Gone Home

With rain, thunder, and dim lights, Gone Home gives off an initial tense mood. During the first five minutes of the game, I walked around the porch trying to figure out what I was expected to do. All I knew was the date and time: June 7, 1995 at 1:15 AM. Then, ten minutes later when I finally found the key of the front door, I was able to go inside. When I walked through the door, everything was dark and at that moment I regretted my decision to play the game at night, alone. Whenever I walked into a new room, I would turn all of the lights on because for the first hour of me playing the game, I was waiting for something to jump onto the screen and scare me. As I stood in the foyer, I was a little annoyed. This was like no game that I’d ever played before. I had no gun and no zombies nor army men were trying to kill me. My first reaction to the game was boredom. I knew, however, that my task for the night was to play through the game, so I proceeded to play.

I walked around the foyer and as I opened all the drawers, I started finding letters and listening to voice messages. This is where the game started appealing to me; I was starting to understand what I had to do. I walked from room to room, picking up crumpled up papers and unlocking safes. I started finding secret passages and my interest in the game grew. I wanted to know what was going on between Sam and Lonnie, and every time a journal entry came up I would become even more engaged in the game. I thought that the journals were an essential part of the game. Gone Home did a great job at transmitting what the characters were like and what was going on between them. Sam, for example, is a teenager who is into punk music and video games. Through journal entries and crumpled papers, we find out that Sam is a lesbian and is currently going through a rough time with her parent’s acceptance of who she is.

In the end, I didn’t quite catch was going on with Sam and Katie’s dad, but I did catch on the fact that Oscar had abused of their dad. This is one of the reasons why this game is interesting, not everyone has the same experience while playing it. I, for example, am sure that I missed some of the clues that were about Sam and Katie’s father which is why I wasn’t too clear on what his occupation was or why he wrote the books that he did. However, to my surprise, I ended up enjoying the game, at least more than I thought I would.