Game Review - Gone Home: Console Edition
Dustin Nichols
2016-11-14
PS4 - Playstation Network
Thank you DUSTIN NICHOLS for the wonderful review!
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Gone Home is a first-person adventure game from the Fullbright Company, a small game developer based in the pacific northwest. The game takes place in 1995 and you play a college student named Kaitlin returning home to her parents (her father Terry, a sci-fi writer, and her mother Janice, a wildlife conservationist), only to find they are not home, and the house is in disarray, with the family having moved recently. On the door, she finds a note from her younger sister Sam, telling her not to investigate what has happened.
At this point, you enter the house and do exactly what Sam told you not to, investigating every nook and cranny of the sprawling house, trying to find answers as to exactly what is going on. Throughout the house, as Kaitlin, you find various documents, drawings, mix tapes and more, each giving you clues to mystery at hand. As you find key pieces, you unlock entries from Sam's journal, with her reciting them to you in a narrative. Each journal entry gets you closer to the answer to what's going on, specifically Sam's disappearance.
The game is very simple, and absolutely anyone who plays it can beat it. That is by design. The folks at Fullbright were more interested in telling a poignant story that every player could see through to the end, regardless of skill level. The result is a game that isn't so much a game but almost a visual novel. The controls are very simple, with everything mapped to only a couple of buttons with movement and camera attached to the thumbsticks.
The graphics won't blow you away, but again, they're not meant to. This is supposed to resemble someone's actual house, so the graphics are very simple, yet elegant. And audio is minimal at best, with only a bit of ambient music, Sam's narrative and the music from the cassette tapes you find to guide you (you are not required to listen to the tapes, but it does help to break up the silence).
I won't spoil the story, but I understand why Fullbright wanted to tell it, and as someone who has lived with/around people who have experienced very similar things to what Sam has gone through, I greatly appreciate the message they were trying to get across. It's definitely not the story I was expecting, either. That alone gets this game a recommendation from me. Having said that, I was a bit disappointed with the overall amount of content. I wasn't expecting a game that would take up a massive amount of time, but I also wasn't expecting a game I could literally beat in two hours. Although not an expensive game for consumers (it'll run you about $20), I still don't feel like I got my money's worth. There is a slight amount of incentive to replay it if you're a trophy hunter, but not much; I have never seen a game with such a small amount of trophies to collect (and one I will never get for sure, because I'm pretty sure I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of competing the game in under a minute, even knowing where the necessary items are), and I definitely think a bit more could have been done to incentivize the player to go into repeated plays.
Still, I loved the story and can identify with it on a personal level, which I think is what Fullbright was really going for (their next game, Tacoma, is looking to go a similar route). I think it's an important story and one a lot of players could benefit from hearing. On that note, I can recommend it, as long as you know what you are getting into. Just don't expect to invest too much time, because the content isn't there.
At this point, you enter the house and do exactly what Sam told you not to, investigating every nook and cranny of the sprawling house, trying to find answers as to exactly what is going on. Throughout the house, as Kaitlin, you find various documents, drawings, mix tapes and more, each giving you clues to mystery at hand. As you find key pieces, you unlock entries from Sam's journal, with her reciting them to you in a narrative. Each journal entry gets you closer to the answer to what's going on, specifically Sam's disappearance.
The game is very simple, and absolutely anyone who plays it can beat it. That is by design. The folks at Fullbright were more interested in telling a poignant story that every player could see through to the end, regardless of skill level. The result is a game that isn't so much a game but almost a visual novel. The controls are very simple, with everything mapped to only a couple of buttons with movement and camera attached to the thumbsticks.
The graphics won't blow you away, but again, they're not meant to. This is supposed to resemble someone's actual house, so the graphics are very simple, yet elegant. And audio is minimal at best, with only a bit of ambient music, Sam's narrative and the music from the cassette tapes you find to guide you (you are not required to listen to the tapes, but it does help to break up the silence).
I won't spoil the story, but I understand why Fullbright wanted to tell it, and as someone who has lived with/around people who have experienced very similar things to what Sam has gone through, I greatly appreciate the message they were trying to get across. It's definitely not the story I was expecting, either. That alone gets this game a recommendation from me. Having said that, I was a bit disappointed with the overall amount of content. I wasn't expecting a game that would take up a massive amount of time, but I also wasn't expecting a game I could literally beat in two hours. Although not an expensive game for consumers (it'll run you about $20), I still don't feel like I got my money's worth. There is a slight amount of incentive to replay it if you're a trophy hunter, but not much; I have never seen a game with such a small amount of trophies to collect (and one I will never get for sure, because I'm pretty sure I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of competing the game in under a minute, even knowing where the necessary items are), and I definitely think a bit more could have been done to incentivize the player to go into repeated plays.
Still, I loved the story and can identify with it on a personal level, which I think is what Fullbright was really going for (their next game, Tacoma, is looking to go a similar route). I think it's an important story and one a lot of players could benefit from hearing. On that note, I can recommend it, as long as you know what you are getting into. Just don't expect to invest too much time, because the content isn't there.
