I played Firewatch in June and really liked it, so today I decided to go back and check out Gone Home, a game that some have compared it to, which was recently made free on Playstation Plus.

I didn't really like it. I didn't have the vitriolic hate reaction that a lot of people seem to have, or think that it was "not a game" but I found it pretty boring and was not emotionally affected by anything in the story.

I will admit that I was spoiled on the rough outline of the game ending (I knew it was relatively happy and that there was something to do with same sex relationships, though I thought that the player character was the one who was gay) and knew that there was no actual threat in the game, supernatural or otherwise, so that might have colored my experience, but I don't think it had a huge affect. I don't like being scared, so knowing there was no threat was probably a plus for me, and the game reveals the lesbian angle pretty early on, so that wasn't a huge spoiler. For me, I think, the main issues with the game were:

The environment is kind of boring.

I was born in the early 80s so I'm sort of a "90s kid" and I recognized the aesthetics and all the bands and celebrities and TV shows, but in the end Gone Home is just about rambling around a large house with a few secret areas that amount to basically an unfinished basement. There's lots of random notes and stuff to read and there are music cassettes to play (I found the music mostly...fine...except for the vinyl record, which I really liked) but it's just a house. I've been in plenty of houses. Shoshone, on the other hand, was much more visually appealing and a more interesting environment. I've been hiking too, but I've never spent a summer in the wilderness and I found the vibe very appealing. Gone Home feels pedestrian in comparison.

Your character is irrelevant.

You learn basically nothing about Katie during the game. There are glimpses of her in her trophy and her license and whatnot, but she doesn't drive the 'action' as it were. She just goes through the museum of the house looking at stuff, and hearing about the actual story. In Firewatch Henry is central to the story of the game, takes a number of important actions throughout, and is an actual developed character. If Firewatch had just been about Brian and his father then it would have been more like Gone Home, and a much worse game.

I didn't care at all about the sister or her story.

Throughout the running time of Gone Home a single image kept coming to my mind:

Okay. The sister is gay. She fell in love, in high school. Her parents were kind of crappy about it. Her girlfriend was going to leave to the army. I get it. But my high school experience was a lot worse and more troubled than that, and I knew others who had it much worse too. I knew someone whose father was killed in a robbery and whose traumatized mother was abusive towards him and his brother. I knew people who got evicted from their homes. A pretty standard adolescent love story just wasn't that interesting, and the sister was relentlessly self-involved. The game makes this clear by showing that there's a lot going on in the parents' lives during the period (Dad is having career struggles, mom is maybe having an affair, their marriage is shaky) but none of this penetrates the sister's little love bubble. The sister is also not a well-drawn character. They give her traits (she likes video games, creative writing, and punk rock) but I never really got a sense for who she was. So I spent 2 hours traipsing around an old house following the bread crumbs of story of a self-involved teenager talking about her stupid high school love affair. Most high school lovers break up. These lovers will likely break up eventually. She's going to Reed, for chrissake, in the 1990s she's going to meet plenty of lesbians there, even if just during a summer program. Lonnie was right, and I think it would have been healthier for them to break up (though I felt bad that Lonnie was going into the military because don't ask don't tell was a crap policy and I assumed it would have been rough on her.)

Compare that to Henry, who is in an impossible situation and self-aware enough to know that he's running away and showing weakness, but unable to gather the strength to do anything else, and Deliliah, whose possible dishonesty and alcoholism give tension to the fact that she's your only point of contact through the game and you must rely on her

In the end Gone Home kept reminding me of how much more I liked Firewatch, and made clearer to me what was good about that game. Having played 2 "walking simulator" type games now I can say that for me it's just like any other genre. There are good walking simulators and bad walking simulators and massively overhyped walking simulators. I have to say that I think that even 3 years ago and unspoiled I would have found Gone Home ridiculously overhyped considering the review scores it got, but the 'controversy' over the game was even dumber.

Oh well. It wasn't a long game, and at least that vinyl record was pretty sweet. Plus you could take all the food out of the fridge and chuck on it on the floor, which I enjoyed. Making a mess in general may have been the best part of the game.

