"Gone Home" is the first game made by The Fullbright Company, an independent game company, and it has been praised by the few reviewers who have given it attention. The major focus in Gone Home is exploration. There is no combat or puzzles, it is entirely you exploring this house and putting pieces together. The premise of the game is this: It is the year 1995, you play as Katie Greenbriar, the oldest daughter in a family consisting of you, your younger sister, your mom, and your dad. You have been traveling across Europe for a long time, and in that time the family moved to a new house. You just got back from this trip and are at the new house, but nobody is home, and there is a note on the door from your younger sister, Sam. It tells you not to try to find out where she is, because she doesn't want anybody to find her, and presumably, your parents have gone after her, wherever she is. With this in mind, you enter the house and look around to try to see what happened. It is a fantastic idea that is compelling beyond belief, and the exploration is satisfying and real feeling. But the real strong point is the character development. Characters are built so honestly that I wanted to know more about every single member of the family. There is, however, one major drawback that takes off major points from this game for me: the ending. The ending to this game is worse than the endings to Assassin's Creed 3, Dishonored, and Bioshock: Infinite put together. Never before has there been a less satisfying resolution to a mystery, but I will go on to describe that at the end. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW!
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| Eerie and very well done (1) |
The first thing I'd like to talk about is the exploration. Basically, the Greenbriar family lives in a mansion on Arbor Hill, the "psycho house" as the children at the High School that Sam attends call it. The moment you enter the house there is a hallway on the left, a hallway on the right, and a flight of stairs leading up. The house is eerie and dark, and it is beautifully made. The graphics are ultimately realistic, when you turn a lamp on, the light twists and curves and creates shadows like an actual lamp would. It genuinely feels as if you are exploring a giant mansion. You can interact with just about everything, even if it just means picking stuff up and throwing it. Every room tells a story and gives insight into the characters. In the father's study, there is a typewriter and manuscript copies scattered around the desk, and there is a bulletin board with ideas on post it notes, and in the center there is a series of post-it notes reading "You can do better." Essentially, as is revealed later in the game, he sent a copy of his first novel to his father (your grandfather) and, while he supported the novel, he did offer critique and said "you can do better." The grandfather isn't a villain, but it does show how sensitive the father character is. This is just one example of the character building that clues left behind in this house bring to the table. Exploration is what drives the plot forward as well. Essentially, as you find notes and artifacts left by the family, you also find journals left behind by Sam that details her experiences, and as you progress you find keys to locked doors, and the saga of Sam progresses with you.
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| Not going to lie, my heart hurt a little bit here (2) |
The strongest point of this game is Sam, your younger sister. As important as your other family members are, the plot follows Sam's experience. She is by far one of the best written characters in gaming history, and her character arc, while I don't like it, is handled as if written by Hemingway. Sam looks up to you, but you aren't there to support her in her transition to a new High School where she already has a bad reputation as the "psycho house girl." She is painfully shy, and at the beginning of the game this is evident in her writing and her voice acting. In the beginning, The Fullbright Company really strives to set up this aspect of Sam's personality through things like notes saying "X called, please call them back....X called again, please call them back," and through a book called "making friends" left by the father character with a note saying "Sam, thought this might help. -Dad." I'm not going to lie, that made my heart hurt. I felt so sorry for Sam, and I regretted backpacking around Europe...even though it wasn't actually me who wasn't there for her. If there is one thing that The Fullbright Company can do, it is make you connect with characters. There is so much to Sam, almost too much to cover in one review, but one thing that I want to focus on here is her religious journey. It becomes evident that Sam is searching for God on a personal level, and that there are only a few people she wants to know this. I came to this conclusion when I picked up a copy of a story she was working on in which the villain tells the main character "there is no paradise at the edge of the world, your father was a liar!" Signifying that there may be some teasing happening because of even the smallest religious conviction on her part. In addition, in her closet there is a small bible hidden under some folders, showing that she has been reading from it in secret. Of course, given some of the twists that her character ends up taking, it is also quite possible that she simply hadn't unpacked it or something, but I choose to look at this optimistically. A character who is shy, perhaps religious, and has a strong interest in creative writing...it sounds a lot like myself. Truly, there are few characters that I have connected with more than Sam.
