Steam sales are an amazing thing, aren’t they? Here I was, bored and in need of something new to play when Steam offered first-person adventure Gone Home, and I was blown away.

Arriving at a new and unfamiliar familial home after a European trip, Katie finds the house empty and has to piece together what has happened by investigating the empty rooms in search of clues. The story uses a simple concept to tell a fairly simple but incredibly moving story, and I was hooked from beginning to end.

The story revolves around Katie’s younger sister Sam’s diary entries. Gone Home is so touching because through the eyes of Katie, the audience unravels the story at their own pace and follows Sam from naïve and innocent beginning to climactic end.

I use the word audience instead of ‘player’, because to call Gone Home a game is probably misleading and inaccurate. The gameplay involves exploring the house, reading information and consequently unlocking diary entries and progressing your understanding of what occurred in Katie’s strange new home.

Whilst the lack of challenge or even things to do might turn some people off this game, be assured that the lack of gameplay serves the narrative. Some games, like the original but disappointing Montague’s Mount, really undermine the story with tedious and uninteresting gameplay. Gone Home avoids this and invites the player to be told an affecting story, and its all the better for its simplistic delivery.

There is no real option to fail besides not clicking on the relevant information and there aren’t really any puzzles. The only skill the game challenges is peripheral vision, as the ‘player’ has to constantly keep an eye out for any crafty hidden pages that might shed some light.

Despite being simplistic, the gameplay is strangely alluring. It appeals to the voyeuristic side of us all as we dig through people’s possessions in search of secrets. There’s something childishly exhilarating about finding something that you were not supposed to see.

I’d wager that Gone Home could be completed in under an hour if not played correctly, however pretentious that may have sounded. There is a vast amount of extraneous information on show, and the game can be finished without reading any of it, but every scrap of paper adds detail, context and colour to the story, fleshing it out.

However, a lot of the information on offer isn’t entirely relevant to the overall plot, which means that you may find yourself spending most of the game opening up drawers, picking up a pamphlet on forests and sighing before moving on to the next drawer. This isn’t helped by the fact that Katie’s family live in a huge mansion filled with cupboards and drawers just begging to be rooted through,

Much of what can be read about isn’t paid off in the story’s climax, but it doesn’t feel like it needs to be. Gone Home attempts to reflect family life, and family life is full of loose threads and dead ends.

I’m finding it difficult to portray just how moving I found the story because I really don’t want to ruin any aspect of it. Perhaps I’m just a delicate flower, but I found the story to be painfully human and it almost brought me to tears, which is something video games very rarely achieve.

Gone Home almost alludes to this. There is a memorable moment when the ‘player’ (yes I do insist on using inverted commas every time) enters a bathroom and sees the bath splashed with blood. At this moment, my heart sank. I thought ‘right, so here we go… serial killer perhaps? Maybe ghosts?’ Then I realised it was red hair dye and I felt foolish for jumping to conclusions based on previous video-game experience.

Gone Home is an example of how video games can tell mature and poignant stories without strapping guns to everything. So what if it doesn’t pander to the conventions of video games by having any sort of peril or challenge. It’s a rewarding alternative experience and it touched me deeply. I suppose all that’s left to do now is to reaffirm my masculinity by playing Splatterhouse or something.

JBH’s Top Tip! – Complete it in one sitting. It’s worth it.

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