I feel the opposite. Their respective stories are apples to oranges, but gone homes had much more of an affect on me than firewatches. The big thing that sets them apart is their worlds and what it's like to explore them (the whole point of these games). Gone Home 100% nails what a family home feels like, especially from that era. The forest in firewatch is videogamey in the worst ways. Forests are supposed to feel sprawling and random, and it doesn't in firewatch; it feels constructed. The fact that it's invisible walls galore doesn't help. I know, making a forest is much harder than making a house, but that doesn't change the fact that I felt engaged when exploring the house in gone home, where exploring the woods in firewatch felt boring.

I also don't see why you're looking at the story of Gone Home through the lens of tragedy. It isn't supposed to be a sad story, and it doesn't even try to be.

I agree, and I'm worried Tacoma will have the same problem. Seeing as the game was made by ex-Bioshock people, it's not particularly surprising that the story is one in which your character arrives basically after all of the major drama is over, and you're left to piece together what happened prior to your arrival. But even in 2013 this approach to storytelling really didn't fly anymore. Hell, even Bioshock Infinite moved away from an audio-log driven narrative, to one where you are a direct participant.

And yes, consider yourself fortunate that you knew ahead of time that there was no supernatural element of the game, so you were spared its bait-and-switch horror nonsense. There was only so much OH NO THERE'S BLOOD IN THE TUB oh never mind it's nail polish and OH NO MY SISTER HANGED HERSELF MAYBE nah it's cool she's fine nonsense I could take. It's a well made but deeply ill-conceived game.

@rongalaxy: Forests are sprawling but Henry sticks to the paths. He's not a skilled wilderness survival so it makes sense to me that he doesn't generally go deep into the woods. And it all looks great.

I'm not looking at Gone Home through the lens of tragedy I'm looking through the lens of "why should I care?" I don't care about the main character because she's not really a character. I don't care about the sister because I don't feel like she's developed, and she strikes me as very self-involved. I don't care about what's happening to the sister because it's a normal part of growing up. My point re: tragedy is that while the sister feels like she's caught in this huge sweeping drama it's really just a normal part of high school, with the added 'twist' of her being gay in a moderately homophobic time (it was certainly less homophobic than the 50s, but more homophobic than today.)

Now you could argue that games SHOULD be able to tell normal stories about every day lives, like other media, and I would agree; but A) your character is totally passive in the story and B) I found the character who WAS telling the story to be boring and unlikeable.

And I disagree with you about nailing what a family home feels like. There were too many repeated objects and too few personal objects for that. You had the cat's collar, a few pictures, the stuffed animal etc... but it did NOT feel lived in to me. You could argue that was because they were still unpacking, and that's fine, but I would have liked a lot more Christmas ducks and a lot fewer highlighters EVERYWHERE.

@bigsocrates: you forget that high schoolers are known for being very emotional creatures, even when the trials they face aren't that arduous. A girl finding out she's gay and having her parents react like they did is laced with enough bullshit that her reaction isn't really unwarranted.

When it comes to how you feel about the characters... There's nothing I can really say to that. If you don't like it you don't like it. I found Sam and her story to be very interesting. One of my favorite genres is coming of age, so gone home very much appeals to me in that regard. The story is told in a very non-conventional way, but I thought it worked well.

To sum up my feelings on how gone home tells its story, I think having you explore Sam's home to tell her story of growing up is brilliant. It wasn't her childhood home, but it's the home she lived in when she reached a pivotal moment in her life, so it's equally as important. We reflect ourselves on our home, and it reflects back. It shapes to who we are as people, and we are shaped by the experiences we have within its walls. Every item in a house is an artifact of the person who lives there, each one being a puzzle piece to uncovering their identity. Gone Home leverages these concepts into telling a (IMO) compelling narrative without just showing the plot from A to B to C like every other game, book, movie, etc.

So yeah, it's fine that you feel the way you do. Just wanted to put in my two cents and say how much I love gone home.

Even though they're both in the "walking simulator" genre, I don't think they're in the same ballpark. I mean, if we're only comparing the story elements, one is a young adult romance and the other is a psychological thriller.

