Gone Home

A 2013 game about a young woman exploring her now-deserted family home, Gone Home has been pretty controversial back in the day, being one of the first video games classified as the dreaded “Walking Simulators.” Now that I’ve played it, it’s weirdly better in terms of actual gameplay but worse in terms of central plot than I’d expected it to be.

So the game is not just “hold forward to win while listening to some pretentious narration” like too many of its successors were. It’s really atmospheric, you have to do some exploring even if it ultimately boils down to “go everywhere and interact with everything”, and it’s no worse in terms of kinetic gameplay or lack thereof than say, the classic PC adventure Myst. That’s the good part. It’s still just a short fun experience but there’s substance to it.

The not so good part is that the “secret” hidden is a melodramatic teen drama where I saw every twist and development coming despite not really knowing the game before I played it. The first world problems of upper-middle class America here just aren’t that intriguing.

That said, I have to give this a positive overall score. It is better than the firebreathers have made it out to be.