Introduction
Gone Home is a short, sweet, melancholic, and a tiny bit scary mystery game. You play as Katie, just having arrived back to a completely empty house, and prominently features Katie’s sister Sam and her gay love story (which is told to Katie by Sam though a series of artifacts you find as you wander the dim home). The atmosphere of the game was clearly inspired by the genre of horror, although the game itself isn’t a horror game (it’s just as dark and creepy as any innocuous old house, and evokes that feeling).
Formal Elements + MDA
- Objective: While the game doesn’t give an explicit objective from the start (you simply arrive at home, having just returned with some short notice from your trip), the house is empty, and it is dark and rainy outside; and it quickly becomes clear that the objective is to find out what happened to your family, the people who once lived here.
- Players: Fully single-player.
- Boundaries: For the player, this may be the game screen and the controllers; within the game itself, the boundary is the house the avatar finds herself in (the exterior doors don’t work in a sort of extradiegetic way; Katie simply won’t open them).
- Resources: The player begins with just some information about Katie’s return trip, and not much else; it expands to include various progression items Katie picks up (things like keys and locker combos), and any miscellany scattered around the house to read, view, interact with, etc.
- Procedures: Players walk around the house, poking at the various closets, drawers, desks, etc. and inspecting objects around the house, until an object of particular importance to Sam is discovered; these reveal the story as you find them,
- Rules: Most objects in the house are interactable in some way; the player may interact with these objects to either inspect them or cause things to happen (e.g. a light to turn on or off, a door to be unlocked, etc). Aside from that, the player can simply walk around the house.
- Outcomes: Reveal Sam’s story and learn more about what happened to the family. At the end, you find a cache of letters from Sam to you.
Gone Home is primarily a narrative game with elements of discovery, the latter acting as a medium through which the former is told. This game is a capital-E Embedded story, the narrative unfolding itself through your exploration of the house and discovery of important objects.
Weaving Mechanics, Narrative, and Mystery together
Gone Home is a game with multiple narratives going on at once– the story of Sam, most obviously, but also the story of Sam and Katie’s parents, Sam and Katie’s relationship, the history of the house and their family…. Gone Home, and some of my favorite games (Kentucky Route Zero comes to mind) create this intertwining narrative mesh with what is, in my opinion, a clever (and extremely effective!) optical illusion: by breaking the story up into fragments, and hinting at deeper truths behind the surface, players get to use their imaginations to fill in all the gaps and twine bits of story together in a way that’s as cohesive as it needs to be. Personally, I think this method is brilliant: it feels cerebral, it makes the player feel smart as they grasp at what could be happening and start piecing it together; it accentuates the mystery by moving the broad picture just out of reach, but giving enough pieces of fine detail that we can start to puzzle that broad picture together, or catch glimpses of it; it is well-supported by mechanics, as these fragments of story become “tangible” fragmentary pieces of miscellany scattered around the house; and, very importantly, the story is no less for presenting itself this way. I call it an optical illusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake or somehow “tricking” the player into thinking the story has more merit than it does: in fact, I fully believe that there is one “right answer,” one cohesive story to underlay that, and the amount of creative fortitude it must take to be willing to take such an intricate tapestry and unrecoverably bury much of it out of reach of the player in unimaginable to me. By doing this, though, taking that tapestry and tearing off very particular fragments and placing them into the game as physical items that relay bits and pieces of the underlying story, they were able to create a mystery out of the narrative and inextricably intertwine them, and materialize the mystery in the core mechanics of the game (walking around and… finding fragments of story in the items you find while walking around). In this way, I feel like Gone Home is an extremely “pure” version of what this could be– the metaphors used at the level of the mystery and narrative are actualized in the mechanics with very little additional abstraction, and this works well for Gone Home. The game designers chose to have one story (Sam’s story) be much more explicit, and I think this was also brilliant– it gives the player something concrete to hold onto and drive them forward while the rest of the items in the game fill in a background image to underlay the main storyline, and gives the player a sense of concrete progression as they uncover Sam’s story, crystallizing the looping experience of searching through the house and locating interesting things in each room into a sequence of arcs that pay off with a snippet from Sam at the end of each of them. Without this, the game would simply stop whenever the player decides they have a good enough idea of what’s going on, with no concrete end to the mystery– this also helps establish the narrative as intertwined with the game itself, as they start and end in the same place– even if the mystery outlasts the end of Sam’s story, as many questions are left unanswered, and outlasts the concrete start and end points of the game, too.
