Disclaimer: this article contains spoilers for Gone Home.
Recently, the long-awaited first-person
exploration game Gone Home was released. It received stellar reviews for its
small-scale, emotionally charged story and its ability to tell that story
through environmental detail. The player explores a seemingly empty house and
finds out about its inhabitants by inspecting the items they left behind:
forms, letters, crumpled notes, drawings, even a scribbled Chun-Li special move
list.
As long as the game sticks to its stated
intent, it works very well. Even though it doesn’t completely succeed in
cramming all this background material into one house in a believable way
(it’s hard to imagine why a nine-month old note would still be in a paper bin,
and neither is it likely that a married woman would let letters that make mention of
her romantic infatuation with a co-worker just lie around the house), it works
often enough to at least show the potential of this sort of storytelling.
However, the game lacks the courage of its
convictions, and doesn’t believe in its core design enough to let it stand on
its own. This is most evident in two design decisions.
First, developers The Fullbright Company
deemed it necessary to ratchet up the tension artificially by including the
signifiers of a horror story. A thunderstorm rages outside the house while
you’re exploring, one of the first things you come across is a panicked
voicemail message and there are frequent allusions to the house being haunted
in some way. When none of this pays off in any way, the only possible
conclusion is that the designers thought the player needed the promise of some
supernatural possibility to keep playing, which runs counter to their stated
intent and is frankly insulting to the audience.
But the most egregious example of artistic
flip-flopping is the ever-present voice-over. In Gone Home, you
slowly uncover the story of the player character’s sister, Sam, and her budding
romantic relationship with a slightly older girl called Lonnie. It’s an
affecting, well-told story, and it tackles themes that no videogame has ever
touched before, which is entirely praiseworthy. But instead of respecting the
player’s intelligence and letting the story unfold through the objects and
documents you uncover yourself, every discovery is accompanied by a
non-diegetic, voiced journal entry that painstakingly explains Sam’s situation
and feelings. Though these fragments are well-written and very well-acted,
their heavy-handed presence can’t help but undermine the strength and
importance of the main exploration gameplay. In a game that purports to let the
player piece the story together herself, the invasive emotional storytelling
deployed by the voice-over feels condescending and self-defeating.
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The game Gone Home is most often likened to in
general conversation is The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther, which also uses a
voice-over that periodically offers commentary. This is indeed an apt
comparison, not so much for the similarities in approach, but for the
differences. The reasons why Dear Esther excels where Gone Home fails are
twofold:
1. In Gone Home, the voice-over feels out of place because everything else in the game is directed towards realism. The painstaking work The Fullbright Company did in filling their game with period detail, and making sure the house feels lived in, clashes with the disembodied voice of Samantha. Dear Esther, on the other hand, establishes from the start that its environments are more mindscape than landscape, and in this context the introspective ruminations (which, unlike Gone Home, can be ascribed to the player character himself) make a lot of sense.
2. Whereas Gone Home uses its voice-over to explain the story, making the player less and less inclined to thoroughly explore their surroundings because the drama is dripfed to them anyway, Dear Esther uses the opposite approach. By keeping the monologues vague and associative, the player’s attention is directed outward – definitive answers aren’t forthcoming in the text, so maybe these wall scribblings, or even these rock formations can offer me some clue?
Great art keeps you guessing; this is a lesson
that Dear Esther has internalised. On the other hand, the game can feel cold
and distant because it doesn’t offer much of a real human presence to latch
onto. This is why many people (myself included) were looking forward to Gone
Home’s release with such fervour: here was a game that promised to tell a
human, small-scale drama in the way that only games can: by letting the player actively
figure it out bit by bit. Considering the fact that Gone Home goes further than
any other game before it in making this a reality is certainly deserving
of praise; however, it also makes it miserably disappointing that it ultimately
betrays its own design principles with its incessant narrative handholding.
