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Metacritic Game Reviews, Gone Home for Switch, June 7, 1995. You arrive home after a year abroad. You expect your family to greet you, but the house is empty. Something's n. Imagine arriving home fresh from a year abroad to find your house empty, where is your family and what events have happened? These are the answers you’ll find as you explore your abandoned home. Pegged as interactive exploration experience Gone Home is set in a decade long past, 1995. Playing as the young Kaitlin Greenbriar you’ll land in your home town of Oregon with a keenness to meet.
This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Two things you need not worry about while reading this review are spoilers or me jumping into the asinine debate about whether or not Gone Home is a game. With those bases covered, let’s talk about what different types of gamers may take away from the Gone Home experience.
Bookworms – If you love storytelling at the forefront of your games, Gone Home will certainly answer the mail for you. What I can’t tell you definitively is whether or not you will enjoy this particular journey. The entire game’s narrative is driven by looking at and listening to the world through the eyes and ears of the main and supporting characters. I found the overarching story to be extremely engaging early in the game. Unfortunately, the climax of the story was far stronger than the ending. I also found myself often wanting to skip through the parts that weren’t related to the main story.
Explorers – Exploring Gone Home’s world was where I had my most fun. Discovering the next piece and direction of the story simply by traversing the world in front of me was very gratifying–when what I was discovering was actually interesting (see my previous comment about skipping subplots). It was this sense of discovery that propelled me to play the game entirely in one sitting.
Audiophiles – On the sonic side of the house, you’ve got superb voice acting mixed with a perfectly fitting native soundtrack. I stress the word ‘native’ because there are other opportunities to experience music in Gone Home that are not quite as enjoyable as the organic soundtrack. In fact, I found some of them downright grating.
Visualists – Perhaps what sells Gone Home’s story best is the intelligent use of the third person camera. I’m not a film guy, so I don’t know the technical terms for the camera trickery that’s going on in game. Just know that the developers use it very well to sell some of the more dramatic scenes (especially the final scene).
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Tourists – Gone Home is a quick game to finish. If you prefer your gaming experiences to come in at under five hours, you may have found your match.
Verdict – Gone Home is hard for me to bottom line. On the one hand, I heavily enjoyed the story right up until what I felt was a less memorable and somewhat telegraphed ending. But, this is coming from someone who does not score heavily in our bookworm category. At the very end of it, I’m glad I had the experience so that I could see what everyone was so fired up about. But, I also could have watched someone else play it on YouTube and been almost as satisfied save for the lack of exploration. I think it was an excellent start to what will hopefully become more consistently engaging narrative-driven games in the future.
Even a good day and a half after finishing Gone Home, it's still hard to know what to say about it. It's unlike anything I've ever played. I will warn you right away that it's a very, very short game.
If your favorite part of Skyrim was the dollars-to-hours equation at the end of the game, Gone Home is not for you.With that said, it's a unique, interesting game that pushes the boundaries of what games can be about, plays with the expectations that come with that, and accomplishes something genuinely memorable in the process.Gone Home starts in the entryway of a mansion known as Arbor House. You play as Katie Greenbriar. A note from your sister is all you have as you enter an empty house. While you were spending a year abroad, your family moved into a new home; you enter a strange place filled with familiar things trying to figure out just what went on to leave the house in the disarrayed state you find it. Please Don't Shoot Up the PlaceGone Home, as short as it is, has a single, simple mechanic that just about anyone can pick up: first person exploration.
As Kaitlin, you move from room to room, digging through drawers and closets, rifling through papers, looking for something.The simplicity of the controls—WASD keys and the mouse's right and left buttons are about it—make it a good entry point for people with less interest in games, while also accomplishing everything they need to deliver the full game experience.Few games are as singular about the narrative as Gone Home, while simultaneously exerting so little control over the way the player approaches that narrative. With a few exceptions, the whole house is open from the beginning. Even then, option menus allow you to unlock the doors from the start, though I don't recommend that.Each room you explore has something to add to the story and if you are willing to put the pieces of the puzzle together—the metaphorical puzzle, there aren't really any puzzles to speak of in the game—the order you explore the rooms in doesn't matter much. Those Horrific Creaking FloorboardsWith such a short game, it's hard to avoid going into spoilers when nearly everything you do in the game is a spoiler.
The dark, creaking house of Gone Home played with my expectations of what a game can be about.The house is absolutely, convincingly real, from the way things are laid out to the noises the house makes. Just like in a real, dark house, the question of 'what's around the next corner?' Always hovered in the back of my mind. Over and over I searched frantically for a light switch in what was, by everything I'd seen so far, an empty room in an empty house.I felt a strange sense of voyeurism, too, as I went through this unfamiliar place. As I picked up items, they were often labeled with Katie's thoughts rather than the name of the object; this isn't a mug, it is dad's mug.
And so, with my family gone, I'm going through their things, reading their notes. I found my dad's skin magazines in one room and the combination to my sister's locked closet in another.This all collectively made me feel uncomfortable, like an intruder in my own house, and every noise the house made, regardless of how innocent it might be, reminded me of that.
Meet my Video Game Family, the GreenbriarsThe real meat of the game is what you find as you explore and, again, it's difficult to avoid spoilers. Each member of Katie's family has, as you would expect, a real life and a past; both are on display as you walk around.The sister, Samantha, is right in the middle of high school.
Schoolwork is strewn about her floor, along with some Super Nintendo games (the game is set in 1995, though it doesn't club you over the head with it like so many other games and movies like this do). The father has copies of his published novels lying around.As I pieced things together, I quickly stopped seeing video game characters and started seeing people I know. The members of the Greenbriar family have been through things that people in my family and circle of friends have been through. These people aren't Nathan Drake or Andrew Ryan, but people that feel startlingly real.You do eventually find out what's going on, though it's never shouted in your face.
If you're not looking, characters' entire stories can fall by the wayside, making the game surprisingly replayable for such a short, focused game. Once I'd finished the main story, going back through the house a second time felt very different. The feel of rooms changed entirely.
BUYGone Home will stick with me for a long time.DISCLAIMER: We purchased Gone Home for PC via Steam with personal funds. We completed the game before starting the review.Gone Home is to action games as independent drama films are to blockbuster action extravaganzas. It's not the sort of thing you'd play to escape, but rather something to explore someone's experience and how you feel about it, how it reflects on your own life.Gone Home will stick with me for a long time. The style and execution are fresh and push games in interesting directions. It tells a succinct, human story that just about anyone can find something of themselves in, and delivers the story incredibly well.
This has been a great year for games delivering on their emotional potential, and Gone Home is another step forward. Eric FrederiksenEric Frederiksen has been a gamer since someone made the mistake of letting him play their Nintendo many years ago, pushing him to beg for his own, and it's been downhill ever since.
Eric takes a multifaceted approach to gaming news and reviews, mixing business analysis, cultural studies, tech and design. Eric has written for outlets like TechnoBuffalo.com, Playboy.com, TabTimes.com, and Kombo.com. In his free time, Eric perfects his napping technique and pursues the elusive perfect cheeseburger.
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