Man, what if Bioshock didn't have gameplay. I think I would have liked it a lot more.

Definitely not GOTY, but it's in my top 10. 8th actually.

I like Gone Home as an experience and there is little that is anything like it. It is fine to dislike a game but don't pin it on reviewers or friends who recommend it to you.

I"m glad I only paid 10 for it but I thought it was a good game with a lot of unnecessary praise from critics. It is more of a pop up book than a video game but I enjoyed my 90 minutes with it.

I fucking loved Bioshock, and it had more than one way to tell it's story, but to say Bioshock's audio logs alone did as good or better job story telling than Gone Home is absurd.

I'm all for video games exploring new topics and being more inclusive, I just wish that those issues had popped up in a better game and that the story had addressed those themes in a more original way.

Well, yeah. If the story is your big selling point, then yes, I do think that story needs to be pretty damn good. Not the "greatest stories ever" necessarily, but I certainly expected more than what I got.

Yes, the game is mostly drivel. How people give it such praise, even so far as saying 'game of the year' is bizarre to me. It was definitely not worth the money, and the story was barely anything more than what you'd see in a mediocre tv show.

I avoided the game until this post, I had hoped to play it on console next year. i thought it was a ghost game. Girl comes home to empty house, finds clues all about, discovers either she's dead or the family is dead, I waited. then this came up and I read the post's. Nothing against the game, but It seem's really boring, walking around the house looking at fake nintendo, fake C.D.'s, fake V.H.S. I need that house to blow up, a demon to come out of the closet. There were plenty of demon's coming out in Doom. In Resident Evil zombie's come out of the closet, there's some big-ass closet's in Resident Evil. Everybody complains about the price, twenty dollars for two hours. I paid forty dollars for two and a half hours on Resident Evil, but the replay value on that is much higher.

That's your problem, then. You interpreted the zeitgeist to mean the game was as good as it was popular, even though quality doesn't scale with popularity. Your expectations were too high. Not entirely your fault, but no fault of the developer.

You're going to be be really pissed when this game starts winning Game of the Year awards from at least Polygon, GameSpot, and maybe GiantBomb. It's a game about lesbian love, shows games can have an emotional impact without the violence, full of 90s' nostalgia, and isn't just about head shots.... oh right... it's also indie....

So, giving Gone Home game of the year let's them justify their existence as people. "See games are import and so are we..." It also gives them a feel good blowjob about their world view.

Please note, I only bring up the lesbian thing in a positive. It's not portrayed well in many games (looking at you Mass Effect). 2013 has been a fanatic year for the gay community in terms of human rights; however, just because you're telling a gay love story in a year to celebrate diversity doesn't mean you should be game of the year.

It's not going to get Game of The Year because "gay love story". Yes, that aspect was something that really resonated with some people, and the voice given to Sam is really great. However, it also portrays that feeling of young love and insecurity remarkably well, regardless of your gender or sexual identity. It's a game that subverts your expectations at every turn, and the experience is richer for it. The game excels because there's no ghost, no killer, and no gruesome death. It's a game that addresses some really serious issues and pulls you along. It might not be a game for everyone, that's okay, no game will be, but for me it was one of the best gaming experiences I had this year. It was complete, fulfilling, and kept me wanting to search that house and put together the story.

It's much more than a "feel good blowjob". Lastly, not entirely sure if English is your first language or not, but the LGBT community does not need to justify it's existence as people.

Gone Home was not a game, it was interactive novel i think that what they call it.

I feel like @xceagle hit the nail on the head. Most of the big-budget full price games that I played this year left me with ephemeral and apathetic feelings. Gone Home stuck with me months after I finished it because all of the pieces fell in just the right places. It's atmosphere, it's soundtrack, it's 90's nostalgia, it's good voice acting, it's all of these things that just make it stand head-and-shoulders above most of this year's crop. Regardless of the general consensus about its qualifications as an actual "game," Gone Home was one of the absolute best pieces of entertainment I consumed this year.

aaa-yuuup. It seems to hit pretty hard for certain people in the right demographic. It doesn't have a lot to offer anyone else. It feels like someone spent a lot of time on sound and graphics and plugged them into example.proj for a ready-made game engine.

