henke on 23/12/2013 at 12:31

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That's too bad, but it's not like you've lost any "progress". You've probably read and seen a fair few things in your 1 hour, and you already have all that in your head, so just start it up again and move on to the next room, skipping what you've already seen.

I can understand why you wouldn't be "hooked" on the game after the first hour. Gone Home is not much more than interesting for most of it's duration, but it does have a few heartbreaking/heartbreakingly beautiful moments sprinkled throughout. Totally worth playing till the end just to experience those moments. :)

june gloom on 23/12/2013 at 18:49

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I don't know how it lost your saves. I had to close out for about an hour while dinner intervened. It was fine when I came back.

Muzman on 27/12/2013 at 07:31

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Hey I finally played it after it sat there for a while.

It's really good. I had been vaguely spoiled on certain things, just by inference from what other people were saying, but the specifics I didn't know and so that didn't hurt it much I don't think.
It's a strange sort of feeling, after all that. It's very understated and mostly uneventful. Absorbing this stuff in a mostly lower key state of mind is very unusual. Most of our memories of films and games these days are essentially by getting you all adrenalised and then punching you in the face. This puts you in a different state entirely, without quite letting you think something isn't going to come along.

The writing is like something I haven't seen since System Shock. That game, more than everything that followed had quite normal conversation a lot of the time and left it to you to figure out the important stuff from amongst that (which is what you'd find on an abandoned space station, not convenient logs with the code right near the locked door) and giving you that sense of the life before all this around you happened. It makes things too hard apparently, even though it's exactly what I'd like to see more of, so everyone kind of gave up on it after. You can chart the information in Thief games becoming more and more obvious as the series goes on.

Well this game is all about those side details and mostly free of having to shove gameplay important information at you, like where the armory is or whatever. The information is the gameplay. It's quite liberating. This is kind of a modern take on the gothic romance in a weird way, only it's neo-realist as well. It ought to be an ungainly mixture, but that's exactly what it does; create this emotionally haunted space from quite down to earth and ordinary things. I'm reminded of the musical (http://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/hauntologists-mine-the-past-fo.html) Hauntology movement and its goal of creating music from audio tidbits that prod memories you never knew were that strong. Is this the first Hauntology game?

I could really see this becoming a genre all on its own. The Empty-House-er.
It's also weird to realise that I was pretty thorough and the game doesn't seeeem that complicated, there's apparently a lot of details to still piece together. I do actually want to go back and 'finish' the house. There I have to remember back when people were trying to figure out The Cradle. I remember Jordan Thomas talking about how the whole story of what happened can be pieced together from clues. I never really felt the urge there (not least of all because the place is a nightmare), but I do here.

Some crits;
I don't have a problem with it necessarily, but the player fiction could be stronger. It wouldn't be easy however. There is that point where you're doing what you think you're supposed to do in game terms, namely poke around at stuff, and you think to yourself - This isn't really what someone does when presented with an empty house- Their house. It's a conceit, sure, and that's fine. But if you're really concerned something terrible has happened there's certain things you could do to establish no one is home or bleeding to death in a corner or something. Rifling through everyone's stuff is somewhere down the list methinks. But that's ok. The not so faint hint of voyeurism is kinda implicit in the whole thing. You're not really Katie, so you can do stuff she probably wouldn't out of sheer curiosity. Unless I'm mistaken they do play with that a little bit too. Is it me or is there a note in the basement that you can only look at for a few seconds? It's like you/she reads it and its finally something that's too intimate so she doesn't want to look. If it's not a glitch, it's a really cool thing. A subtle little mechanic with a lot of potential.

The narration I understand is just avoiding the absurdity of convenient audio logs or something lying around for people to find at the appropriate time. They just skip that problem. It is what it is. I wonder if anyone played it without them first time and what they thought of the experience though.

It's probably something for another game, but I wonder how forcing a bit of roleplaying on you would go. Like your character can call out for people, try to make phone calls etc. Could be interesting. (Machine for Pigs had kind of dopey phone calls that just keep going. Doing that well could be pretty cool, if hard.).

Another thing is the sound. It's good, but it's just good. It's a nitpick, but the phone voices don't sound quite like phone voices, the tape players all sound the same and their sound propagates in a simple radius and doors and walls don't make a great deal of difference. The footsteps get a bit repetitive too. I expect its a bit beyond their means as developers, but something like this is crying out for truly transcendent audio. Render every raindrop if you have to. I want to hear Heavens to Betsy echoing eerily through the bricked bowels of the house like an angry ghost.

Anyway that just speaks to the potential for this sort of thing. Definitely worth a look if you want something different in any case.

Muzman on 29/12/2013 at 16:45

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This thing about it being a horror fake-out or misdirection has to go. It's nonsense. It's exactly what it wants to be. All the atmospheric tropes of Horror came from the Gothic anyway, this is just putting them back in their original, relatively mundane context. People's rote second guessings aren't the game's fault.

If there's any game that's probably going to expect an audience of non gamers its this one. So the odd control aid (that you can turn off) is no surprise at all. FPS controls are some of the hardest to get to grips with for people who didn't grow up with that sort of thing. There's a lot less aids and tooltips than most games these days.


Do tell.

retractingblinds on 31/12/2013 at 02:11

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Funny, that's what I've always like about Thief, there's a lot of rich lore underneath everything. But even then, games like Dark Souls and Demon's Souls have become famous for how involved the environment is in storytelling. You may not be entering the #groanzone as Katie might have put it, in a more modern era whilst discovering dad's old nudie magazines, but rather uncovering a history of a destroyed land, the lords who ruled over it, the origins of the scourge that ravaged it.

Even in games like Half-Life 2 you can uncover the rich history of its locations, the entire games setting, by just looking at a bulletin board, paying attention to your surroundings. I think what Gone Home has going for it, is that is all it's about. Looking at that bulletin board, in that shoe box, playing with that mix tape cassette player (along with a truckload of nostalgia). There's nothing more. Essentially it took the environmental storytelling from games which do more than just tell the story through the environment, and boiled away everything else to have it be a purely environmental driven story. Well, that's not entirely true. There's also the ghostly audio from your run away sister that comes when you cross random tripwires in the story.

It's not really anything groundbreaking. And you can't deny the corniness of that ending.