Gone Home Review

Grown up games. 

One of the most rewarding moments of Gone Home, and any work of fiction for that matter, is when you take a jumbled mess of oddly shaped metaphorical puzzle pieces and finally put them together to resemble something familiar. This revelation sprang forth for me a few hours into my first-person walkabout through the Greenbriar household. As I rummaged through an abandoned kitchen examining refrigerator notes, discarded paperback books, and surprisingly named bottles of salad dressing, the proverbial light bulb suddenly illuminated.

Yes, I was exploring the Greenbriar home, a digital space where the first game by The Fullbright Company is set. But perhaps more importantly, I was exploring something strikingly similar to the house I grew up in. Each time I clicked on an item owned by a family member and studied its various traits, like empty liquor bottles belonging to a father who may or may not drink too much, or a sarcastically written term-paper on the female reproductive system that highlights a young woman's sharp wit, I was brought back to the uncountable innocuous nick-nacks that populate my parent's house.

Throughout Gone Home, a first-person exploratory adventure game, you'll poke around a beautifully created house and examine the artifacts that populate each well-designed room, and everywhere you look the house

has a warm, lived-in feel. The family's study is filled with interesting books to browse, records to listen to, and liquor cabinets to raid. The kitchen is as wonderfully disorganized as my mom's, and the bedroom of an angsty teenager feels like the bedroom of an angsty teenager. It oftentimes felt as if I had broken into a museum in the middle of the night with the goal of touching the very things that I was told not to touch. Games like The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite allow us to explore exceptionally realized worlds, but Gone Home's world just feels straight-up real.

Despite an ever-present sense of dread – lights flicker sporadically, a fierce thunderstorm rages outside, and the house itself seems to moan at times – there's nothing to fear in Gone Home. The only skeletons here are figurative, which you'll eventually discover as you explore the house and begin to unravel the family's past.

As you delve deeper into the Greenbriar residence, you'll come across telephone messages, scrawled notes, and diary entries that provide the clues needed for you to begin illuminating the dark corners of this family. The writing and voice work here are among the best I've ever experienced in games. It's not stylish or exaggerated, but rather painfully real. Unraveling the story of your character’s teenage sister Samantha's coming of age, the complicated intricacies of your parent's marriage, and eventually the reasons why you left home in the first place make Gone Home a powerful piece of storytelling. I'm being a bit vague for a reason, because so much of the emotional impact I felt stemmed from discovering these bits of backstory and piecing them together myself.

The writing and artifact design are so good that I felt compelled to grab everything that wasn't bolted to the floor and give it a closer examination. Turning around a can of soup reveals a fully written label. Thumbing through a VHS collection highlights a wealth of classics from Gone Home's mid-'90s setting. And entering a closet only to find it filled to the brim with board games, subtly weathered with use, all contribute toward making the Greenbriar household feel like a living, breathing place.

Doing this isn't just some menial task – scouring the house with a fine-toothed comb leads to optional story revelations, humorous asides, and sometimes both. For example, while rummaging through my father's study, I came across a box filled to the brim with dozens of copies of his unsuccessful second novel. But after removing the top few layers of literature, I unearthed he awful Pandora's Box of his smut magazine collection. This moment walked such a fine line between painful and comical, and it's only one of many that did so throughout my three hours in the house.

The only drawback to the inanimate objects that lay about the Greenbriar home is that by the end, you're sometimes examining a handful of the same things. Coming across the same box of tissues in every other room pulled me out of the world just a tad bit – like a deja vu glitch in the Matrix. Also, the first time I held my father's sophomore novel, I was completely enthralled with studying its cover. The second time, it made sense since that book was a commercial failure, and unsold copies would litter this house. The fifth time: not so much. But despite this infrequent repetition, Gone Home continually won me over in spades partially due to its impeccable use of music.

A successful mix of a moody, ambient score and a variety of cult Riot Grrrl hits (played by sticking various cassette tapes found scattered throughout the house into a tape player) create an affecting ambiance. The two styles might seem to clash in stark juxtaposition on paper, but they somehow managed to meld together to give Gone Home a musical backbone that's riddled with both teenage angst as well as an air of mystery.