review by Isaac Handelman

Gone Home is a tough game to sell by description alone. Its premise is simple, but intriguing: you are Katie, a college student who returns home from her Euro trip to find that her family has vacated her house for mysterious reasons. It's your job to journey through the huge house and find the truth behind her family's disappearance.

Your task consists mainly of rifling through the items left behind by Katie's family scattered throughout the house. You'll inspect notes pinned on the refrigerator, journal entries buried in desk drawers, forgotten cassette tapes from basement storage rooms, and much, much more. Though it's immediately impressive how fully you are able to interact with the objects within Gone Home, this feature becomes one of the game's liabilities. Some objects in the home are disappointingly void of detail or purpose, and rendered with low-res textures that stand out in a game so obsessed with immersing you in its environment.

On the other hand, Gone Home succeeds brilliantly at conveying an aura of isolation. It may not be classifiable as a horror game, but wandering the creaking halls of Katie's home, completely alone, surrounded by pitch black night and a thunder storm outside is one of the most deeply unsettling gaming experiences I've ever had. The strength of Gone Home's environment is helped immensely by the game's marvelous sound design, which turns cackling thunder, soft footsteps, television static and other seemingly ordinary noises into an utterly captivating audio-visual experience. The developers smartly play on the innate human "fear of the dark" by working in some superstitions of supernatural occurrences within the house, which the player is forced to investigate.

The Fullbright Company's decision to limit themselves to a single house has allowed them to realize their setting to an extraordinary extent. The game's unrelenting focus on the house itself makes a couple of design hiccups stand out more than they normally would -- most notable is the fact that the house's floor plan is absolutely ridiculous, and would likely be scoffed at by any competent architects.

Luckily, most of the other side effects of the single-setting environment work brilliantly in Fullbright's favor. The house feels real, to an extent that is difficult to put into words. Suffice to say, it's a believable place, and it's populated with a staggering amount of detail. As you journey through the house's rooms, it can be easy to get stuck simply admiring the craftsmanship that went in to crafting this stunning environment. 

Spending all of your time dwelling on this aspect of the game would be doing it a disservice, though; one of Gone Home's greatest strengths lies in its story. The narrative itself, centering on Katie's little sister, Samantha, is nothing particularly earth-shattering, and the final revelation may disappoint those seeking a mind-blowing twist. What's impressive about Gone Home's story is how effectively it's told despite the absence of a single NPC throughout the entirety of the experience. Players slowly uncover pieces of the story by reading notes, finding codes, and listening to audio snippets wherein Sam relays personal recollections directly to Katie. Players get to know Sam extremely well over the course of the game. She becomes one of the most likable, believable video game characters of the generation, which is especially impressive given how short the experience is, clocking in at just under two hours, and the fact that the only sort of communication players have with Sam throughout the game is via audio logs.

Gone Home makes an attempt to tell some side stories revolving around Katie's parents, but neither is as engaging as the central narrative. I was interested to hear about the relationship and professional issues plaguing Katie's mother and father, and intently read every note I found regarding the secondary narratives. However, whenever I came across another link in Samanatha's story, I immediately abandoned my pursuit of the side stories to return to the far more interesting main arc -- and uncovering the conclusions to the divergent stories doesn't quite warrant a second playthrough of the game. If anything draws players back for a second helping, it'll be the draw of re-immersion into Gone Home's stellar atmosphere, not the desire to learn how Katie's parents worked through their mid-life crises. 

The game's brevity and lack of replay value may scare off potential buyers, and it's true that Gone Home's default asking price of $20 is a bit steep for a game of this length. However, don't let Gone Home's shortness alone scare you away from the experience. It's not a flawless experiment; it is an experiment, after all, and petty annoyances with the game world pop up every now and then. But Gone Home is all at once haunting and heart-warming, quiet and captivating, one-of-a-kind and brilliantly memorable.