@audiobusting: I did not experience Firewatch as a "psychological thriller." I think it was more of a drama. Sure there were thriller elements (and there were faux horror elements in Gone Home) but what mattered to me, and stayed with me after the game was done, were the characters and their interactions and relationship. Just as the potential horror of Gone Home propels that game the potential thriller of Firewatch propels it, but neither game is 'about' those elements.

So they're both really about relationships. It's just in one game you wander around hearing passively about the relationship, while in the other you actively play one of the participant characters, including making certain dialog choices.

I've not played Firewatch but I loved Gone Home. One of the most interesting parts of it was finding out about the uncle(?) who used to own the house before your family moved in.

Even though I got no sense of nostalgia from exploring the house in Gone Home (I was born in the 90's) and found Henry to be a more relatable character than Sam, I still enjoyed Gone Home — at least, at the time — more than I did Firewatch. Firewatch looked gorgeous and had a unique art style, but it was too much of a guided experience; in fact, in a way that inhibited exploration. Plus, I remember the story having pacing issues, which Alex outlines in his review. In my opinion, Gone Home's story is fundamentally different than Firewatch's and I don't really get why one type of story is inherently better or inferior than another. I also don't get this line of thought, in which it's okay to dismiss people's problems simply because other people have more "real" problems.

To my mind, part of the reason why Gone Home was highly praised is because it stood in contrast to games like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite that came out in 2013. Games that were almost universally praised for having compelling narratives and interesting worlds, but gameplay that was criticised for being obtrusive. In Gone Home, however, nearly everything you did was in service of learning and uncovering more facts about the characters. Also, don't be surprised that Gone Home got extra points — and rightly so — for featuring a narrative that is centred on a group that is often underrepresented in the media. In my experience, very few stories in Western mainstream video games are about women, let alone queer women.

@militantfreudian: Not being interested in someone's problems isn't the same as dismissing them. I have no interest in hearing an uninteresting teenager with pedestrian high school relationship problems (slightly, but not heavily, flavored by the gay angle) whine and make bad decisions. It's old hat and I didn't feel much new was brought to the table.

Gone Home is different from The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite in that it is non-linear (to a degree) sure, but a lot of that is because it doesn't have much in the way of "gameplay." It just has a lot of objects you can sort of interact with. I don't want to get into the "gameplay" debate because I don't think that it's useful, and Gone Home does have some steps necessary for progression and other guided elements (the game clearly encourages you to collect journal entries, for example.) But the storytelling in the Last of Us was much more engaging to me.

As for the underrepresented element...sure they can have some abstract credit for that but it doesn't make the game more fun or the story more engaging for me. I mean a major element of storytelling in this game is listening to the crappy mix tapes that this girl's girlfriend gave her. I don't even want to listen to crappy mix tapes by people I actually know!

I didn't hate the game but it didn't connect with me on any level. Story, character, gameplay, or even really aesthetics. When one of the most memorable moments in your game is finding a banana in the fridge and thinking "Shouldn't this have gone black?" then throwing it on the floor and seeing if it would make me slip (no) you have failed to engage me.

I completely agree, but I actually ended up feeling more negatively towards the whole thing for the same reasons you've outlined though. I didn't have anything spoiled for me beforehand, except maybe I was expecting something amazing from the frankly ridiculous amount of critical praise it received. I genuinely had to look up to see if I'd missed something once I'd finished because I didn't understand what was so groundbreaking or amazing about it! Maybe it's just because everything about the story felt very obvious (I was playing with my partner and we'd guessed or joked about everything in the story after the first few journal entries) and the environment was robbed of it's tension by the glacial pace of pretty much everything. Unfortunately, if those two elements didn't work for me, there's literally nothing else to enjoy.

So I spent 2 hours traipsing around an old house following the bread crumbs of story of a self-involved teenager talking about her stupid high school love affair.

... that's kind of the point, isn't it? It's hardly a criticism just because there are stories of people in worse situations they could have told. Games of this type shouldn't have to go for a grand, high stakes narrative to be effective.

Thanks for reminding me that album exists though! Old Sia is the only legitimate Sia.