I literally just finished Gone Home and really enjoyed it. In fact much more than Brother, which I finished last night (doing some GOTY mop-up).

While I can certainly see why someone wouldn't like the game, saying that people enjoy it because it's indie and the sister is gay is just asinine. I am not gay, but the love story really connected to me on a personal level, reminding me of similar situations when I was a teenager.

While I've never been a 17 year old girl, it seems fairly incredulous that all this would have happened over a 10 month period, going from being a normal kid to a hardcore lesbian in a band and running away from home; and why would all these things happen at the exact same time: daughter returns home, other daughter runs away, parents out of town on counselling.

How the heck does a 20 year old afford to go tour Europe for a year?

Did it really cost $1800 to move an hour across town in 1994?

There was so much of this stupid shit in the game that it really took me out of it, and all the hooks that people try to sell it on, the 90s, the personal story, the discovery, were all letdowns.

For me the big thing was definitely the rad 90s vibe. I also liked the way the story was presented, and the fact that it was not another "you're the chosen one to save the universe" type stories. I agree that overall the story was a little flat.

It was stated in the game that Sam knew she was a lesbian for at least a little bit before meeting Lonnie. Sam was never in a band, Lonnie was. Some teenagers make brash decisions, especially ones that feel like their parents don't respect who they are.

Saved up money working jobs? Got a scholarship from college? There's a few ways.

Moving an entire house is pretty expensive.

I knew about the twist (more specifically the lack of one) before going in, so I knew what I was getting into. Add to that the fact that I got it for half off, and I had a good enough time with it. Some weird game elements aside, the story was totally normal. For obvious reasons, a lot of games don't do that, so it was neat to see here. Kind of like a murder mystery where no one was actually murdered (they were just on vacation or something). Harmless dumb fun.

Then again, I might be unfairly swayed by the Magic Eye pictures. That was probably my favorite thing in that game, nostalgia reasons.

Where did you get that the LGBT community needs to justify their existence? I have never said any such thing.

All I said to the OP was that this is the type of game that gets the reviewers at those publications passionate and listed the reasons why. That's it. I would argue that if it was a straight love story, it wouldn't carry the gravitas of the gay love story simply because they've been done, and done well before.

Here's how the game sells itself on Steam

No Combat, No Puzzles: Gone Home is a nonviolent and puzzle-free experience, inviting you to play at your own pace without getting attacked, stuck, or frustrated. This house wants you to explore it.

What expectations was it subverting?

While I'm sure the lack of conflict is amazing for you. The way you have to examine objects for some semblance of a story. I guess that's fun.. or entertaining... or something other than the most goddamn pretentious thing in all of storytelling. "I found this note in the trash can." "I found this note in this desk." "My whore mother left this incriminating letter in the filling cabinet." I guess her family just had years of paper work scattered about.. well at least just the character and plot points. The rest of it found its way to the only damn trashcan they knew how to empty.

It's fine if you liked it. Just like it's fine if you carry around a giant copy of Friedrich Nietzsch's Anti-Christ so everyone knows what you're reading. It is what it is.

This. I would be pretty hard pressed to think of a single other story driven game that didn't involve some sort of massive conflict usually in some sort of fantastical environment. Even something like To The Moon still had a sci-fi bend. I think one of the key issues with gaming among the general populace is that the types of stories games tell are all very similar. They are summer blockbuster type stories, maybe not in scope, but in style. There has never been, to my knowledge, a game equivalent to something like American Beauty. Many of the best movies don't see the world in danger. Many don't see anyone in danger. Many just involve the lives of everyday people and the things they deal with. Now Gone Home is not the greatest story ever told, but it is the only story of this type ever told in a game. It paves the way for similar games to tell better stories.

