"Gone Home" Is it a game or isn't it?

[Kaldrak]

So I suppose the first question anyone asks before they sit down to play this is, 'what is this, exactly?' A valid question.

In my humble opinion, Gone Home qualifies as a game, but there are certainly an awful lot of curmudgeons who are more than willing to argue the point. This whole thing is a bit strange, because this is one of those odd times where critics heaped glowing praise upon a game and an awful lot of players seem to despise it in the user reviews. The heart of the debate comes from whether or not you define it as a 'game.'

What do we define a game as these days? It can be hard to pin down, sometimes. I have a hard time calling Japanese Visual Novels games, for instance, when all you do in most of them is read, listen, and click the mouse to move the story forward. Is that all that's required in order to call something a game?

Games are supposed to be interactive experiences and there are titles that minimize that interaction to the point where the very status of it as a 'game' comes into question by the users. What was that exactly? They ask themselves. Sometimes, there are no ready answers.

The closest title I can compare Gone Home to is Dear Esther, but that's not really fair to either of them. Dear Esther is much more limited in the player's ability to interact with things. Also it's a very, very pretty title in its own right. Gone home is not quite as strong in artistry or atmosphere, though it does a good job in both categories, but you can actually do stuff in it, so....

*shrug*

What you should expect when you play Gone Home is a fairly short game. You walk around a large house, almost a mansion in fact, and you look at things and move stuff around. It's kind of like a scavenger hunt. Go to one part of the house, read stuff and listen to dialogues, unlock another part of the house, and so on and so forth until you unravel the mystery of the game and get to the finish. This doesn't take very long, though. I think I beat the game in one sitting and you should expect your playthrough to last no longer than three or possibly four hours if you move really slowly like I do and fully immerse yourself in the game world.

I enjoyed my time with it and I liked the atmospheric elements, especially the storm raging outside and the lights flickering. I would consider it a moody, rather than creepy game, but then again some players might find it spooky to wander around the house with none of the lights on before you enter the rooms. There are secret passages to find, hidden areas where only the main character's sister has been recently, and old history to uncover in addition to reading diary entries. The diary is told from the viewpoint of the main character's younger sister and hearing the entries is at times both poignant and personal.

Nobody is home for some strange reason and the main character has just gotten back after a year abroad. Your job is to try and discover what has happened and where everyone is. As mysteries go, this one wasn't bad. I was intrigued enough to play through the whole thing and satisfied by the ending. I liked the music and the voice acting and the atmosphere and the writing and the visuals and I wasn't overly turned off by the short play time.

Boy am I in the minority.

Let's get right into it then.

There are apparently a large number of people in the world who never bother to do anything other than check a game's metacritic score before buying it. They don't watch the trailers, they don't bother to find out any sort of information about it at all, and they apparently don't even bother to check what type of game it is when it's listed right there on the screen before they spend their money.

I...don't understand these people. I mean, I do understand that metacritic is a great reference tool and I use it myself, but that is by far not the only measure of the quality of a game and if you are foolish enough to blindly purchase things solely based on the fact that the critics liked them, without even bothering to read what the critics y'know, actually liked about them, then you only have yourself to blame when you get something you don't actually want or even like.

The steam forums are full of whiny people who lambast the game for its lack of gameplay and for how short it is and about almost anything and everything they can think of, but it really only boils down to two main things that people like to hate on. One, the aforementioned problem where they bought something sight unseen and then hated it, and two,

Spoiler: ShowHide

straight up homophobia.

I don't actually like accusing a bunch of folks of being homophobic, but maybe if their comments weren't so...oh I don't know...homophobic then I wouldn't actually do so.

So the game has a sweet little coming of age story about the main character's younger sister and how she realized she was interested in girls and the problems it causes with her family. So what? I could understand objecting to this based off of religious reasons, but most players just seem pissed off about it. Ehrmagerd, lesbians in mah game!

*Gurgle. Choke. Frothing at the mouth. Arms flailing.*

What is wrong with you people? Stop that right now.

Good grief.

I can tell you that the whole thing appealed to me immensely because I'm a hopeless romantic. The idea of forbidden romance and star crossed lovers tends to send me off into bouts of fantasy.

*sigh*

Wha—? Where was I? Oh, right. The controversy.

