Game Introduction
This week, I played Gone Home, a first-person mystery video game that seems to be for players of mature enough age to understand implied sexual abuse. The game was published by The Fulbright Company and I bought and played the game on Steam. The target audience seems to be mystery-lovers and those who like narrative as the main playing point of a game.
Important Formal Elements
In the game, you, the player, are able to walk around using keyboard and look around using your mouse. As you explore, you’ll find trinkets and notes which you are able to pick up by clicking and examine more closely using the mouse. Players can also open doors and turn on lights and lamps. When you encounter particular notes, an audio will play voiced by Sam, the player’s younger sister, and that journal entry will be added to the player’s backpack. Picking up particular trinkets like keys will also add them to the player’s backpack. There seems to be one large arc in the narrative with many loops — the player continues to open doors and explore, and I think with each room the player is able to update their mental model of what the game is trying to be (a horror game? a mystery? what kind of information is being given/available?) and so the player is able to move through many loops that way.
Type of Fun → Discovery and Narrative
As the player explores more and more of the house, they are rewarded with more and more bits of narrative to piece together who exactly their family is and what they are hiding. Narrative is the main selling point of the game, as most reviewers find pieces of themselves or experience some nostalgia at the game plot. The game’s embedded narrative is found out through the spatial environment, and each element or material we find brings something to the story. This game definitely met its goal for these types of fun.
Moments of Success and Failure
I thought the narrative came at a very smooth pace — I felt like I was always in reach of learning something new. The narrative between Sam and Lonnie made me smile, and I thought the rate at which I learned about their relationship and where I found certain pieces of the narrative was clever. Secret passages and secret compartments… it all showed me what kind of relationship they had and how it developed, which I thought was a clever use of the environment by the directors. I was, however, very scared in the beginning because of the environment that had been set. I thought this was going to be a scary horror game with jumpscares and was so tense to the point I had to search it up and see if there were going to be any jumpscares. I found that when I was worrying so much about the horror aspect of it, I started skipping over important rooms or hallways because I was terrified of what might jump out, which in turn led to me skipping some narrative points early on that I came back to later on. I think there’s a good balance overall of the narrative exploration + the tense environment they set it in, but I found that the tense environment took away from the experience for me at least in the very beginning. I’m wondering I would have been more receptive to the narrative if that had been taken away.
Signing off,
Annabelle
