Adventure Gamers - Forums

Well, I bought it (and regret it) - only played it for about an hour so far and it’s bored my senseless.

And before anyone assumes that there’s not enough to ‘do’ in it for me - I love Dear Esther and have played it a number of times, and that had zero interactivity compared to Gone Home.

Nope, sorry - for me Gone Home is a waste of money.

IGN gave it a 9.5. You can see the review here:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/15/gone-home-review

Sounds pretty exciting when a mainstream website loves an adventure game so much:)

I can’t wait to get home and play this. I’ve been anticipating it for months and it’s been getting rave reviews; I had a sneaking suspicion it would.

I’m kind of shocked that this game hasn’t been done before—a modern-day first person 3D exploration game without any supernatural elements—but I’m glad it’s here.

It’s fantastic that we have a game like Gone Home on one end of the adventure game spectrum, and The Walking Dead on the other. It’s good to see the genre growing beyond inventory-based puzzles.

Finished it. It’s a nice but I feel like it could/should have been more. Don’t want to spoil anything because some most of the fun involves discovering all the little details. The level of involvement/connection with the story told will probably affect how people respond to the game.

Favourite part was all the 90s nostalgia.

I guess there will be complaints about the length/price. Just be prepared for a short experience.

AG’s review is up

fov - 16 August 2013 11:23 AM

AG’s review is up

Nice review. I think my problem with the game is that I was not really invested in the main story and more interested on finding out about the secondary characters. Also thought more little interactions (fiddling with tv channels, using microwave, etc) would be welcome, Instead of only being able to turn around objects.

Also You should open those 2 safes, they hold some important stuff concerning Oscar and Terry (Sam’s dad).

wilco - 16 August 2013 12:02 PM

Also You should open those 2 safes, they hold some important stuff concerning Oscar and Terry (Sam’s dad).

Yeah, I read a blog post this morning with some info about what’s in the safes. I love that there’s a whole secondary storyline hidden in the house. I’ll definitely go back and do some more poking around, I’m sure there’s other stuff I missed.

I did try the 1963 combination on the one in Terry’s office and it didn’t work there. Didn’t occur to me to try it on the one downstairs.

Hi fov:  Your rating of this game puts it up with Gabriel Knight, Riven…..a Top 20/25 Adventure Game of All-Time. Do you really feel that strongly

I’ve been writing for AG since 2004 and have only ever given two 4.5-star scores. (The other one was King’s Quest 6. And I’ve never given a game a five!) It’s not a score I give lightly. I don’t feel right comparing it to other games like Gabriel Knight because it does really different things than Gabriel Knight, but I think Gone Home does what it set out to do incredibly well, and *for me* it was a near perfect experience. There are very few games I feel that way about.

and do you foresee a time when “Interactive Narrative” becomes it’s own separate genre/sub-genre such as “Casual Games or “Hidden Object Games.”

Personally, I’d love see “interactive narrative” as its own sub-genre. Puzzles that are just there for the sake of padding gameplay or because an adventure game is “supposed to have puzzles” drive me nuts. That’s one reason I rated Gone Home so highly—none of what you do is extraneous, it all serves a purpose that ties directly back to the story you’re experiencing and the character you’re playing as. It’s not only well written, but also well crafted.

If you’re writing a book, there comes a point in the process where the writer has to look at everything they’ve come up with and tighten the stuff that works and toss the stuff that doesn’t. (I use this analogy because I’m currently at this point in the novel I’m working on! And it’s hard!) A lot of adventure game stories feel to me like books that didn’t go through the editing process. Gone Home feels like a well-written novel—everything counts, everything that’s in there matters.

I just finished the game and piecing together the stories of everyone in the family from the grandparents to Sam’s heartbreaking story (I totally expected a different ending that I didn’t want to look in that last room).

That’s what I was trying to get at in the review (without spoiling anything) about my feeling of self-imposed urgency. I was afraid of what I would find, and very relieved and surprised by the ending. It just all felt real, I cared about Sam and what happened to her as if she were actually someone I knew.

Lucien21 - 16 August 2013 06:34 PM

My only issue was .....What’s with the obsession with 3 ring binders? 