As far as this specific story and the way it is told, I think the best part about it is how it plays with your expectations. At the beginning of the game you expect something terrible to have happened. You hear Lonnie's messages on the answering machine and expect that she is in danger, not in the throes of young love. You expect the red liquid in the bathtub to be blood not hair dye. You expect the basement to contain the ghost of year's past and the attic to contain the dead body of your sister. You expect the parents to divorce, the father to fail at getting another book published, the mother to have an affair. But in the end none of those things happen. By playing with tone and player expectations, Gone Home manages to keep things unexpected. You keep expecting things to go terribly wrong but they never do. And that is true of both gameplay and story. It's a merger of gameplay and narrative that defines the best interactive stories. Nothing bad happens in the gameplay of Gone Home. There are no monsters, no ghost, nothing. You expect the gameplay to go in a certain direction based on the setting and the tone, just like you expect the story to go in a similar direction. It is in fact the exact opposite of ludo-narrative dissonance. It is one of the few games to achieve true ludo-narrative harmony.

EDIT: Also, @roadshell, I noticed you used the term cognitive dissonance to describe this game, but cognitive dissonance is a mental issue where a person believes one thing but does the exact opposite. I think you meant ludo-narrative dissonance, which describes when the gameplay of a game is incongruent with the story it is trying to tell. Maybe the best example of ludo-narrative dissonance is the Uncharted series where Nathan Drake is presented as this nice, likeable guy in the cutscenes but in the gameplay he ruthlessly murders hundreds of people without a shred of remorse. Nothing in Gone Home in any way presents ludo-narrative dissonance. Contrivance? Yes. But contrivance occurs in everything from books to movies, and this game was at least a bit more believable than your standard audio logs.

To me it seems like the video game equivalent of Oscar bait. Lets make this indie game where you basically do nothing gameplay wise, have it set in the 90ers (a decade many reviews have fond nostalgia for), the main plot involves LGBT issues and to top it off we add some "Nintendo games" references. I have never felt so pandered to in my life.

Few games I can think of have been so cleanly divisive. It's fascinating to me how an apparently significant portion of players sat there, completed the game, and were angered when the credits rolled. I know it's just a vocal minority, but the truly vitriolic responders seem to touch on similar bullet points. A lot of people have meditated intensely on what other people might possible have enjoyed about the game. This is fine, and could even be a part of constructive conversation. Not everyone has to agree on everything after all. Plus, the capacity tryto imagine someone else's perspective indicates a baseline level of empathy. This is something which sociopathic personalities, among others, are incapable of.

On the other hand there are people who are so closed to the world that they cannot accept that someone might, in fact, name Gone Home the Game of the Year (or related accolades including rave reviews). The notion of consumers and critics being eager to "prove they're not bigots" or "seem smart" has come up a lot. This is tantamount to conspiracy theory, and though it represents a fault in logical reasoning, the speaker feels he has sufficiently rationalized a conflicting perspective that does not fit neatly into his warped perception of the world. In the case of professional reviewers, multiple individuals might get casually referenced because of how profoundly positive just about every real review was. If accused in the appropriate context, accusations like these can get taken very seriously and investigated as possible conflict of interest. I have to imagine a critic might be somewhat concerned if someone suddenly started casting aspersions in an inappropriate context as well.

It's not a bargain-priced game, and that can be a legitimate detractor. The value of my experience was easily in excess of your average AAA game, so I probably wouldn't have flinched if I had paid $70. The brevity works to its advantage. Overall, Gone Home to me, amounts to one of my favorite games of all time.

I really liked Gone Home. So much that I edited my GOTY list after playing it and put it on there.

That being said, the reasons I liked it were the setting, tone, pacing, and the story in general. I really appreciated how the stage was being set for Samantha to run away from home...it was not a surprise when I found out that's what happened. Her sister was away for a year...Dad was on the downslope of a writing career and drinking a lot...Mom was withdrawing and probably having an affair with Ranger Rick...where were they? Was Mom out with her boyfriend while Dad was at the bar drinking his sorrows away? Who knows.

The fact that Sam ran away with a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend was completely irrelevant to me, and I only thought about it in the context of "Oh god, I'm going to have to listen to people claim this is some sort of lesbian propaganda."

So yeah, I liked Gone Home. I think I liked it way more at $5 than I would have at $20, though. I enjoyed the game and while it was one of my favorites of 2013, I'm not going to sit here and claim it was some kind of life-changing psychological kick to the head, or try to make a case that it's something more than it is. It's a story I've heard and seen plenty of times before, just never told quite in this way.