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| That smirk kinda makes me want to punch something (3) |
But then came Lonnie, the wench who Sam wanted to be friends with. Let me just go ahead and give it away: Lonnie and Sam go on to have a lesbian relationship. Lonnie is in a class with Sam, and Sam tries to be friends with her by playing against her in Street Fighter, and gradually they get closer and it turns into something. But Sam never seeks it out, she is uncomfortable for a lot of the process. Lonnie is a selfish brat who doesn't know a thing about personal space or preference and thus keeps on pressuring Sam more and more and coercing her until she has completely stockholm syndromed her. This isn't the standard reading of the situation. Most people who play this game look at this relationship and say "oh it is so beautiful and sad," and that is probably what the company's intention was, but this is entirely a stockholm syndrome thing. Yeah, in the end, Sam chooses to be in a relationship with Lonnie, but it is only after constantly being told she is beautiful ("Oh, sorry, I feel like I've done something wrong." "Oh, no, its ok, it was just...") and being forced to share a futon after an out of town event. It is a constant charade of making a move and throwing a pity party and being told "no, its ok," with Lonnie. I've got to say, Lonnie will be getting a high place on my top 5 villains of 2013 list, because every time she was brought up in journals my blood pressure was raised dangerously. So why isn't Lonnie a positive to the game? A great villain is always a major point getter, but only if the intention was for them to be a villain. I thoroughly believe that Lonnie was intended to be this sort of savior figure for Sam, delivering her from her bondage ("delivering" meaning: convincing her to sneak out, call her mother awful things, smoke, buy porn magazines, engage in premarital intercourse, perform satanic rituals and ultimately throw everything away), but I could be wrong. The whole Lonnie situation could be a statement against such people (not meaning Homosexuals, but people who for all intents and purposes rape and destroy lives), but I'm inclined to believe that the Fullbright Company wanted Lonnie to be a shining example of how people should be. I don't have anything against Sam turning out (maybe) to be a lesbian, I don't like it, but I have nothing against it. What I would change would be for her to know about her feelings from the start. If I had to work with this idea, I would make it so that Sam would turn Lonnie's life around for the better, not Lonnie completely wrecking hers. You see, Fullbright Company, that is how one would create a positive portrait of the homosexual community: you have lives improved, not destroyed. If the purpose of "Gone Home" was to make a statement on equality, then they went about it entirely the wrong way, and it made me so angry, as I will go on to describe when I talk about the resolution.
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| "'ooooooooh!' also, ghost milk, 'oooooooh!'" (4) |
Before I talk anymore about the things that raise my blood pressure, I'm going to cover one more positive: the game's sense of humor. The best way to describe the game's humor is that it knows itself. For instance, it is pretty much a given that as you go through the house, you turn on all the lights and leave them on. Well, on a bulletin board by Sam's room there is a note reading "Sam, stop leaving all of the lights on! You're worse than your sister!" It calls you out on the fact that you are leaving all the lights on. I thought it was pretty clever, but there are also funny things to be found in the characters of you and Sam. Sam is written exactly the way a quirky high school girl would be, and thus, when you open up her journals there are things like drawings of ghosts going "ooooh!" and a drawing of a carton of milk next to it with an arrow pointing at it reading "also, ghost milk...oooooh!" And you learn about your character through the descriptions that pop up for items when you point the reticle at them. For instance, when you discover the porn magazine that Sam has, the item description reads "Gosh, Sam!" and when you find a book on "spicing up marriage" in your parents bathroom the item description simply reads "Ugh." And in my favorite instance, you pick up a note that starts off with a pretty steamy description of a particular...umm...instance...with Lonnie, and after a few seconds the note drops and the item description becomes "I'm not reading any more of that," and if you try to pick it up again, the description changes to "nope."
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| It could have been great (5) |
Now, before I talk about the ending, I'm going to talk about the different twists that the family story takes, so you can understand why I'm so bummed out about the resolution. First off, there is the idea of the father character being obsessed with earning his father's favor. There is a combination locked safe in his office that, when opened, has the last will and testament of (if I remember correctly) his brother, Oscar. Later on, Sam reveals that she believes Oscar's ghost is in the house, as evidenced by what she and Lonnie discovered using an Ouija board (in the picture above). What could have happened was the father killed Oscar out of jealousy or something and now the ghost is back for revenge. But that is not the case. It is also heavily implied that the mother is having an affair with the new, stud-muffin young ranger in her forestry service, and given the dad's shaky mental state this could have been an intense twist, but this is not the big secret behind why your family is gone either. Would you like to know the big secret behind why everybody has vanished?