@mikachops: Once again, the point isn't that in isolation telling a small story with low stakes is a bad thing, the point is that a small story with low stakes isn't engaging if the characters involved aren't engaging and it's told through the passive mechanism of finding notes and listening to boring self-involved journal entries. Of course games can be great while telling stories with small stakes, or no stakes really. But for me Gone Home was just annoying. I wasn't given a reason to care about this teenager, her girlfriend, or her girlfriend's crappy band. You're gay? More power to you, have fun, but that doesn't make me care about the details of your pedestrian high school romance.

Plus she locks parts of the house, hides the keys, and then runs away (without a clear need to actually do so) and says "I'll see you again someday" as if she can't just pick up the phone and call the sister, even if she doesn't want to deal with the parents? She couldn't leave the journal entries where the sister could find them easily rather than locked in the attic? She's a jerk!

I actually feel like both games have a lot in common in that they are basically about very simple human problems that lead you on to thinking that something larger than life is about to happen, and that these larger-than-life fakeouts also work on a thematic level as a manifestation of the characters' personal fears.

I think Gone Home's "twist" works better, actually, and of course, bonus points to them for doing it first.

If you listen to Idle Thumbs, you'll understand exactly why both Fullbright and Campo Santo went down this route. You hear how tired they get about video game stories almost always devolve into save-the-world stakes or supernatural silliness.

I think Gone Home is a billion times better than Firewatch

As a lesbian, Gone Home resonated real hard with me as might be expected. I love it unapologetically. It's a good representation of what my (and many other lesbians I know) coming out/coming to terms experience was like.

We get next to no representation in media where one of us doesn't get killed off (aka the 'bury your gays' trope) that when something with a positive ending pops up, it's amazing to experience.

The point of the game isn't to put on a display for the oppression olympics which you really seemed intent on believing. It isn't supposed to show how hard it is to find out you're a lesbian. It's really just showing a touching love story that a small demographic of people can relate to where something bad doesn't happen for once. And that's pretty darn important.

@strangestories: Everyone is focused on one small part of the criticism and is ignoring everything else I said. My issue was not that it was a story about a lesbian romance. You could make a great game about that. My issue was not that there wasn't a big display of 'oppression.' My issue was this that this was a small stakes story with a self-involved character I didn't find interesting, told in a manner that I didn't find engaging.

Everyone's mileage may vary, but I didn't like the game not for political reasons but because I just didn't like it. If the narrator had been more introspective and interesting I might have had a different reaction. Maybe that's not true to an 'average' teenager, but there's a reason I don't hang out with teenagers. If I had gotten to play through the actual story instead of just picking up journal entries in a house I might have reacted differently. As it was I did not enjoy interacting with the game.

The issue is not that I couldn't enjoy a relatively gentle high school lesbian romance story. I have enjoyed those in other media. The issue is that I didn't enjoy THIS story because of how it was presented and who the character was. The small stakes issue was mentioned just because big dramatic stakes can compensate to some degree for other flaws. If you're going to tell a small-stakes story you have to nail the other elements, and this game just didn't for me.

Gone Home was such a over-hyped bland teenager love-story trope. Having some distance from that time of life, which some of these previous posters seem to be very close to still, the entire situation felt like any average emotional teenager letting feelings go before rational thought, and frankly, I'm all too happy to leave behind all that fruitless thrashing and dramatics. Also, so many repeated textures and items made it feel real lazy and pulled me out of the experience.

Big up to BigSocrates for nailing it on the head

@bigsocrates: I don't know what to tell you then. The characters were extremely engaging for me and for a lot of other people. I'd like to know what other lesbian stories you've found engaging to see just how these topics should be done correctly in your eyes.

@bigsocrates: Well, you said something that was kind of not cool, and you're getting dinged for it. Whatever your point might have actually been, you opened up by saying "some people have real problems," which obscured whatever you were trying to say after that, and frankly, made you seem like kind of an ass. Your point about a low-stakes story being boring without compelling characters is valid, but if that's what you wanted to say, make that your thesis statement. The way you wrote it made that point seem like a supporting idea, rather than the main idea.

Besides the colossal elephant in the room problem of how bare bones the gameplay is in these titles, their stories are just not that engaging.

