Gone Home is a mystery “walking sim” developed by The Fulbright Company, available on PC, Playstation, Xbox, Switch, and iOS. With a storyline involving complex familial and romantic relationships, its target audience is teenagers and adults. I played the game on iOS.
In Gone Home, the layout of the rooms (and the linear narrative that the layout encourages) physically depict the trajectory of Yolanda and Sam’s relationship (alongside other overlapping narratives about the family, like the mother’s relationship with Rick). The simple loops that the game has facilitates a simple sequence of arcs, each culminating in the reveal of a journal entry.
The layout of the house encourages a linear exploration of it. There are a couple ways that this linear narrative happens: first, the objects on Floor 1 “gate” the puzzles in floor 2 – for example, to find the key to the attic, one must open the locker in Sam’s room with objects from the basement. During my playthrough, I was confused and didn’t actually explore floor 2 before I explored floor 1 – which meant that I had to return to floor 1. I couldn’t proceed without having explored floor 1, and once I did, the story actually made sense. The layout of the house also encourages a certain kind of exploration. The hallway of floor 2 is one corridor, with rooms on the sides, and the attic at the very end of that corridor. The attic, then, feels always like the “thing” that you have to achieve. It also makes sense for you to move from room to room in a linear fashion: from Sam’s room to the parent’s room to the sewing room.
The structure of the house not only encourages this linear narrative, but also embodies it. You go from floor 1 – most basic, least intrusive – to floor 2 – more and more intimate exploration – which mirrors the plot of the actual story. As you move into more and more intimate areas, Sam and Lonnie’s relationship also becomes more and more intimate. The very cool thing that happens is that the secrecy of Sam and Lonnie’s relationship is reflected in the very architecture of the house. Sam and Lonnie’s most intimate moments are in the locked basement, and hidden in various secret compartments throughout the house. The basement embodies the secret, dark underbelly of the household – both spatially and narratively! Isn’t that cool?
How this story gets told is mostly through arcs. The game contains few loops: the only loop, really, is the skill of picking up an object and examining it for clues. These small, simple loops build up to form an arc. Once you perform a certain number of actions, or certain actions, like opening a closet, you trigger the reading out loud of a journal entry, which is the “feedback” for a particular arc. They function like narrative cutscenes, giving you that payload for all the work you have done. These loops and arcs help transform a spatial landscape into a narrative one: they transform the physical architecture of the house into narrative architecture. They also do so in a way that centers the narrative architecture, since it’s not very hard to pick up an object or move about the house.
Gone Home wonderfully tells a complex story while maintaining the “fun” of a game – it’s a prime example of embedded narrative, especially with the way that the mechanics of the game (the layout of the house) mirrors the narrative of the game. Everything collides to tell a poignant story of Sam and Lonnie. I kind of wanted to cry at the end.