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| "Sam's Darkroom: Where sucky endings are made" (5) |
Well, it is quite simple. On her way to the army, Lonnie gets off the bus and calls Sam saying "I couldn't go through with it! I want you to pack your things and get in your car and come get me and lets just drive until we find a place for us, can you do that for me?" And Sam says yes, leaves behind the acceptance to college, steals all the vcr players and jewelry in the house and hightails it out of the house so that she can sell them and make some money so that she and her lover can live happily ever after (because that has never failed before). Out of all of the conflicts in the house, this was the secret? Basically, you get up into the attic, you grab a book of letters that sam wrote to you, and Sam starts narrating about how she hopes you understand why she had to do what she did...never mind the fact that she DIDNT have to do what she did, she was just being a stupid brat who doesn't know how good she has it. By the end of the game, I totally lost my connection with Sam because of this change. The story and the character progressions are so doggoned well done, I just hate that it had to be in this direction. I simply cannot understand why this had to be the big secret!
Let me get this out of the way: I am pro marriage equality, I think it is wrong for people to be persecuted for their sexual orientation. But if I wanted to be beaten senseless across the head with "Oh, if you disagree with anything we say, you're a bigot," "Unless you are an atheist, you must want to burn all the homosexuals alive" Propa-flipping-ganda, then I wouldn't pay $20 for it. The utter insensitivity with which this game treats the relationship between religion and homosexuality ("My mom is a Christian," note the wording there. There is no distinction, Lonnie condemns the entirety of the religion) bothered me throughout, but I accepted it as just part of the character progression. One particularly infuriating thing is that this game company imposed modern values on the year 1995. In 1995, things were better for the homosexual community, but not nearly as good as today. When Sam came out to the parents, they didn't kick her out or cry or anything, they didn't even tell her to stop seeing Lonnie. They simply said that it was probably a phase, and that she keep an open mind. But Sam views this as them not loving and respecting her at all. Okay, lets get something straight. This is a family that is religious in a time where, even though homosexuality was more accepted, it was still majorly frowned upon. The daughter comes out as gay, and all they do is ask her to keep an open mind...and somehow this is bigotry? This is the kind of logic that comes from the senseless numbskulls who think we shouldn't discuss George Washington because he was a slave owner. This would have been major love and acceptance for a family of this nature in 1995. The company managed to be historically accurate in most things, but when it came to their ever-so-precious message of "us and them" mentality as the ultimate good, they just couldn't stand to make anything resembling acceptance from religious folk seem possible. But the fact that this is the big secret of the game, the big thing that I spent somewhere between an hour or two working toward, is insulting. There was no need for me to go on a wild goose chase to find out what I could have found out just by having a note left on the door for me. People are hailing this as the deepest, most beautiful story they have experienced, and I disagree. It is a well written story, but it is not beautiful or deep.
Let me be forward and against the grain. Having Homosexuality in your story doesn't automatically make it deep, or romantic, or good. Just like any other story aspect, you need to earn quality. The fact that you make the story about lesbians doesn't me that you are doing a good job of it. The fact that the lesbians run away together doesn't mean that you are taking a hard stance against persecution. What happens in this story is: Sam meets Lonnie, they play street fighter, they go out, they sneak out of the house often and go to rock concerts, Sam becomes rebellious like Lonnie, Lonnie is about to ship out to the military, they have the "happiest night ever" (I think I'm gonna throw up), Sam feels empty, Lonnie asks her to leave everything behind on the off chance that they might be happy and not end up drunk in a ditch somewhere after a fight, Sam steals from her accepting family so she can finance a relationship with her whore girlfriend. There is nothing beautiful about this story. There is nothing even remotely substantial to this story. It is a high schooler's fantasy made real. It is a darned well written and executed high schooler fantasy, but that doesn't make the story good.
The ending to Gone Home had me pacing around the room for half an hour in anger. I was just so insulted that I'd spent $20 for a crappy end that was created by first year theatre students!
I simply cannot understand how a game can be so well written, have such amazing character development and progression, have so many well done plot strings tying together, but have a main plot developed by 12 year old girls who think that having to be home at 10:00 is a violation of their human rights. When I started the game, I thought I was going to give it either a 9 or a 10, and when I finished I thought I was going to give it a 5 and call it generous. But I did have a fun time playing "Gone Home," and there are soooo many positive that I can still call this game playable and buyable. I would say, wait until it is about half the price it is now. But buy it, it is a good game, despite my distaste for the glorification of utter teenage STUPIDITY and lack of sight for any reason whatsoever. Ultimately, "Gone Home" is Hemingway taking an intro to theatre class. It is masterpiece work surrounded by amateurs and immaturity, and it is still worth looking into despite that.
8/10
I have faith in you, The Fullbright Company, please learn from this.
Picture Sources:
Cover: www.pastemagazine.com
(1) www.maclife.com
(2) www.digitalspy.com
(3) www.gamespot.com
(4) www.indiestatik.com
(5) www.me.ign.com
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