Gone Home is a game that's hard to describe. As a genre, it's a story driven point and click adventure game, but without really having the puzzles from a point and click game. Or an adventure game. It has puzzles, like 3, but they're all fairly straightforward and instead of needing thought to be solved, they need exploration, in which you find the right thing and it tells you how to solve the puzzle.
And it's mostly just one puzzle: what happened here? You return home to a mystery, a dark and spooky house and you try to figure out what's going on. In exploring the house, you find notes and scraps of paper explaining current events of your family, though mostly from your younger sister. Occasionally, an audio diary is played from your sister to you. And, well, that's about it. Seriously.
It's hard to explain, but I will say here that I really enjoyed this game. Though I played it for 90 minutes and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, it's not only hard to explain why, given a game so functionally bare-bones as this, but I also must do so without spoiling anything, which is pretty damn hard. This is pretty close to feeling like a movie, but could never ever be adequately done as such, as it'd make a pretty boring movie. In film, it's always said to show, not say, and there's not a lot of showing. Likewise, because you are controlling a person wandering this house, there is a sense of discovery, as you start to know the people who lived here, and you feel this story unraveling, because you're the one unraveling it. And because the player is the one unraveling the story, I feel that I'd be cheating you in revealing anything to you about the story.
I guess part of the reason I find the game difficult to describe is because I haven't played anything quite like it. If I had to equate it to anything, it's most similar to To The Moon, another short indie game with little gameplay but a magical story to tell. And in that regard, it's fantastic. It has a story, a brilliant story in my opinion, told in a unique manner, one that I can't imagine being experienced in another way. It would be like if a haunted house made you care for characters and question your perceptions of people.
I honestly can't say too much more about this game. It entertained me for 90 minutes at 3:30 in the morning. I highly suggest picking it up cheap on a steam sale, as I don't think I could recommend it for it's full price or even half of its full price, but for what I got it for, as part of the Humble Indie Bundle 12, I'm pretty damn glad I got to sit down and play through it.
If you think you could be entertained by a story driven fun house, by all means, find the game cheap and pick it up. This is a game I'd recommend to people looking to enjoy a story in a unique way. This is a game I'd offer to the "games are art" argument, as this is something that I can't imagine being enjoyed through any other media than a game, and this one nails it on the head. This game is different. It's short, it's satisfying. And it works.