I really don't think Gone Home deserves to be controversial at all, honestly. The backlash against it by unsuspecting dudebros who got duped into purchasing it by the high metacritic score, is about as valid as the critics heaping praise upon it and giving it that high score in the first place.

This isn't really edgy anymore guys. This is the twenty first century now. Can we all collectively move on?  Please?

No? Well alright then. Jimmies rustled, got it.

Spoiler: ShowHide

I'm honest enough to admit that if the romance had been between two guys, I probably wouldn't have even bought the game in the first place, let alone played all the way through it. I would argue though that this is not hypocrisy. This is merely a matter of personal preference. It is one thing to say that the game makes you uncomfortable and you don't want to finish it and quite another to spew vitriol and homophobic slurs all over the place.

A fine distinction I suppose, but one that exists nonetheless.

The sad truth is that if the game devs had had a more traditional male/female romance, no one would have batted an eye at Gone Home. It likely wouldn't have achieved critical acclaim or backlash. It would have simply dropped into the waters of the lake and sunk with barely a ripple to let anyone know it was ever there. Which is kind of a shame, now that I think about it.

It's a nice, enjoyable little experience, even if so many people accuse it of not really being a 'game.' I'd say it has far more of a right to being called a game than Dear Esther, or even most VN's. However, due to the short playtime I can really only recommend buying it for about five bucks. It originally sold at twenty dollars, which was another major point of contention and I don't believe in paying that much for really short games, no matter how much I may enjoy them. I bought it on sale for about six dollars and I was pleasantly surprised. Oh and the game is set in the nineties and has a bunch of references and music from that era within it, so there was a certain nostalgia factor at work on me in addition to everything else.

Final verdict?

I like this thing. If you like things like this, then maybe you'll like this one too, but for goodness sake, don't just take my word for it. Find out a little bit about it for yourself. Watch a trailer or take a look at some reviews or something. Don't just blindly purchase stuff on another person's say so.

I mean what are we, sheep?

[Dracos]

Gone Home is one of those games I begrudge for being someone's political battletoy.  I've never played it and I largely ignored it entirely because the creators made it an Issue game that couldn't show up at certain shows because they weren't respectful enough to The Issues.  That my first encounter with it was seeing the devs ranting about how they felt uncomfortable showing it at shows with gamers.  Not a charitable characterization of what they said, but what I took away from it.

Which hey, is their right.  More art is better art, and all that jazz.  It is alright for people to make skillfully delivered games that discuss things people would rather look away from.  Heck, the Impact Games team was my seniors in college and hell if that wasn't their entire business model (Here, go look at what they try and use games to teach people about http://www.impactgames.com/).

...but the focus on it as a political battletoy results in me entirely ignoring their game or art or whatnot, because while I am okay with stories in which things like this are going on...I'm not interested at all in consuming it as part of a 'movement' that uses slurs all over the place to basically revenge all the 'othering' they've gotten, whether or not it is targeted at folks who've ever done it.

Well, I also begrudge it for being voiced in the same sentence repeatedly with The Stanley Parable which I thought was a very clever game about narration, actualization and self-directed play, which I thought was unfair to both and generally irritated me as I was fully unwilling to part with time or money to see if the loud critical ranting about it being 'better' was even correct.  That admittingly is just petty of me.  :)  I can be petty.

Anyhow, glad you enjoyed it.  To be somewhat fair, during its heyday, it was all over the games news sites as the best story game of the year.  So beyond metacritic, there's good reason for folks to have been lured in more than usual.

[Kaldrak]

Heh. I never read a word the game devs said about it, but I did see a lot of fantastically written, flowery reviews about how utterly beyond compare the game is. I mean, look at this, for goodness sake:

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/gone-home

The critic reviews are almost worth reading on their own, just for the glowing, flowery language. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this on metacritic and there are no negative critic reviews, but if you take a gander at the user reviews, you can see a very sharp divide.

Maybe it's like you said. The game very easily could have been a tool to forward the devs agenda, whatever it may have been at the time. I simply don't know enough about it and I certainly never read any comparisons to the Stanley Parable, which I haven't played, so I'm not really sure how to take that.

At the end of the day, I don't think Gone Home really is the best thing ever like a whooole lot of people said...but I think it's pretty good for what it is.