This disconnect between the expectation and reality is thematically brilliant, neatly creating a sense of displacement, a feeling that you'll discover lies at the core of what Gone Home is all about. As you start to explore the house, rifling through drawers and cupboards and garbage baskets for a clue to where your family might be, certain items trigger the narration: Sam, speaking to Kaitlin, telling the story of where she has gone and why. Yet, as spooky as the game gets, with popping incandescent lights and sudden cracks of thunder at key moments, this isn't a game about jumpy, cheap-thrill scares. (I kept leaving them on, because heck, it was dark and spooky.) Up to that point, I had left on every single light I'd passed by. The game knows it, too cheekily, you'll find a note early on telling Sam not to leave the lights in the house on like her sister (you) does. Throughout the game, so many of its cues - the panicked voicemails to Sam that you discover upon entering the house pouring rain and crashing lightning the low, eerie ambient music the occasional bolthole clearly used by Oscar the giant, oppressively dark house - all combine to create an intensely spooky atmosphere. It sounds like the set-up to a horror game, and we can't help but feel that this is intentional. Your 17-year-old sister Sam, who had started a new high school, and your parents are mysteriously missing from the house.
While you were away, your family moved into a new mansion, inherited from your father's uncle Oscar, a pharmacist with an interest in the occult who had been ostracised by the Greenbriar clan. You play Kaitlin Greenbriar, returning home in 1995 to Portland after a year-long holiday in Europe. There are very few, if any, puzzles to be solved, and nothing to kill Gone Home is about discovering a story, not being its hero.
It looks like a first-person survival horror, and plays a little - but not a lot - like a point-and-click adventure. We suspect that this is because Gone Home flagrantly defies the usual expectations about video games. On the other, gamers seem to have hated it on Metacritic, it netted itself a critic rating of 89, and a user rating of 4.9. There's an interesting schism when it comes to opinions about Gone Home, a highly unusual game created by indie developer The FullBright Company.
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