![]() Some items you obviously need to find before the story can progress, but there are actually very few of these. Much of the story is told through the environment and the objects you discover, with a basic timeline established through the dates on scribbled notes, discarded school papers, and snail mail. Gone Home is largely non-linear and you explore the roughly 25-room house at your own pace, deciding which rooms to enter, which lights to turn on, which drawers to open. The exploration-only gameplay may sound passive, but it doesn’t feel that way, because you’re the person initiating the search. It’s a smart setup that resolves the usual adventure game conceit in which players are expected to embrace being a voyeur, a kleptomaniac, and a stranger without a past. ![]() But because Katie’s a member of this family, she has full permission to go wherever she wants, read notes left behind, and rifle through dresser drawers. Because Katie embarked on her trip before the move, she’s never been in this house, so she and the player discover each room together for the first time. You start at the threshold of a huge, empty house and by the time you’ve moved through all of its rooms, you’ll understand the lives of the people who lived here, what happened to them, and where they’ve gone. There are no action sequences, no dialogues between characters, no use-this-on-that inventory, no cutscenes. Upon entering the house, you soon learn that the Greenbriar family moved here the previous autumn, and you'll begin to uncover notes, receipts, newspaper clippings, and other items “just lying around” that fill in the blanks about the ten months they’ve lived here. An ominous note left by her younger sister, Sam, suggests that something bad has happened and implores Katie not to go looking for answers. Without giving away the nuances that make it so compelling and touching, Gone Home’s basic story is this: Katie Greenbriar, a high school graduate who’s just spent a year backpacking in Europe, returns home after midnight to find her family’s house locked up and apparently empty. Gone Home tells a story that feels true as you discover it, one that anyone who grew up in the '90s (and, really, anyone who’s ever been a teenager) will relate to in some way. As you piece together the mystery of their disappearance, the game addresses many of the same real-life issues MSCL so deftly explored: the frustration and isolation of being seventeen, the confusing pangs of first love, and even “grown up” problems like keeping a marriage alive when both parents have drifted apart, all through an LGBT lens that never would have been okay on network television two decades ago. ![]() Set in June 1995, Gone Home is a story game that peeks into the interrupted lives of a Portland-area nuclear family, the Greenbriars, who seem to have vanished from their house in a hurry. Gone Home, an indie production from the four-person team at The Fullbright Company, is not a retelling of My So-Called Life, but I have to think the developers were fans. (We weren’t that crazy teens were doing the same all over the country.) But in the end, network executives decided that the American viewing audience just wasn’t that interested in a real, raw look at the secret lives of teenagers. A few months earlier, when this unflinchingly realistic portrayal of high school life was pulled from primetime after only 19 episodes, we had written letters to the network and circulated a petition around school that picked up a few hundred signatures. Someone had left behind a Boston Globe on the table and we flipped through it to the entertainment section to read that My So-Called Life-a TV show we loved to the point of obsession-had been cancelled. I was a high school junior, skipping an afternoon class to go out for lunch with my best friend. ![]() On May 15, 1995, I learned a life lesson in disappointment. ![]()
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