gone home
Gone Home is a narrative that defies its genre expectations to create a story that slowly creeps up on the player, leaving them a different person to who they were when they began. Let me explain: Gone Home is a first-person story exploration game released in 2013 by Fullbright. Released at a time when narrative games and walking simulators were still a thing it was much debated by the video game community. Can games be art? Is it still a game if there is barely any gameplay? What does it mean in a game when the narrative is at the forefront? What kind of stories can games tell?
Full spoilers follow
Gone Home's narrative is communicated through the environment: the objects and written notes you interact with as you explore an abandoned house. You play as a young woman, returning home after a year abroad to find a note pinned to the front door from your little sister asking you not to go looking for her or go "digging about". Once you find the key and let yourself in you discover your old home had been sold and everything packed up. Your parents and sister are nowhere to be found. It's the middle of the night, there is a raging storm outside complete with thunderclaps and flashes of lightning, the lights are all turned off. In front of you there is an imposing staircase and closed off doors either side. Everywhere looks unwelcoming. It's the set-up to any classic horror film.
It's up to you what you do next. If you're like me you'll want to stop playing the game immediately because you don't like horror games and the thunderclaps are making you physically jump every few seconds. But you persevere because you heard somewhere that this is a good game, that there is a good story here. And there is, what starts as a horror exploration game slowly morphs into a different story altogether. As you explore you uncover documents and journal entries from your sister, Sam, which are read aloud to you — there are cryptic hints at something wrong in the house, the suggestion of a ghost and secret passageways hidden in its ramshackle corridors. It is a horror story written in your own head. You continue to search the house, opening up new rooms, and slowly you uncover more of the story. You begin to piece together a different narrative: you learn that your sister made a new friend after you went away, Lonnie, another girl from school. You learn that they fall in love, tentatively and quickly the way only teenagers can. You learn more about your little sister than you ever knew, you learn that Sam and Lonnie's relationship was not received well by your parents. That Lonnie had to leave.
In the closing sections of the game you ascend into the attic — after trawling through a house overcome with nostalgia (set in 1996, cassette tapes and riot grrrl references abound) — there are gently glowing lights leading your way, no more the harsh flashes of lightning and jumpscares. The story of the house has utterly changed, recontextualised by the information you now have. It's no longer something to be feared but a repository of melancholy, the remains of your sister's story, her love and her loss. The power of this story, this shift in genre from horror to teenage love caught me off guard when I first played it, no other narrative has had this effect on me (except perhaps Guillermo del Toro's The Orphanage which similarly moved me from fear to sadness). This is Gone Home's greatest achievement: that it draws you into a story you think you know (haunted house, horror) and through only contextual clues, the environment and a beautiful score, changes the tone so completely.
The final twist to the end of Gone Home is that your sister's absence may not be something to be mourned after all but rather celebrated as a new kind of story started. By the end you will walk each room with familiarity, you will have learnt the layout of the house as surely as if it was your own, you will look at each passageway with fondness and feel the same sadness at having to leave it. In the end, the story of Gone Home is not one of horror, but loss and longing for a home you didn't realise was gone until you left.
Gone Home is available on PC, Mac, PS4 and XBOX ONE