All those people assuming reviewers who praised the game did so just to stroke their own egos are the worst. I can totally understand just not liking the game, but I just fucking hate it when people claim to know others' real reasons for liking a game better than the actual people who said they like a game.

Is it really so impossible for people to have different opinions that you'd call others out as being dishonest? Especially for people who do this thing for a living? Come the fuck on, and grow the fuck up.

Do I also believe that the game deserves praise for telling a story about a lesbian love story? Yes, because it's something that's not tackled head on by most video games as others have already pointed out, and diversity in narratives is always a good thing for any medium. By praising it for taking a different direction in story, we send a message to all other video game developers that it is good to tell any kind of story. That your game doesn't need to be about saving a princess/country/world/galaxy/universe for it to be well-received.

I'm not really one you'd call an active advocate for LGBT rights, but praise for telling a story representing that side is also good for the gaming industry's maturation and that community's wider public acceptance.

And even then, I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting to identify with that group and their ultimate agenda. Is it really something that people find offensive to have equal representation for that minority group?

Maybe it's because a lot of the stereotypical gaming audience are made up of people who don't think any form of politics should be mixed in with games, that games should strictly be outlets of escapist fun. But that's a whole 'nother conversation.

Going back to criticism of the game itself, bringing up the argument that "film/tv/literature already covered that ground and did so better" doesn't hold up in my eyes either.

First of all, it's an unfair comparison considering the amount of time those forms of media have had to develop compared to the relatively young history of video games, especially in terms of storytelling.

I also believe that telling this story on the platform of video games provides a whole different experience that make the narrative feel fresh and thus deserving of praise. The power of agency brings an entirely new perspective to an old plot. I don't believe I would have felt as invested in Sam and Lonnie's romance if I hadn't been the one exploring the house, turning on the lights, discovering the notes, unlocking the doors, listening to the tapes, jumping from the cracking of thunder, wondering with dread if I was going to stumble upon Sam's dead body in the attic or Oscar's ghost in the basement, and piecing together the "normal" mysteries that fleshed out the characters that made up the Greenbriars.

You can't duplicate that exact same experience by just telling the same story in a book, in a movie or in a TV show. That's what makes it great.

The game didn't need any complex systems that we usually see in today's traditional video games. The freedom to walk around the house as you will while also having a layout that still leads you along a narrative path that would make picking up information feel natural; the lighting, sound and visual context clues that creates a wholly immersive atmosphere; and the unfolding narrative that plays upon your expectations of video game plots (and even stories of such nature in general) when all put together totally justify it having been done through a video game framework and nothing else.

This was my biggest problem with it as well. Not to mention the ending is about as cliche as it gets and the parents having a rocky relationship while lecturing the gay teen about love...yeah that's in like every fucking coming out story ever.

If literally the only thing your game has going is its story, then the story needs to be great. Gone Home's was mediocre. The excessive praise for this game is nothing short of baffling.

That said, I don't regret the purchase. Always glad to support an indie, especially one dealing with GLBT topics.

It isn't a game.

/thread

I enjoyed it, as its been made obvious, many of you did as well. But this experience, WAS NOT A VIDEO GAME.

Zero game was involved. Why are we still talking about a virtual house tour just because it had a narrative?

Is it because it had a narrative?

We're still talking about it because we liked it. Why are you still talking about it?

Bombcast GOTY spoilers: Gone Home will be in top 5. Someone will get angry about it and give in.

You're a narrative.

@roadshell: "All this game did was take that format and then suck out all the gameplay, all the action, all the production values, and all the fantastical elements."

To some people those are the least important parts of a game. In fact sometimes those aspects are actively hurting the experience. What we are left with is an insanely personal story with amazing world building. If a game can get one thing perfect, to me that 100 times better that a dozen things in mediocrity.

