Game: Gone Home
Creator: The Fullbright Company
Platform: PC, later ported to Switch
Target Audience: Intense themed story targeted at teenagers or adults. Relatively accessible for people who don’t play a lot of video games.
The mechanics of Gone Home are walking around the house and point-and-click interacting with things in it. Before the player even enters the house, the game designers establish the two functions of these point and click mechanics: getting more information (the letter on the door) and unlocking more of the house (the key hidden under the duck). These two functions of the point-and-click mechanics give rise to the mystery, as often the information you find or rooms you unlock raise more questions than they answer. They also introduce narrative into the mystery in two principle ways: the emergent narrative of the player’s search, and non-linear storytelling.
Enacting narrative arises when the player searches a room because of the sheer number of interactable objects and the player’s unfamiliarity with the house. Because not useful (i.e. gives information or unlocks more of the house) object is obvious, the player is encouraged to search and interact with everything just in case something turns up. There’s a sense fun to be had in opening all the cabinets, even if most of them have nothing in them—in fact, that makes finding something feel that much better. Further, though the character is also unfamiliar with the house, the player is even more so. All this together results in an enacted narrative where the player gets to play to detective in a way that, we might imagine, the actual character caught in this situation might not. For example, the character might call a relative, or not investigate all her parent’s clothing drawers and private bathroom.
The mechanics also give rise to non-linear storytelling because you can pick things up and explore in any order. For example, when I played, I entered the house and immediately went upstairs, which meant I found some personal details of Sam’s relationship with Lonnie before discovering much more vague hints in the downstairs rooms. One of the key ways in which this adds to the narrative is foreshadowing: the designers chose to write many of the story entries ambiguously, such that you don’t know how the incident described in the entry turns out (or even exactly what it’s referring to) without more context. For example, near the end of the game I found a note clearly written by Sam with a pointer to a secret passageway labeled “where we’ll do it”. Coming right off of a section describing how Sam’s parents don’t accept her, “it” sounded sinister—it was only later that Sam’s voiceover clarified that what they were doing was just saying goodbye to Uncle Oscar.
The non-linear narrative of the mechanics is supported by the architecture of the house, which shapes the story by encouraging the player to explore and providing a creepy, labyrinthian environment. The control over the player’s movement exerted by locked doors and lights force the player to explore to uncover more of the story. Locked safes provide a similar function, though they are optional. The secret panels throughout the house encourage the most exploration because to interact with them, you just need to know they’re there. Once this mechanic is revealed, the player is encouraged to prove every panel and try every wall to find another. This indirectly turns up a lot of story entries.
Finally, though much of the gameplay is physically accessible because the mechanics require few (remappable) keys and are not time-dependent, the game contains some accessibility barriers for people who have impaired vision. Most of the game is about reading text, often in handwriting that is difficult to read. The game addresses this with overlay text and subtitles. However, there are some moments for which the overlay text and subtitles do not help. For example, late in the game I found a note written by Sam that started to detail her experience being intimate with Lonnie. After I had read about a paragraph, the game abruptly closed the note because the main character refused to read more of it. The comedy of that sequence only works because the player gets to read a little of the note. I’m not sure I read the intended amount, but I know I wouldn’t want to have read less, especially as I couldn’t repeat the event. In a game like this where the story is mostly revealed through reading and narration, a selectable or automatically learned reading speed as an accessibility option might go a long way.
