Game: “Gone Home”, iOS
Narrative Elements
“Gone Home” is an embedded narrative where the player navigates around her family’s new home in attempts to uncover a mystery about where her family has disappeared after her year abroad. Immediately, the narrative tone supports the mystery through elements like the unsettling and ominous pouring rain sounds on the porch. The access to a luggage tag and passport to learn more about the first person narrator’s character was also immediately exciting and evocative. Once I was able to enter the house, finding the document in the foyer that led to the sister’s journal entry was another narrative moment that pulled me into the story and piqued my curiosity to continue uncovering the mystery of “who is my family?”, “where have they gone?”, “where have I been?”, “why did I leave?” — all questions that would pull me in to continue the game.
Skill Development and Interaction Loops
The game developers encourage the player to develop a simple “skill chain”, per Daniel Cook’s framework, in the first segment of the game on the porch, giving the player, guiding the player to learn how to walk, angle their camera, crouch, and select objects before they can reach the house key to essentially start the game. The player goes through a skill development cycle, starting with a “mental model” from the brief tutorial screen, making “decisions” to walk, “apply the action” of picking up the duck, “receive feedback” by finding the key, and eventually “update my mental model” that I will need to combine simple interactions into “compound actions” to find clues.
The game mechanics to move around and investigate objects was frustrating as a novice video game player. This prohibited me from exploring far even after a reasonably length play session. I repeatedly had trouble walking around the space, angling my camera angle correctly, picking up and putting down objects, and more. I found the very simplistic horizontal and vertical scroll mechanics of “A Sailor’s Dream”, which I played for my walking sim Critical Play, to be much more intuitive, but, alas, also much less rich with independence and mystery. Gone Home’s narrative enticed me and encourages me to continue playing the game in hopes the mechanics will become more familiar and will be transferrable to other iOS walking sim games.
