Gone home is a walking simulator video game made by the studio Fullbright. The game is available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox, iOS, Steam, and more. It follows the story of a girl that arrives home from being abroad to find her family’s house empty. The player must explore the house and uncover clues to discover where her family has gone. The target audience of Gone home is people that like mystery and family drama, and the game is likely to be engaging to young adults that have also come home to their families after being abroad or away at school. True to the nature of walking simulators, Gone home builds narrative through the player’s interaction with space. The ultimate purpose of this narrative is to solve the main mystery of the game: Where did the main character’s family go? Although it may be easy to overlook this game’s use of space, setting is imperative to the structure of Gone home. The space of Gone home’s game setting is used to mediate the collection of clues, which come in the form of physical game resources and control the pace and extent to which players can uncover the mystery of the game.
The architecture of the Gone home’s setting is complex and intriguing. As a player, you begin at the doorstep of what you assume is your house. However, it’s soon revealed to you that this is a house that your family just moved into. It is an unfamiliar place to both the player and the character, and could contain any number of surprises. The house is littered with cardboard boxes and papers, and walking through this space uncovers the mystery of the game. Most of the lights in the house are turned off, and the first task when entering any new room is to find and turn on the lights. This mechanic creates a sense of unease throughout the game. This sense also couples with the slow pace that the player must move at. The player is forced to move slowly about the rooms and halls, heightening the sense of anticipation that players feel in uncovering the mystery of the space. Ultimately, the mechanics of the space itself generate the pacing of the game.
This pacing is specifically designed to mediate the player’s ability to uncover clues. Clues in Gone home come in the form of physical objects within the main character’s house, such as notes, tapes, and various household items. In order to uncover the narrative behind these resources, players must walk up to them, pick them up, and examine them. See an example of a resource below. Sometimes, these resources can be read to uncover more narrative. For example, we can read a positive recommendation that the main character’s mom left for a ranger she was working with. Other times, these resources lead us to more important resources, such as maps to hidden areas in the house. But the most compelling resources are those that trigger the dialog of the main character’s younger sister. For select resources, after interacting with them, an auditory message from the main character’s sister will begin playing. As players, we don’t know exactly what these messages are, perhaps letters to the main character or journal entries, but they are valuable clues to uncovering the narrative mystery of the game. They often hint at the family dynamics of the main character’s family. For example, the sister tells us that she lied to her parents about going to see a concert with a girl she has feelings for. We learn about this detail after finding a tape player in a room of the house. Clues such as these slowly help us to piece together why the family is missing from their house. This narrative arc is the fundamental form of fun that the game provides.
Overall, Gone home provides a captivating story of family drama that the player must uncover through moving through the space of the game. Players are paced in learning this story through many well thought-out game dynamics. These dynamics provide a great balance of information gain and suspense that keeps players playing.
Images from https://gonehome.com/.
