ALL ALONE AT THE WELCOMING PARTY
Back in the nineties, I used to dream of photorealistic video games. “If games could someday look like this,” I’d think while admiring the natural world, “I’d be happy just exploring—without any particular goal.” I should have been more careful what I wished for. Why did I ever include that last part?
I’m not claiming that Gone Home, Fullbright’s story exploration game (or “walking simulator,” if you prefer), is photorealistic—or even that it lacks a goal. But it does embody other forms of realism that made me revisit that old fantasy and seriously question it. Replaying the game twice for this review only reinforced my doubts. This is a dull way to experience an unremarkable story.
In Gone Home, you wander through a large, empty house, searching for clues to explain why no one is home. You move from room to room, opening drawers and cabinets, examining objects from every conceivable angle—usually to no effect. Occasionally, you find a note or a scrap of paper containing a fragment of the larger narrative.
Set in 1995, the house is saturated with references to the era: Pulp Fiction, Nirvana, The X-Files. You can play cassette tapes featuring Riot Grrrl music. VHS tapes line the shelves. These details do a fine job of evoking a believable nineties household. Objects are placed where you’d expect them to be, and careful exploration may uncover certain family members’ buried secrets. Like a puzzle, you reconstruct the sequence of events in your mind. Once you locate the final piece, the game ends.
A story told almost entirely through aftermath demands something extraordinary to justify itself—devastation, mystery, terror, or at least emotional urgency. For the most part, this story offers none of that. Having grown up immersed in cinema, I find Gone Home dramatically flat. While some individual passages are competently written, this type of drama depends on delivery: presence, performance, timing, intimacy. It needs to exist in the moment. Here, all of that is lost. The story is already over, the emotional heat long dissipated.
The atmosphere, admittedly, is effective. It’s midnight. The mansion is dark and isolated. A thunderstorm rages outside. The house creaks and groans. Faulty wiring causes lights to flicker. Televisions hum in empty rooms, implying a hurried departure. Notes suggest the house may even be haunted. Chris Remo’s minimalistic soundtrack heightens the unease, capturing the apprehension of the explorer returning home after a year abroad.
That explorer is you, playing as Kaitlin Greenbriar. The house is as unfamiliar to her as it is to the player, having been inherited while she was away. But Kaitlin is not the true protagonist. That role belongs to her younger sister, Sam (voiced by Sarah Grayson). The story you piece together is essentially Sam’s coming-of-age tale, reconstructed from its debris. What initially feels promising ultimately amounts to little more than atmosphere doing the heavy lifting.
Perhaps this is one of the few ways to present a realistic family drama in video game form—at least for now. But the story itself isn’t compelling enough to sustain reflection. Its central themes—feminism and homosexuality—are handled respectfully, yet the revelations are too fragmented to carry emotional weight. And the oppressive horror framing raises unnecessary questions. Is the house haunted? Built on cursed ground? Or did Fullbright simply need a genre hook?
There are a few buried side stories of greater interest, particularly one involving the father, but they’re so subtle they verge on invisible. I uncovered all the relevant clues and still failed to assemble that narrative without outside research. If that interpretation is correct, it strains credibility to the breaking point.
Gone Home has been praised for its originality, but story exploration was hardly new in 2013. My first encounter with the technique was System Shock, nearly two decades earlier. There, audio logs and environmental clues enriched a game already built around combat, puzzles, exploration, and RPG systems. The storytelling was optional—flavor rather than foundation.
Gone Home instead strips away nearly all gameplay to foreground environmental narrative. Fullbright themselves cite immersive sims like BioShock and Dishonored as inspirations. As a result, the experience is functional but thin. Those looking for challenge or meaningful interaction should look elsewhere. The few obstacles that exist—keys, hidden switches, locked containers—offer little resistance.
To the game’s credit, it knows when to stop. It can be completed in a single evening. The map is confined, traversal is quick, and exploration feels efficient enough to avoid outright frustration. The atmosphere carries the first playthrough, and the final stretch toys skillfully with dread and uncertainty.
Still, I can only recommend Gone Home as inspiration. For instance, I’d love to see a story exploration game set in the aftermath of The Thing. An Antarctic research station. A vanished crew. An alien parasite. Dig too deep and you risk infecting your own team. You’d never know who was compromised—only infer it from clues, then decide whether to expose them.
Fullbright might even be the right studio for such a project; they clearly understand atmosphere. But they would need a story worthy of the form. My tendency to imagine a completely different game while playing Gone Home speaks volumes. I appreciate it as an experiment, and replaying it has at least convinced me that story exploration has a place in the medium.
Now it just needs stories worth exploring.
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