Gone Home

[IamLEAM1983]

For a few years now, we've been seeing developers attempt to use the electronic medium to tell stories that run deeper than what we're accustomed to. I'm not referring to high-budget gameplay-fests with lofty philosophical or ideological discourse woven through their structure, but rather to what's usually the fare of mods or indie projects that thrive in the darker, less obnoxious corners of YouTube's Let's Players and gameplay commentators. Yes, games like BioShock Infinite or even Saints Row IV are important in their own right seeing as they manifest the industry's prosperous and professional side – but there's always room for developers like Frictional, thechineseroom or Chris Hecker's two-person team.

In some cases, what's attempted is more a narrative experiment than an exercise in budget gameplay. In this regard, I'd mention Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable as examples of games that use standard engines and game-dev tropes in new and unsuspected ways.

Sometimes, you end up with things that aren't quite games but that still tease the brain. If you're lucky, the sometimes Byzantine design won't come off as pretentious and you'll end with something that'll touch your heart, or maybe educate you about an issue you might not have been familiar with, otherwise. There's other cases where games turn into little time capsules, propelling you back to periods and eras that mean something to you.

Gone Home, produced by former BioShock team members who went on to found The Fullbright Company, is one of those games, and it's a piece of software I'd stick in the hands of anyone who's interested in studying Sexology, Social Studies in general, or the family-related implications of certain profound and life-altering experiences.

Rest assured, though – it also has its light moments. So what is Gone Home, exactly?

It's a story that puts you in the shoes of Kaitlin Greenbriar, a fresh-faced twenty year-old who's just recently returned home after a year spent backpacking across Europe. The date is June 6, 1995, the time is 1:15 AM; and you've missed the fact that your parents and sister have moved in a new house during your absence. You're essentially stepping in a residence that's unknown to you, inexplicably deserted and yet filled with all the little markers and keepsakes that chart both your life, and three other lives Kaitlin is familiar with. In a rather ominous touch, your sister Samantha's left a note on the door, telling you that she's leaving, apologizing for it and urging you not to look for her.

Inside, the house is pitch-black. In a bit of a reflex-subverting touch, the game outright tells you that there is no cause for alarm. Gone Home is a game without ghouls, men with guns, grinning psychopaths or otherwise dangerous beings, so that heavy darkness that's greeting you isn't much more than the result of a quick dash of a few family members out the door. With your sister gone God knows where, your parents have also left the house – leaving you alone in a house that's been seemingly locked down for extended leave.

Seeing as you've missed a year, you've missed quite a bit of your parents' and sister's lives. You'll find postcards here and there suggesting that Kaitlin kept in touch regularly, but there's no evidence of reciprocated contact. This is 1995, after all, and your protagonist doesn't have an overseas cell phone plan – much less a cell phone to begin with. The only way you'll be able to make out most of anything in the Greenbriar residence is through copious snooping. Like in 3D adventure games, the meat of the gameplay involves opening doors and flicking switches, conquering one very mild navigational puzzle. You'll comb through 90s memorabilia for clues as to what made your relatives leave the house in a funk, certain objects or sheets of paper triggering narrations from your seventeen year-old sister.

Considering, Gone Home's strengths are in the level design, the cultural research that's in play, along with the tremendously effective and emotional voice acting. Turns out your sister is going through a bit of a period of self-discovery, while your uncle – to whom the house used to belong – is the subject of a supernatural plot point that's barely grazed or touched.

In this, though, I found that there was a bit of a problem with the game's sense of Self, a tonal dichotomy of sorts. See, the game leaves you parked in front of your new home on a stereotypically dark and stormy night, and the title screen's heavy use of purples and the Greenbriar residence's many gables all combine to give the first few layers of the experience a sort of “Gothic Horror Lite” feel. Vague cues regarding poltergeist investagions or previous hauntings are dropped, so you'll end up preparing yourself for a fittingly ghoulish payoff – only for the game to discreetly perform a bait-and-switch and redirect its entire debate on a much more realistic and important issue. I have nothing against it, but if the whole “Big Creaky House in a Thunderstorm” thing is rendered moot, then why use those tropes in the first place? Why pepper the place with vague clues regarding a dead relative and a Ouija board?

There's a moment in the game that's an apt metaphor for precisely this. You're sleuthing along in the top floor and find the master bathroom. Immediately, your brain adds a dramatic violin sting to the scene at the sight of a red stain against the bathtub and on the floor! Oshit, it's a crime scene! Someone's been murdered and there's a psycho in the house! THE DEAD UNCLE ISN'T REALLY DEAD AND OHGOD HE'S A PSYCHO AND ALL THE CREAKS I'VE BEEN HEARING ARE PRODUCED BY HIM AND HE'S RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER LIKE SLENDER MAN ONLY HE'S GOT A HATCHET OR SOMETHING, AND -

And then you find a bottle near the bathtub. It's an empty dose of red hair dye.

Oh.That vaguely haunted atmosphere the game managed to cultivate until now? All gone. If the transition was immediate, I wouldn't mind. Thing is, it isn't. Depending on what you've explored in the house or where you've been, you might have a very clear idea of the recent proceedings of your family members or be completely clueless for several corridor-crawling moments longer. You might flounder, asking yourself “Well, what now?”

If the game's destroyed its own aspirations of ghastly underpinnings and has to somehow tie one of the three phone calls you'll find on the family's answering machine to something, what does it do? What can it do?

Whoops, Social Commentary incoming!

