Review: Gone Home makes me feel like a teenager again, except not as awkward and dumb

About an hour into Gone Home, I opened the door to yet another room--the lights were off, of course--and I suddenly realized why this all felt so familiar. I had done this in my own parent's home countless times as a teenager, and the sense of foreboding, however misaligned with reality, was omnipresent on every dark night I spent there.

Such as it is with Gone Home, a first-person "story exploration video game" as described by developers The Fullbright Company. The mood of a dark, silent home is captured perfectly here, and it surprisingly tells a story that makes you want to explore a creepy house.

The premise is simple enough: it's June, 1995, and you play as Kaitlin, a young woman who's been traveling abroad for a year. She's finally--wait for it--gone home to see her family. Only problem is, all the lights are off and no one's there to greet her when she arrives. Oh, and it's 1:00 in the morning. Oh, and there's a thunderstorm outside.

Yeah. It sets the tone really well from the onset, and standing on the porch looking in through the window, I got creeped out and didn't want to go inside.

But I did. And inside is a ludicrously large home, filled with little details and knickknacks to find. I shan't spoil any of them, for their discovery is the most important ingredient of Gone Home's secret sauce. What I will say, however, is how excellent the pacing and writing is. You come upon key items at just the right times, in just the right places, which lead you somewhere entirely new. Information is gleaned from every little thing you see, and you slowly start to piece together what happened. Kaitlin's family is fleshed out so well that it feels, honestly, like I know them. These are real people to me, living in this real house--a true feat, to be sure, since you seemingly never interact with them directly.

And this house, whoo boy, it's a creepy one. Approximately the size of a goddamn football field, all the normal amenities are there: bedrooms, main hall, living room, etc. Colours don't really pop, nor are they necessarily supposed to given their context. Rooms have their own distinct layout, and off the top of my head I can remember key areas, all the way down to where objects are placed. You never get bored because each room feels different from the last, and that's pretty darn good for a game that bombards you with room after room after room.

There's a whole bunch of other stuff about the house that I can't speak of for fear of ruining one's experience, because the whole crux of the game revolves around not knowing what you'll find. Every little detail is exquisite, though, and it feels as though you stumbled into someone's home when they weren't expecting guests. It has a sense of realism that is immediately relatable.

The sound design is top notch as well. The thunderstorm rages outside, peppering the windows with raindrops. Walls and floorboards creak as the wind pushes against them, adding a sense of fear as you wonder, perhaps irrationally, if that really was the wind. Cassette tapes featuring real life bands Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile can be found and played, contributing some mood-appropriate music to your otherwise hush surroundings. And that silence--the discrete, unforgiving silence; the kind you can only truly find in homes at 1:00 in the morning--is disturbingly void of just enough sound to be disconcerting. Just thinking about it makes me uneasy. The only real downside in the sound department is the loud, thudding footsteps, and that's only because it makes me realize that Kaitlin never bothered to take her shoes off before she started meandering through the house. That annoys me for some stupid reason. Too, the original score, while fitting the game nicely, seemed lacking in variety. Whatever. The rest is great.

Gameplay involves venturing from room to room, picking up and examining everything you see and opening every drawer on the planet, apparently. Most rooms are darkened, of course, so you'll need to find the light switch to illuminate each room. I can't enunciate how much this one repeated event spoke to me; it harkened back to my young teenage years when I would get nervous if I didn't have every light in the house on. Which I did in Gone Home as well, by the way.

You can pick up and look at a whole host of objects, some important, some utterly dull. But all aid the sense of immersion and apparent truth that, yes, people live here and leave random shit laying around in drawers like we all do. Sometimes when you've finished poring over an object a voiceover entry from your sister Sam will play, speaking in the form of letters she previously wrote, but never gave, to you. Sam is so three-dimensional that she could easily be any teenager I met back in high school, except much less ditzy. In particular, a certain character trait of hers is handled with such tact and care that you can't help but be moved by it. Which is good, since the story, if you can call it that, mostly consists of learning about Sam, who she is, and most importantly, where she is.

Where she isn't, to be sure, is in the house. Or is she? That's what this game ultimately does so well: it makes you curious, scared, upset, comforted, and maybe--if you're lucky--joyous. For me, there's no higher praise than to say that a game moved me, and by the end, Gone Home certainly had. It's beautiful in its simplicity; in its twists and turns. And it deserves a good hard look by everyone, even those who don't play games. You won't ever forget this one.

Highly recommended.


Check out the Gone Home website for more details.

Online Games Always Shit the Bed, But Why?

GTA Online's recent bungled launch has me wondering: why do online games always stumble out of the gate?

On October 1, GTA Online launched--two weeks after the game, mind you--and nothing worked. Oh sure, some players could create their character and play the game. For most, however, it was like having a dump truck pour garbage all over you. Issues ranging from characters not being saved to the beginning tutorial mission not loading up--both of which I personally suffered from--and even now, after the servers are somewhat stable and it’s all patched up, there are reports of characters being deleted and cash disappearing, among other things.

Rockstar, makers of Grand Theft Auto, aren't alone in the kerfuffle: nearly every game in recent memory that has an online mode has been in shambles on release day. Two games spring to mind immediately: Diablo III and SimCity.

Both were a right mess on their respective launches.

Diablo III was first released in May of 2012 for the PC, and had an online requirement--meaning, you had to be online in order to play the game, even on your own. That alone ruffled the feathers of would-be buyers (not enough to stop it from selling millions, mind you) but on top of that, the game suffered from numerous server issues and error codes, all of which were indecipherable to the average human being.

SimCity, too, was the recipient of ire--twice--when it launched on PC earlier this year, and then again on the Mac a couple of months ago. The Mac launch suffered from technical issues, not server issues, but the PC launch was woefully unprepared to meet demand. Just last week Maxis, the developer of SimCity, said they were considering adding an offline mode to the much maligned game.

Here's what I don't get: these companies know how many pre-orders they get for a game. So why are they consistently caught with their pants down? It's not like it's a surprise or anything.

Blizzard knew that pre-orders for Diablo III reached over two million, so why did the servers keel over and die? You'd think they'd prepare for two million simultaneous connections (plus a few hundred thousand more for people who bought without pre-ordering) on launch day. But no. They didn't.

And why does every company do this? You can practically write the press release for this sort of thing by now: "We're overwhelmed by the response to Game X," it would read, "and we're working around the clock to bring the servers back online."

Does nobody test these things? They must. There's no way they don't. And I understand that a controlled test with a few studios isn't the same as launching to the majority of players around the world, but come on. You can't tell me these companies couldn't have seen this coming.

I'd love to live in a world where a massive, hyped up online game gets released... and nothing happens. Everything goes smoothly. After all these faffed-up launches, you'd think that someone would have the common sense to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Here's hoping that someday, they will.