Gone Home is an indie story exploration video game.
I recently played and beat the new independent video game Gone Home. Set in the 1990s, Gone Home is a story exploration game centering on a young woman who returns home from a year in Europe to find her entire family missing. Sifting through letters, stories, and other artifacts at the house, we learn all about the family and get to solve the mystery of where everybody has gone.
Jane McGonigal, a prominent scholar, author and game expert, has spoken a lot about the potential for games to make our world a better place. I don’t game very much (ahh, life…how it gets in the way!) but I do strongly believe that games have the potential to offer many benefits both from personal and cultural standpoints.
Gone Home is indeed a remarkable game that offers a truly immersive, empowering and meaningful gameplay experience. Unconventional to the core, it leads with a strong queer narrative and has remarkably gotten mainstream attention and tons of accolades from diverse critics. There’s no guns, no blood, no violence, no scary zombies (maybe a ghost…that’s all I’m sayin’…). There’s just a really sweet queer coming of age tale, a family drama, and tons of awesome 90s relics and riot grrl music.
If this sounds at all intriguing, I highly suggest buying and playing Gone Home and supporting the indie developers who made it (The Fulbright Company), as well as that little part of your heart that’s aching for a truly unique interactive storytelling experience.
Thanks for the game review. I will check it out. I am an avid gamer. It keeps me grounded in an ungrounded world, and because of the work I do. It also allows me to immerse myself into characters and story, like I did when I was an actor. I enjoy it immensely, and especially enjoy them when women are the central characters or heroes.
That’s awesome to hear, Eileen! I agree — games featuring women in strong, empowering roles as characters or heroes are superb and definitely enjoyable for me as well. Let me know if you enjoy it!
Oh, man, I played it in one 4 hour session. I was convinced the whole time that a zombie, ghost or lesbian necromancer was going to jump out at me the whole time. Quite distracting from a sweet story, but it really got the adrenaline pumping when there was no good reason for it to be!