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Time Crisis, the arcade on-rails shooter, is the epitome of walking simulators-it walks for you, for crying out loud-but no one can watch another play Time Crisis and honestly declare that they, too, have reaped the same experience as if they had played it themself.
GONE HOME SAM AND LONNIE FULL
It’s not like Bastion where you can watch a full playthrough and absorb the story but still want to play it yourself for the gameplay Gone Home is strange in that if you’ve seen a playthrough of it, then you’ve essentially played it yourself.Īnd it’s not just because Gone Home is a linear story in the form of a “walking simulator,” as some have called it.
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That aside, my primary criticism of Gone Home is that you can watch a YouTube playthrough of it and have the same fundamental experience as if you had played it yourself.
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It’s intentionally misleading, and while that in itself isn’t a bad thing, the misdirection here doesn’t serve the story in any meaningful way, and therefore comes off as cheap. Some of the story elements are even manipulative, particularly the offhand references to a ghost and the ambiguous messages and staging that prime you for one character’s suicide. I suppose it is in a way, but everything from the start appears to point to this as a traditional haunted house mystery. The setup, the environment, the clues you find along the way all seem to say that this is a horror story. The Badĭespite my praise for Gone Home’s suspenseful atmosphere, I can’t help but feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The themes of young love, childhood innocence, and LGBT strife are smaller in scale and far more intimate than the grand, epic, save-the-world plots that are so common in video games, and it’s clear that this was a quieter story that The Fullbright Company felt was important to tell. But the suspense is palpable.Īnd the writers deserve the recognition they’ve received for telling a story that, at least at the time of its release, wasn’t told very often. Don’t get me wrong: Gone Home is no Amnesia. The textures, the sounds, the mood-I was scared at points, and as much as I hate horror, I almost stopped playing because of it. All of this comes together to create an eerie atmosphere of darkness, mystery, and uncertainty. The house that Katie returns to is disheveled, and the story takes place at night during a raging storm, with heavy rain patter punctuated by peals of thunder.
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The Fullbright Company deserves praise for successfully creating an immersive environment that evokes emotion. By exploring the house, you encounter clues that drive the narrative forward toward an explanation of what happened.Ī leisurely playthrough will have you reaching the end within 2 hours. Gone Home is a first-person exploration game where you play as Katie, a 20-year-old who has just returned to her 1995 home in Oregon to find that the house is completely empty. Not many would call Netflix’s Bandersnatch interactive film a “game” despite the viewer having some agency in directing the narrative to me, Gone Home feels a lot like that.īut I’m getting ahead of myself. Gone Home is an important video game, if for no other reason than that it forces us to confront and grapple with two commonly asked but oft-swept-aside questions: On what basis should games be judged, and when does a piece of media start being a game?įirst released in 2013 to critical praise but an otherwise ambivalent reception elsewhere, Gone Home stirred up controversy in its time-not only for its unconventional subject matter, which I’ll touch on below, but also because it doesn’t quite have all the components that comprise a “game.” Is it interactive? Yes, and for some, that’s the only essential bit that matters-but others, myself included, demand more.