This is my second time playing Gone Home. Steam says I last played the game in September 2014, so it’s been four years since I had thought about it much. Replaying the game, I feel the experience was ultimately quite different from my initial experience. When I first played the game, I was relatively in the dark as to what occurred in the game. And it was scary. Seriously, the atmosphere of the empty house with ominously low amounts of lighting and a confusingly large structure helped to lend this air of mysteriousness and impending danger to the environment. If I lived in that house I would be constantly terrified by the shadows.
However, upon replaying it that experience is totally lost. Just like it would be if someone had the premise spoiled before playing the game. This is certainly the sort of game you play for the story over the game play mechanics, and if you already know the story then the glamour (in the fables comics sense) which first encompasses the game when you play it is lost. To use terms from our Jenkins reading, a ludologist would most likely find little in this game worthy of much critique – the most interaction you have is picking up and item and moving it around a bit so you can look at a part that wasn’t visible previously. However, illustrative of how a mesh of the two is necessary, there is much to critique from a narratological perspective.
The story itself is relatively straightforward. It is told through two primary means – journal excerpts spoken by Sam and interactions with environmental objects. The later is where the game is more interesting to me, and where you really serve to see where the designer created little bits which provide more context to characters. For example, there was a letter on the billboard from the dad chastising his daughter for not turning off the lights but, when the player enters his rooms, the closet light is left on. It’s small, but it’s a cute point of hypocrisy that, along with his negative feedback from his father, helps to illuminate the father as a flawed but sympathetic character. It was also funny to compare the health class exams between Sam and Katie.
And aspects of the main plot are also communicated this way, such as providing mixtapes made for Sam by her love interest. This is where the game really shines, and shows a compelling way of creating environmental storytelling. This could be totally missed by simply choosing to not interact with these objects, but it provides a layer of depth and nuance whose absence would certainly negatively impact the overall experience. Such a level of interaction is what distinguishes game from film, and allows for a sense of nuance and immersion into a world which other mediums are typically not capable of.
It is quite similar to Bioshock, where little details in the world which you can observe tell you something about the people of rapture, but larger plot points are spoken to you (either over the radio or through audio logs). However, when I replayed Bioshock I certainly had a better time than I did for Gone Home because it has more depth to it’s gameplay. The gunplay in FPS genres means that the player is always doing something and engaging with the world, rather than walking around and taking the occasional action. Though I love Gone Home, this certainly does make the experience less re-playable. However, I contend that re-playability is overrated, and doesn’t necessarily contribute to the quality of the experience – that first hour I played of Gone Home back in 2014 was a better use of my time and money than many an hour I’ve such into Skyrim.
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