No one is saying (well, I'm not saying anyway) that there's anything wrong with LBGT themes and representation in this or any other game, or any other kind of political message for that matter. What I'm saying is "the game still needs to be good." I'm not going to give something a pass just because it happens to align with my political worldview (and for the record, Gone Home does align with my political worldview). I'm not going to be happy about blowing $20 on a boring 90 minute game with a cliche-ridden story just because it "sends a message." There's a difference between being a critic and being an activist, when you're chief criteria is "is this a good game" you're thinking like a critic, when your chief criteria is "is this good for the cause" then you're being an activist. There are going to eventually be games that address these issues in better and more creative ways, and you do those future games a disservice when you give this one a pass just because it dared to even bring the topic up.

I would be more willing to buy that as an argument if I thought that Gone Home was a fun game that I would want to play whether or not it had a story. Even something like The Last of Us (which could be reduced to "Children of Men meets The Road" if one wanted to) probably wouldn't match up to your average movie, but I'm fine with that because I think that's a fun game that I'd still want to play even if it didn't have a story so I'm fine with the narrative being merely good by video game standards..

Gone Home isn't like that, when you buy Gone Home you're essentially buying a story. The gameplay only exists as a means of leading you from one story element to the next, and when a game's entire value rests on its story I don't think its unreasonable at all to judge that story against the kinds of stories you can get elsewhere.

We're going to have to agree to disagree about this one. In fact I think that one of the game's biggest failings is that I don't think the player's agency does much of anything to improve the story. By its nature, the game makes the player little more than an observer listening to Sam and Lonnie's story from afar. Your actions as a player might slightly alter the order with which you hear the story or read about it... but barely. I'm also no believer in the notion that "atmosphere" should be counted as a stand-in for actual storytelling (as seems to happen all to often in video game discourse as of late). To me, atmosphere is backdrop, nothing more, and its what you do once that atmosphere is established that matters. As for the notion that the game's subversion of expectations is praiseworthy, well, I've got to disagree with you once again. If anything that made the game more or a letdown because, frankly, every one of the possibilities that I imagined while playing was more interesting than what the actual plot ended up being.

I was talking to a best friend and he was saying "I cried about the father." It's not that I'm cynical but I felt that's a bit much projecting himself onto red herrings.

@roadshell: I agree with your original points. This was a big disappointment for me. I'm sure the hype brought my expectations too high, but I didn't really enjoy any part of this.

I walked around a messy house, some girl talked about a girl she was into, and they referenced Street Fight and Uma Thurman. I was born in '85 so I figured something would resonate but I could've just walked around my house and looked at VHS tapes for the same nostalgia.

And its story had the same effect as listening to a bunch of audio logs.

What is Patrick referring to in the review? "There is, for lack of a better phrase, a 'holy shit' moment early on in the game, and it acts as though nothing's happened" What holy shit moment?

@csl316 said:

I think Patrick was referring to the messages left by Lonnie when you play the voice recorder.

I personally don't think it would have made any difference if Lonnie was a dude. Gone Home's story is your typical love story done to death in other forms of media. What I did enjoy about Gone Home is how you unravel the story. Nothing is told straight up to you and it's up to the player to interpret what happened. Some players might have missed some clues making their interpretation of the story slightly different.

why are you on the forum specifically designated for this game then is your life that dull that you have to search out an area to proclaim that you don't like something that other people like
wait I forgot I'm on GiantBomb.com my bad

I like that the OP gave really good reasons for not liking it. People may not agree with those reasons but they are totally valid and well thought out.

Isn't it great to share opinions about videogames, guys?!

Personally I loved Gone Home, and I played through it twice in a row so my wife could experience it too as I had a feeling she'd love this game as well.

@donchipotle said:

But, like, okay, Blue Is The Warmest Color is a landmark film! How many films with the production value and critical reception of Blue cover lesbian drama, let along young lesbian drama? Blue didn't exist for wide audiences to see when Gone Home came out, and it's super exciting that both happened near the same time. And there are things to like about each approach and things to criticize, such as the extended porn-like sex scenes in Blue and questioning the efficacy of the bait-and-switches in Gone Home.

