14 DAY TRIAL // Gone Home is a title that could easily have slid towards pretentiousness or could have lacked the gameplay to be engaging, but the development team at the Fullbright Company has created a perfectly calibrated small experience that shows how well games can deal with complex feelings and incomplete stories.
At its core, the title is very simple and only asks the player to move around the house, interact with objects and gain access to a number of areas that at first are locked or blocked.
The puzzles are easy to solve, there’s no combat and the main character does not actually talk to any other present human being for the full length of the game.
Initially, Gone Home seemed too sparse to be interesting, but after I played a few audio diaries and read a couple of old letters, I wanted to know more about what happened in the house that was now devoid of life but filled to the brim with memories.
The best way to approach the game is to be slow and pay attention to the little details scattered around, looking around all the available space, but with no urgency.
The story, which involves an entire family and their ancestors, comes to light in bits and pieces and it will be some time before it all makes sense.
The house itself is a work of art, with carefully selected details that evoke the ‘90s while also keeping the player focused on the relationship between the two main characters, one of which never physically appears in the game.
Gone Home is also a game that encourages the player to take to his group of friends or to the Internet in order to create and test hypotheses about some of its murkier aspects and there’s still one element that the developers have not offered an explanation for, as far as I know.
This title earns its category's Game of the Year award because it shows how games can be non-violent and still captivate the imagination.