Starker on 4/1/2014 at 02:53
Quote Posted by Chade
I would love to hear impressions on the game from IF fans. I'm sure there are games in that genre that solely focus on telling a story. How does this stack up? Is this something that the gaming industry is doomed to go through multiple times: taking iconic control schemes and ways of representing worlds and creating games where everything is stripped out except the story? I can't help but feel that there is a potentially large mainstream genre waiting to be tapped here: but probably not with a control scheme and world representation taken directly from an unrelated genre.
If I had to, I'd compare it to Photopia. It's also streamlined and minimalistic and fairly accessible to people unfamiliar with the genre conventions, and you kind of have to piece things together from multiple viewpoints as they both try to present their fairly linear story in a non-linear fashion. Also, Photopia is about a father-daughter relationship, so they are both coming-of-age young-adult fiction stories.
However, I feel that Gone Home has more in common with visual novels and graphic adventures than text adventures. It's actually fairly rare that you get a purely story-focused text adventure. Every once in a while you get something where the entire game is one long conversation, or something like that, but usually puzzles are fairly heavily featured.
It seems to me that the focus on the story at the expense of gameplay is something that has been happening independent of specific adventure game genres. There's Amnesia with its atmospheric first person exploration and The Walking Dead with its minimal gameplay. There's also AAA's <s>focus on</s> obsession with cinematic storytelling with almost incidental gameplay systems. It's likely a convergence of multiple influences, stemming from things like the desire for mainstream appeal or the misguided focus on more realistic graphics, but Gone Home specifically has fairly obvious ties to Bioshock and the environmental storytelling that has been pioneered by immersive sims and first person adventure games.
As for whether there's a new genre to be tapped, I'm inclined to think of games like Proteus and other exploration-heavy games that tone down the dialogue and puzzles and even storytelling as the extreme examples of the adventure genre. To me, they don't seem different enough to warrant a new separate genre distinction. If you really wanted to emphasise the minimalist gameplay then I suppose you could call them adventure-likes or adventure-lites.
Quote Posted by Chade
I'm pretty sure I missed some sort of significance to
Sam and Lonnie's supernatural games. I look forward to reading other people's interpretations of all the details in the game.
Storywise, the excuse for Lonnie to come over was to see the reportedly haunted house and to do some ghosthunting together. Thematically, I think the reason for the occult stuff is to juxtapose it with Christianity. Or maybe it's not really more complicated than "exciting teen adventure".