Compared to books, movies, or TV shows that have covered these types of topics, games still don't have good writing. I'm not trying to belittle the topic of gay relationships and how society in general views gay people; it's certainly something that any form of media and art needs to delve deeper into. But that being said, it just feels so surface-level in games anytime a serious topic comes up. It's so shallow in its depth and so "nod of the head", that it still feels like games have a lifetime to go before they catch up with other media.

And as I first said - this issue compounded with the fact that the gameplay is way, way too simplistic just makes me wonder how these games got such good reviews. And I don't mean to be snide when I say that; I'm genuinely confused as to what people like about these titles. The reviews / forum discussion have never given me a satisfactory explanation. I'm starting to think I'll never understand - which I'm okay with. But it still remains intriguing to me.

@strangestories:I never said that there is a specific way these topics "should" be handled and I'm sensing a lot of hostility from your comment. If you want a couple pieces of media from the time period of the game that I liked that told lesbian stories I remember enjoying both Go Fish and But I'm a Cheerleader!

I don't have an issue with Gone Home because it's a lesbian story. I have an issue with it because of the other elements. It wouldn't be better with a straight man or straight woman. At one point the narrator character talks about her girlfriend replacing a singer in a band and how great she is and I realized that I was playing a game wherein I was taking the part of a woman reading about her sister talking about how good that sister's girlfriend's band was. I was down the rabbit hole of super boring conversations I would never want to have in real life. Frankly Lonnie's story seemed more interesting, since she was the one who actually had interests and led the action, but I didn't even get a great sense for Lonnie, since all the sister did was moon over her. So if you want to know how I would prefer this story be told, I'd like to play as Lonnie, the character driving the action, rather than hear a description of Lonnie by her girlfriend to that girlfriend's sister.

@buttle826: This is a blog and I shared my honest reaction. I actually started by saying that I didn't like the environment and didn't like playing as someone who wasn't actually driving the action. I also explained clearly, multiple times, that the real issue is not that the stakes are too low but that the sister is completely self-involved on what I perceived as a pretty standard high school romance.

I will admit that part of this may be that I went to an extremely liberal high school (around the time the game takes place) and there were lesbian relationships that formed and broke up among my classmates like any other relationship (there may have been closeted students, but the school encouraged students to be out and had an official gay/straight alliance club.) So to me a lesbian high school relationship isn't really different from any other, and this relationship was boring.

@bigsocrates: No hostility intended, I'm just very blunt with what I say.

You provided examples and I thank you for that. I don't like those movies; I'll be straight up with that. In fact this kind of proves a point I had, that for me, a lesbian who grew up in the 90's, there's kind of...not a lot of media for us to latch on to. My partner's first lesbian movie that made them start to find their sexuality was an awful movie called Better Than Chocolate. I couldn't even venture to guess mine, but it was probably awful as well.

Gone Home is honestly one of the few pieces of media that resonates. It's more gentle and thoughtful than Blue is the Warmest Color, the graphic novel/movie combo that shares space with Gone Home as the most recent important development in lesbian storytelling (though I have my problems with it).

Like Gone Home, I fell in love with my best friend in a new school, we had to hide it for months before comfortably coming out, then had a crisis of my partner graduating a year before me and frantically trying to figure out how to stay together. We're engaged now, living together, and we played Gone Home sitting next to each other. It's unique in that it feels real, way more so than anything else I've experienced.

@bigsocrates: I should have been more specific, I meant that you began the "I don't care about the sister or her story" section with the "some people have real problems" bit. And I know that you believe you clearly expressed your issues with the game. I was trying to point out why it seems like you've mis-communicated your position.

As written, it looks like your three main points are:

1. The environment is uninteresting (totally fair and subjective argument)

2. Katie is essentially a non-existent character (absolutely fair criticism)

3. The sister's problems aren't interesting because I know people with worse problems (not so fair)

I know that you don't think that's what your third main point is, but it reads like it.

And since you seem to be defending it as an "honest opinion on a blog," I will remind you that just because it's your blog doesn't mean it's exempt from criticism. If you were in a bad mood because your relationship just ended, and I walked up and said, "oh yeah, well my dad is dead, so quit being upset" wouldn't you think I was being a jerk?

I'm not trying to say that you're a jerk, or that you're an ass, but the way you structured your position makes it look like you're being one.