There's no need to be competitive and exclusionary about whether Gone Home is a good narrative "by comparison" to other media or just in the world of games. Simply put, it's either a good narrative or it's not, on its own merits. I personally found Gone Home very affecting and transformative, as much so as Robinson's Housekeeping, James's The Turn of the Screw, or Brontë's Jane Eyre. All of which have elements of the sort of "ghost stories" that focus more on the absence of living people than the presence of the dead.

Felt the same way about this and Brothers. Just didn't click. I'm even part of the generation they're pandering to here. Ultimately the experience was me saying "oh that's kinda neat" about 4 times and then the game ends. Brothers not working for me was more an execution problem but I get the appeal more there. But Bioshock Infinite got pegged down mutliple times for these 2 games and though I liked them I will never get how that happened.

I guess my issue is a first person game with almost no gameplay isn't really a revelation now. I thought it was novel with Dear Esther, but since then there have been a lot of them and Gone Home was just one of that lot.

My main problem with the game's entire premise is that I didn't have the teenage experience that predisposes people, mostly from a certain part of the US, to like the game a lot more than I would. There's nothing for me to enjoy of that more personal and intimate story - maybe I'm just not that personal and intimate as a person, just someone who uses gaming as a way of escapism, not to live through other people adolescent problems that seem entirely petty and angsty. And even serious personal issues in games is not something I come to the genre for.

I don't hate the game at all, but I dislike people claiming it can be this universal amazing experience when I don't see it as that for me.

That said, as a contrast, I enjoyed Papers, Please immensely, but that could have something to do with me growing up in a shitty Eastern European country. Or that game having an actually enjoyable and interesting, much more relatable setting, at least for me.

I would like to add that my favorite trend over the last few years in games is the diversity of games available. I love the fact that some people adore Gone Home and others loathe it. That means the medium's audience is becoming more diversified and the games are matching. A medium where everyone likes the products the exact same amount is a boring medium that doesn't grow. So, please everyone, even if you hate this game don't come to the conclusion that your dislike of the game means it shouldn't exist. I'm not saying anyone here has said that but I'm worried that will start to happen. Such a belief will only make this medium stale and predictable.

@jasonr86: That's a great point, actually. A couple of years ago it would have been hard to imagine the breadth of indie games we have available now. It could never come from huge developers or publishers simply because of the way they want to spend their resources, and the amount of profit they want to achieve.

I think mostly people get angry when something becomes really popular and receives a lot of praise, and it's not the specific little indie game they fell in love with. And especially if that thing that becomes very popular doesn't appeal to them at all. It's understandable, of course, and kind of sad.

I feel Giant Bomb is pretty good at this however, with tastes in games spanning a HUGE cross section (from Patrick to Jeff to Vinny to Brad to Drew), all highlighting different and interesting things.

I doubt there will be anyone angry about it, all the giantbomb duders seem to love whatever this thing is. I really wish there was some voice of dissent on the GOTY awards because people deserve to hear that not everyone adores this.

Man, I'm just glad whenever someone mentions Blue Is The Warmest Color. That's all.

I don't think it's possible to judge anything completely on its own merits. When we evaluate anything--art, food, games, music, or books, we're bringing our own past experiences with us. I loved the Spyro series when I was 6. That game was 10/10 in my eyes. Now that I've played more and better video games, I think of it as a game series with slidy controls, a bad camera, and occasionally messed up design choices.

If OP thinks that Blue makes the sexuality aspect of Gone Home's story seem lazy and generic, then his opinion is completely justified.

I guess it's a pretty decent visual novel.

The praise Gone Home and the Stanley Parable have received have damned them somewhat. They are both interesting experiments that don't live up to the hyperbolic hype. I just now finished Gone Home and I went into it knowing more then an ideal amount about the game.

I knew going in that the supernatural trail was a dead end and the GOTY podcast had me anticipating a light bulb would blow every time I turned one on. Although despite my efforts to search the house thoroughly, I never found that exploding bulb. It`s hard to say if my experience would have been a better one if I went in cold.

The story was ultimately pretty disappointing. From the start I didn`t like Sam because of how she treated Daniel, and I don`t think the whole running away thing was justified. I identified with the parents more then anyone, maybe the lack of voice acting for those characters added more room for me to visualize my own narrative.