ALL ALONE AT THE WELCOMING PARTY
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Back in the nineties I used to dream of photorealistic video games. "If games could someday look as good as this", I'd think, admiring the natural world around me, "I'd be happy to just explore that game world without any particular goal". I should have been more careful what I wished for, because little did I know that my dreams would one day come true. Why did I have to include that "no particular goal" sentiment?
Look, I'm not pretending like Gone Home, the story exploration game
(some prefer to call it a "walking simulator") from Fullbright, looks
photorealistic, nor that it has no goal. But it has other realistic qualities
that made me recall my old dream and wonder what the hell I was thinking.
Replaying it twice for this review only reaffirms my doubts. This is a boring
way to experience an unremarkable story.
In Gone Home, you walk around a deserted big house, looking for clues as to
why nobody is home. Now, doesn't that sound exciting? You explore
meticulously, going from room to room, checking drawers and cabinets for
messages left behind. You can pick up most objects and examine them from any
angle, which usually is pointless. Here and there you stumble upon some hidden
or fully visible piece of paper with fragments of the full story.
Taking place in 1995, the house is beset with references to popular movies,
bands and TV shows of the time, like Pulp Fiction, Nirvana and
The X-Files. You can find and play cassette tapes with home recordings
of Riot Grrrl music. VHS tapes adorn the shelves in the living room. Details
like that make the place feel like a real nineties home. Things are placed
where it makes sense to find them, and if you look carefully enough, you might
reveal some family member's shameful secrets. Like a puzzle, you piece the
events together inside your mind to form a chain of events. Once you find the
final piece that binds it all together the game ends.
A story told this way needs to be devastating, fascinating, mysterious, scary,
hilarious or whatever to make it work. This one, for the most part, is none of
that. After growing up engrossed in the world of cinema, to me the Gone Home
story feels blasé. Although some parts of it contains fine writing, this sort
of drama hinges on delivery; things like presence, acting, tension and
intimacy matter to make it work. It needs to exist in the moment. All this is
lost because Gone Home is too distant and calculated - it lives in the past,
with the heat of the moment already faded.
Granted, the atmosphere is quite scary. It's around midnight and eerily dark
in the secluded mansion. Outside a thunderstorm rages and the building emits
some strange noises that are hard to explain. Faulty wiring causes some lights
to turn on or off unexpectedly. Some television sets are left on, suggesting
the residents left in a hurry. A few of the messages left behind claim the
house might be haunted. The brilliant, minimalistic soundtrack, composed
by Chris Remo, expresses the dread going through the explorer's mind as
she returns home after spending her sophomore year of college in Europe.
That explorer would be you, in the role of Kaitlin Greenbriar. Her home is as
unfamiliar to her as it is to the player, since the Greenbriars inherited it
during her absence. You're not really the protagonist, as that role would
befall her little sister, Sam (voiced by Sarah Grayson). It's basically
her growing-up story you piece together by going through the aftermath. But
what initially seems so promising turns out to be little more than smoke and
mirrors created by the setting alone.
Maybe this is one of very few possible ways to tell a realistic family drama
in video game format, at least in this day and age. But the story itself is
not interesting enough to entertain much afterthought. The central themes -
feminism and homosexuality - are handled well but most of the bitesize
revelations feel too fragmented to be effective storytelling. And what's with
the oppressive atmosphere? Was the house built on some ancient native American
burial ground? Or did Fullbright just need some way to categorize their game?
Sure, there are a couple of hidden side stories of a more disturbing nature,
particularly one involving daddy Greenbriar, but that one is so subtle it can
only register in the most inquisitive minds. I didn't put it together myself,
in spite of discovering all the puzzle pieces, and only found out about it
through online research. And that theory only poses disbelief. If it is true,
I couldn't imagine what possessed the father to bring his family to that
house.
Gone Home has been lauded for its originality. But this way to tell a video
game story was far from new even when Gone Home was originally released in
2013. My first contact with story exploration came with System Shock in
1994, almost 20 years prior. That game revealed its events through horrifying
audio logs and voice messages you received whilst exploring a space station.
All that was optional, like a flavor to spice up the gameplay, consisting of
combat, puzzles, exploration and light RPG mechanics.
In addition to its unusual themes, Gone Home broke new ground by simply
removing most gameplay features to highlight the environmental storytelling.
In the commentary track, Fullbright themselves reveal how much they were
inspired by immersive sims like Bioshock and Dishonored. As
such it is a passable experience, thanks to its limited map size, but anyone
seeking a proper, challenging game should stay away. The very few, easy
challenges consist of finding keys, secret doors or ways to open locked
containers.
At least Gone Home knows when and where to stop - it can easily be finished in
one evening. You're confined to the house, which might be big, but you can
still walk from one end to the other in a couple of minutes. It's pretty
condensed and exploration feels rewarding enough that you don't get
frustrated. The atmosphere is skillfully directed and should keep you on edge
for your first playthrough. And the home stretch of the story plays with your
dread and uncertainty in a skillful way.
But I still cannot recommend Gone Home for anything other than inspiration.
For example, I'd love to see a story exploration based on the movie
The Thing (John Carpenter's masterful 1982 version). It
would be restricted to an Antarctic research station, where you and a team of
fellow researchers would arrive in the aftermath of an infestation by an alien
parasite. If you delve too deep into the station's secrets your crew risks
getting infected by the parasite. You'd never know who got corrupted, but
could figure it out by looking for clues, and then you'd have to conduct some
kind of test to expose "it".
I think Fullbright themselves would be good candidates for such a game - they
certainly know how to create atmosphere - but they'd have to expand their
development team quite a bit. As for Gone Home, I think the way I fantasize
about a completely different story inside a similar game reveals my opinions
of it. I like it as a narrative experiment, and replaying it has at least
instilled some hope that story exploration has earned its place in the gaming
sphere. Just get me a worthwhile story and everything's dandy.
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