The thing is, Gone Home wears its honest and laudable intentions on its sleeves, once you understand what its actual message is shaping out to be. The house is littered with cassette tapes and a curiously high amount of individual casette recorders, both of which are used to momentarily replace the thunderclaps and the rain's pitter-patter with Riot Grrl-scene performances. Behind the happy tedium of the Greenbriar family's lively mess is a tale of pain, growth, emancipation and self-discovery that might feel a little too obvious for anyone who has no problem with the LGBT scene's oftentimes painful roots and who doesn't need a masterclass on how coming out of the closet can involve cutting some ties that run particularly deep. It's touching – especially in its conclusion – but I'm sure most open-minded guys and gals playing this in 2013 would shrug and ask “Yeah, so? I know this girl who's a lesbian, and her parents are totally cool with it!”

Considering, Sam Greenbriar's tale of teenage love culminating in her running off with her darling feels a bit excessive, maybe just a tad maudlin; and I'd have to add that the premise feels a bit naïve. Teenage love is still teenage love, no matter if you're one guy and a gal or two gals holding hands and exchanging quiet I-love-yous. By that, I mean that it's poignant, yes, but also immature. The game is quick to paint Kat and Sam's parents as being in denial about their youngest's sexuality, pushing that angle so far as to come close to demonizing them. Unfortunately, denial is a common reaction to discovering that the person who's biologically expected to carry your legacy forward won't do exactly that. All we ever see is Sam's side of the equation, and her growing resentment of “the Patriarchy” as well as the fact that her own parents can't simply come to grips with her feelings for Lonnie. Kat finds Riot Grrl tracts Sam got suspended for distributing at her high school, and the triggered narration fails to show any understanding of the fact that Feminism is like everything else in life : it has degrees, and moderation needs to be applied. Female emancipation is all well and good, but treating most masculine figures of authority as being inherently noxious is – well – it's patently unfair.

At the same time, you could argue this only increases the nineties-ness of Gone Home. The decade has permeated every floorboard and every VHS tape you'll find in the residence, as the father of the family is an X-Files aficionado, while Sam has the famous I want to Believe poster in her bedroom. You'll find three-ring binders and folders in kitschy neon, plenty of old CRT televisions with the dual-audio and single-video plugs clearly visible (SD resolutions included) and something like a slew of old research papers and high-school written assignments eluding to the fact that a certain someone got up, left home and hit the library. There's no academic database entries in the bibliography, no evidence of Internet searches – Sam has a few Indie Rock magazines, including one that apparently dates from the very week Kurt Cobain died – it's all endearingly authentic. It reminded me of my childhood home and its own stacks of VHS tapes, my own former reliance on analog forms of entertainment : shelves packed with comic book boxes, or the aspiring novelist of a father's expansive library... Sam even makes a few passing references to her meeting Lonnie thanks to Street Fighter and their respective Super Nintendo consoles. Dig around Sam's room and you'll find the button prompts for a few of Chun Li's moves, jotted down on paper the way we used to do before the Internet made everything instantly available.

Above all, however, Gone Home transcends its own indecisions and sometimes sophomoric characterizations and creates a living, breathing place. Well, it's more of a snapshot of a living place – a moment frozen in time where the Parental Units took off for the weekend and the youngest maybe just absconded with a few VCRs and a Laserdisc player – possibly to hawk them off and pay for her Thelma & Louise-esque romp with Lonnie towards parts unknown. You're the outsider looking in, the real ghost of the equation, staring at individual bits and pieces that come together to assemble lives you've all but stopped being a part of. Sam obviously envies Kaitlin's greater freedom and you can acutely feel that envy, that very teenage desire for more.

In the end, it's a touching if perhaps naïve tale that lets out several inconveniently sordid potential outcomes to focus on earned freedom and self-expression. Some aspects of its ideological tenets might feel a bit extreme for any person who has two brain cells to spare and nothing against alternative couples; but it's hard not to consider these potentially excessive aspects as being part of the decade's alternative cultures. The nineties weren't exactly sunshine and roses for the LGBT community, but does that honestly warrant lashing out against people who just happen to be part of more traditional models of authority? It isn't because a high school's principal is male and orders a Riot Grrl concert to take place elsewhere that he's a Patriarchy-supporting asshat. His refusal can be misguided, but flat-out condemning someone for their ignorance feels short-sighted. Education matters far more than aggressive defence.

But – I'll admit I was raised in a progressive context. The whole “gay/lesbian” thing was never an issue around our table as we simply accepted them as-is. Maybe those persons who really do need to go through a period of sexual uncertainty end up experiencing something as unpleasant as open discrimination – but I've worked with gay colleagues who didn't feel ostracized in the least. Considering, wanton aggression isn't necessary.

Maybe the nineties sang a different tune and I simply never noticed, being too young.

[IamLEAM1983]

Let's say you're an idiot who can't make his brain work while gaming. Let's say someone gives you a Steam key for Gone Home. Who wants to play a shitty game about introspection and alternative sexuality and nineties nostalgia and shit, huh? Nostalgia's for fags and queers, yo.

Thanks to Dorkly, you can star as Katie Greenbriar - freshly returned from Iraq with a duffel bag full of guns. Quick, your house has been overrun by Nazis for some reason, and you need nine keycards to unlock the attic and KILL HITLER. HNNNG. THE NOSTALGIA, MAN. I'M SO FUCKING PUMPED! GUNS AND NAZIS AND NOSTALGIA AND STREET FIGHTER II REFERENCES! SAY WHAAAAAAT.

This is Gun Home, and it's obviously nothing but a pure parody. I gotta admit I do dig the jab at IGN at the end of the video, though - they mostly snubbed the actual project that came out of ex-Irrational and 2K employees while giving BioShock Infinite fairly unreal amounts of praise. I stand by my own review of the game and it is phenomenal, but I'd be blinding myself if I didn't admit the mechanics are kinda rote.

http://www.dorkly.com/video/58404/gun-h ... @jschreier