 

Lol! And tissue boxes! Tissues boxes everywhere

It reminds me some of the best laughing moments in the game:

- Finding the gentleman magazine in the library… and then the same one in Sam’s locker
- Katie refusing to read the “sexual” experience letter from Sam
- The Sex ed homework composition - sam and katie’s version
- The little scare when the grabbing the crucifix in the secret passage
- The obligatory finding the condom in parents drawer

Ok, this game is packed with all these awesome little details.

Also, concerning the secondary story Was just reading in another place all the details that I didn’t get during my playthrough, Oscar and Terry story is really dark…

I finished it last night in one sitting. It’s a refreshing, engaging experience. The house is created with such care and the characters are excellently defined through subtle tidbits of information.

I was definitely moved by Sam’s story…I was so happy (and relieved) by her decision to run away with Lonnie, as opposed to something more extreme...but I think I was expecting a little more from the main plot line. The subject matter felt a little…unambitious? I don’t know. I think I agree with this particular part of the Eurogamer review: “You can’t escape the sense that The Fullbright Company started on this project with grand designs for games as a storytelling medium, yet without a story they desperately wanted to tell”. Although I seemed to enjoy the game a lot more than they did.

To me it felt like a decent story superbly told, not a superb story in itself. The secondary characters almost make up for it.

I think first-person exploration games are the future of video game storytelling, but there are contrivances that we have to drop in order to progress: audio diaries, for starters. It’s a tough nut to crack because without them games like Gone Home would feel a bit lifeless, but ultimately they make no sense whatsoever. The other one is playing a character—in Gone Home we’re Katie, but we’re not really—Katie has no defining characteristics to speak of, and we share none of her foresight and knowledge. There’s an elaborate setup to mitigate this player-character dissonance: it’s the ‘90s (conveniently meaning no email or mobile phones), we’ve been away traveling for a year, the family’s moved into a strange new home, and there’s a dangerous storm outside. In the future, games of this style should simply cast you as yourself in a foreign place. That’s it.

orient - 16 August 2013 09:51 PM

I think first-person exploration games are the future of video game storytelling, but there are contrivances that we have to drop in order to progress: audio diaries, for starters. It’s a tough nut to crack because without them games like Gone Home would feel a bit lifeless, but ultimately they make no sense whatsoever.

No less sense than voice-over narration in a movie…? (Or in My So-Called Life, for that matter!) In that sort of scenario does disembodied narration seem wrong to you, too?

Not trying to force a point… I’m genuinely curious, because this is something I thought about a lot while I was playing. I saw the audio diaries as cues to the player, rather than cues to Katie (the same way that voice-over in a movie is heard by the audience, and not the characters). If she acknowledged them in some way, that would be weird, but as far as I remember she never does.

The audio diaries are NOT what lead Katie into the final rooms of the house (those cues are given by written notes and the keys she finds) and in the end the game makes sense of the audio diaries by having Katie find the “letters for Katie” folder which I thought was a very satisfying wrap-up… it left me thinking “Oh, great, now she gets to read about everything Sam’s told me throughout the game.” Structurally, I thought that nod at the end worked really well.

As far as not knowing Katie as a character goes… it’s not her story. I don’t think there’s any reason we need to know more about her. It’s like The Great Gatsby, in a way… the narrator is the least important person in the story. (And tons of other books, Gatsby’s just the one that’s always brought up as an example of this!)

Well, to be fair, I much prefer Gone Home’s approach in comparison to the vast majority of games, where characters record their every thought and leave them lying around for people to find.

The difference between voice-over narration and the audio diaries in Gone Home is that in TV/movies, the narration typically comes from the main POV character (Veronica Mars, Carrie Bradshaw, whatever) so it makes sense, like you’re in their head. The fact that it’s coming from your sister, who isn’t present at all, makes considerably less sense to me. The tie-back to the “letters for Katie” at the end was nice, but didn’t reconcile what I perceived as a necessary evil rather than a clever storytelling technique.

*Also, the fact that there’s the option to turn them off tells me that the developers anticipated that they might break the immersion for some players.