Gone Home

Gone Home is a call back to the first person adventure games of the past. In comparison to the bloated gimmicks and puzzles of its contemporaries, its a stripped-down experience. What’s not important is how the player interacts with the physical world, but where the player goes and what they discover. It’s a noble attempt at creating a personal tale in a market saturated by AAA games and experimental indie titles, but Gone Home is ultimately a shallow experience.

After spending the last year trekking across Europe, 23 year old Katie Greenbriar has returned home to find her parents and younger sister missing. The family has moved during Katie’s absence, making the Greenbriar homestead just as unfamiliar to her.

Boxes marked with thick marker still clutter the foyer and spare rooms. Many rooms sit unused, pitch black, and the spacious lighting barely touches some corners of the cavernous gothic mansion.

The lack of a family computer is a little unusual, even for a game set in 1995, but plenty of books and laserdiscs line numerous bookcases. VHS tapes lay haphazardly in around the living room and bedrooms. Most rooms feel suitably lived in, while others feel like they have become dumping grounds for still-packed amenties. It’s an obnoxiously large house for a family of four.

Gone Home fills us in on the past 12 months of the Greenbriar’s lives. Katie finds notes laying around the house. Some addressed to her, some personal notes passed between friends, snippets of short stories and correspondences. Certain items will trigger a voiceover by Katie’s younger sister Sam. Reading from the pages of her journal, Sam chronicles her feelings of loneliness after moving to a new town, her meeting with the intriguing Lonnie, and the change of their friendship into something more.

Sarah Grayson does a fine job portraying Sam, and it’s her narration of Sam’s journal that lends the most emotional impact to the story. Grayson affects the slight valley-girl lingo and cadence of a girl raised on 90’s television, while convincingly conveying the joy and confusion of a teenager falling in love. We hear Lonnie’s voice only twice in short, voice messages, and its a jarringly awkward performance.

Instead of being drawn through the narrative, Katie is dumped into one. Other game designers might have peppered clues to a final puzzle throughout Sam’s stories, her pages of back-and-forth communication, maybe through a small quiz requiring intimate knowledge parsed from items left behind by the family. The Fullbright Company have opted for an open-ended design; somewhat daring in the age of constant direction and hand-holding. It is up to the player whether or not they will race for the finish line, or take their time wandering the empty rooms and halls of the Greenbriar homestead.

What this also means is some players might miss the most important parts of Gone Home. The early portions of the house hold little clues to Sam and Lonnie’s early friendship, and the final moments in the attic tells the player how it all ends. The real heart of the story is hidden away.

I spent two hours playing Gone Home. Within in the first half hour I had found an important clue that led me to a secret room, then onwards to the attic, and finally to the end of the game. It was only due to my knowledge from reviews and online discussion that I knew there was more to explore. It wasn’t until my second hour, after I discovered how to get through a locked door, that I became truly interested in Gone Home’s story.

Its a fitting metaphor; the real truth is locked away. The walls of the house contain secret passage ways where forbidden feelings are hidden. Fitting, but the team at Fullbright have risked the most touching moments of their story going unnoticed.

Behind the cellar door lies another wing of the Greenbriar house. It is here Sam and Lonnie’s relationship grows from  eventually culminating in their first kiss and sexual exploration. But their enthusiasm gives way to concern as they realise their peers, and most importantly their parents, may not approve.

Together they try to express themselves creatively and emotionally in the face of conservative authoritarian figures. Of course their energy becomes misguided. Sam hides cigarettes and stolen clothes in her locker. Detention and reprimand slips are defiantly dumped in the trash. Meanwhile, Riot-Grrl posters line the walls. Copies of home-made ‘zines lie, waiting to shock the world with its brutal emotional honesty. Two teenage girls personifying the punk-feminist ideals of the mid-90’s.

Although it may be a touching, romantic tale at times, Gone Home is also awfully cliché.

It ticks all the boxes of tale of star-crossed lovers, and its characters barely rise above TV movie stereotypes .

Terrence Greenbriar is a struggling author (with an alcohol problem and a strange obsession to a certain dead president), churning out hi-fi product reviews for an electronics magazine. Of course, he feels trapped in a job which stifles his genius creativity. His fanciful and sentimental work is too highbrow for the young, no-nonsense editor, who only retains Terrence out of loyalty to the his predecessor. 

Terrence penned a few novels in his younger days, but his dream of curating a best selling series never came true. What never becomes apparent is whether or not Terrence was any good as an author. His first novel was a success, it seems, but he seems weirdly focused on sci-fi tales about saving JFK from constant assassination attempts. Instead coming off as a talented author who never got his big break, Terrance feels more like a man who had one good idea, and has failed to move on.

Even less is known about Jan Greenbriar. The family move was due to her career and her correspondence with a old college friend indicates she and Terrence are having troubles with intimacy. In response, she may be developing a relationship with a male co-worker. All of these elements feel ripped from any family-friendly drama series or telemovie. Oh, and of course the Greenbriars are devout Christians, who feel Sam’s budding love for another girl is ‘just a phase.’

However, we only get a surface understanding of the older Greenbriars, and only from Sam’s perspective. All of the information we are given about her parents is limited to what Sam or Katie might discover themselves. Sam’s journals give her depth and emotion. All we know of Jan and Terrance is they are distracted by their own lives and disapprove of Sam’s sexual orientation. Not surprisingly, its an incredibly immature perspective, where her parents are like, total spazzes and will NEVER understand her.

It seems we are supposed to gloss over several other important aspects of the Greenbriar parents. Terrence offers Sam a copy of a book to help her make friends. Katie finds another book in the library about how to connect with teenagers. Jan’s correspondence shows she is worried about Sam becoming distant. All of these point to an earnest couple who are simply struggling to understand their teenage daughter, who is going through a period of self discovery. It might indicate that her parents could learn to accept their daughter for who she is, but it also makes Sam’s midnight disappearance seem selfish and melodramatic.

And then there’s Katie; whom we control through the experience. She remains silent throughout the game. Small parcels of text occasionally accompany notable items, but they are usually nothing more than description. As the player learns what has being going on during her absence, Katie’s silence makes her appear totally unaffected. Sam says that Katie has always known about her secret. Her trust and confidence tells us it was never an issue for Katie. So what does Gone Home have to say about its characters and their situation?

Ultimately, nothing. Gone Home makes no commentary on homosexuality now or in the 90’s. Its simply family drama is equal to that of any run-of-the-mill TV series. It exists as a tale of a two teenagers falling in love and is a wasted opportunity for emotionally driven games.

Gone Home is held back by awkward design choices and a reliance on all too familiar characters. It bucks the trend of modern gaming by trying to tell a personal story, but fails to leave a lasting message with the player.