New-Form Literature

Richard Bell, in Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home, compares Dear Esther and Gone Home in the ways that they portray characters, narrate stories, and engage the player.

Dear Esther, in my opinion is clearly the more literary one, as Bell mentions. It isn’t as “engaging” in the sense that the player merely doesn’t have to do anything else except walk and listen. Gone Home, on the other hand, is far more captivating. We find ourselves solving puzzles, picking up every piece of the story (sometimes missing a few), and the story we get is directly related to our actions. But, for anyone who enjoys reading poetry, old novels, or any other work of literature, it is a great game to be exposed to a source that is considered an idiosyncratic source of literature.