Gone Home - Full Game (No Commentary)
0A full no commentary playthrough of Gone Home.
Game: Gone Home
Release Date: August 15, 2013
Platform: PC
Developer: The Fullbright Company
Gone Home is a first-person exploration video game developed and published by The Fullbright Company. Gone Home was first released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux computers in August 2013, followed by console releases for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in January 2016, the Nintendo Switch in September 2018, and iOS in December 2018.
Set in the year 1995, Gone Home puts the player in the role of a young woman returning from overseas to her rural Oregon family home to find her family currently absent and the house empty, leaving her to piece together recent events. Gone Home does not feature much interactivity, but instead has the player explore the house at their own pace and determine what has transpired by examining items, journals, and other items left around the various rooms. The Fullbright team, having had previously worked on BioShock 2: Minerva's Den, took concepts and ideas from that game to craft an exploration game to engage the player into uncovering the narration by non-linear progression in their searching of the house, while keeping the project manageable for their small team.
Gone Home was critically praised at release. Several outlets used the game as an example of video games as art, as its non-standard gameplay format demonstrates progression of the video game industry into more artistic forms. However, this also raised the question of whether Gone Home should be considered a game, and led to the derogatory term "walking simulators" to describe exploration games with little interactivity, though since then, the industry has come to embrace the term. Gone Home's characters and story were praised for addressing LGBT issues with which some players could identify.
The player takes the role of Katie in the first-person view, who can move around the house and view and interact with objects. There are no defined goals in the game; however, the game encourages and rewards the player when they explore new areas of the house and search for new messages. Much of the interactivity rests upon looking at objects and notes within the house. In order to progress in the game, the player must find certain objects that unlock access to other parts of the house.