The game consists of directing Katie through the house (actually a mansion), and discovering, through documents, letters, and journals entries belonging to the three family members, what has happened to the Greenbriars in the year that Katie's been away, and where they've all gone. Once she gets into the house, Katie discovers that her family-parents Terry and Janice, and younger sister Sam, who has left Katie a cryptic and urgent note telling her not to worry but also not to look for her-are missing. The player character is twenty-year-old Katie Greenbriar, who is returning home after a year backpacking in Europe. Gone Home takes place over a single night in June 1995. So, I leave it with you: Gone Home is overpriced, extremely interesting and worth playing, and if you read the rest of this post before playing it you probably won't enjoy it as much as I did. I don't doubt that the price reflects the cost of making the game-whose graphics, gameplay and voice work are all top-notch-and I see the value of encouraging independent game developers, but none of that changes the fact that Gone Home takes maybe three hours to get through and has almost no replayability value. And, unfortunately, I can't in all good faith urge you to buy the game and play it, since for all that it is interesting and worth playing, Gone Home doesn't really justify its $20 price tag. ![]() Its effect is rooted in the expectations it creates in its audience, and a player who goes into it knowing what to expect will probably get much less out of it than someone who goes in completely ignorant. Gone Home, however, is a work that challenges that last belief. ![]() Which is: a) that I don't have one, b) that I am sick and tired of the way that the word spoiler has been allowed to control and denature the discussion of pop culture, and c) that any worthwhile piece of fiction is one that can't be "spoiled" by knowing what happens in it. Having played the game myself, however, I found my own eagerness to join the conversation curtailed by this blog's spoiler policy. Part of the reason that I ended up playing Gone Home-aside from the fact that it doesn't require shooting anyone or terrific hand-eye coordination-was that it was a game that people seemed to be seriously discussing and debating. I'm pretty far from what you might call an avid gamer (games I've played in the last five years: Portal, Machinarium, Tales of Monkey Island, Botanicula, and, uh, that's it I still haven't gotten around to Portal 2), but even I couldn't miss the attention paid to The Fullbright Company's Gone Home.
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