Reflections on Gone Home
The Light Shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness Can Never Extinguish It
When I was a child, I was deeply scared of being alone in the dark. I would stare into the empty blackness of my closet and shiver, wondering what foreboding figure might emerge from the shadows. Now, at least, I can sleep in the inky blackness, and prefer complete darkness when I sleep. However, when at my family home, when I travel back to my room at one or two in the morning from the basement, I admit I still get very nervous around empty, dark rooms. Walking past the completely harmless larder can make me jump and scurry up to my room in a slight panic, imagining some man lurking inside.
That fear shaped my early Gone Home experiences. Fullbright Studios had been created from previous members of 2K Marin, the studio responsible for Bioshock 2. While that game had been slightly less terrifying and unnerving than its predecessor, the dark atmosphere, the brutal violence, and the eerie audio logs all contributed to an aura of fear. The lead designer, Steve Gaynor, also worked on a true horror action game, F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, a game all about the murderous actions of supernatural entities and secret government projects. Thus, I came into Gone Home expecting the mansion to have something in it to hunt and kill me.
The physicality of the engine further fueled my worry. Within the first room, when trying to get into the mansion, onethe player has to pick up a Christmas duck to find a key hidden underneath. The player can zoom in on an eerie note on the door, telling the older sister (the player character) not to look for Sam, the younger sister. The creepy notes and the manipulation of objects, including the ability to pick up items and toss them carelessly around, reminded me strongly of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Opening the front doors reveals a dimly lit mansion, a grand staircase leading up into the darkness, flickering lights, and within the first room, a voice answering machine that plays the sobbing tones of a stranger.
Thus, I spent the first half of my first playthrough in a blind panic. I crouched around the opening environments, carefully opening the doors to tiny, ‘safe’ closets and slamming them shut behind me, in case a monster might appear out of nowhere. When the player looks outside, they see nothing but darkness and trees, another parallel to the Amnesia experience. In retrospect, the lack of detail to the outside world likely only reflected a lack of development funds for unnecessary details. The heavy rain and lightning, however, must have been purposefully added for a suspenseful atmosphere. When spending a lot of time crouched in Gone Home, hiding and peeking around corners, I became very aware of how little detail in the game exists on that level. There are a few hidden boxes here and there, letters stuffed in drawers, but most of the material can be reached and seen while standing. My terror did not make me the ‘ideal player’, as the design is not meant for people to wince in terror at every flickering light.
On subsequent playthroughs, I found myself still nervous at the beginning, even knowing the home was entirely safe. However, certain points help to unravel the nervous player, to allow them to enjoy the experience not as a horror game, but rather an opportunity to explore a well-crafted embedded narrative. Most of these moments surround the younger sister, Samantha: her journals sing with the pent-up energies of an out-of-place teenager. The 90s punk rock tapes one can listen to all over the home so strongly dispel an atmosphere of horror that it would be hard to remain scared while listening to them, much in the same way the heavy rock soundtrack of 2016’s Doom helps even dark, ‘scary’ environments feel like a gleeful, blood-splattered playground for guns. A homework assignment by Samantha on the first floor crafts a tongue-in-cheek story about a woman’s estrus cycle set against the violence of World War II -- it managed to get me to laugh while sitting at my computer.
Once the fear evaporates, the game’s tone shifts, although the foreboding atmosphere still hovers in the air. The game does not let you forget that you’re exploring the private belongings and emotions of characters unseen, even if, ostensibly, the player character belongs here as much as anyone else. Unlike Dear Esther, another game in the walking simulator genre, the game tells a concrete story, with the limited narration attached to objects within game world. Further, the story has an uplifting tale to tell, unlike the dark, siren calls of Dear Esther, which ends in apparent suicide. Gone Home’s world also lacks some of the puzzle-solving elements of other walking simulators, like Myst or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, although occasionally the player will need to hunt around for a key or a set of numbers to advance the story. In this way, the game encourages the player to explore and engage with the many objects in the world, exploring every cupboard and under each magazine to try to find clues.
In a narrative sense, the game’s storytelling chop frequently resemble Bioshock or even Dark Souls. Caitlyn, the player character, picks up and examines items to learn about their history, and uses the clues to piece things together. Like in Dark Souls, the player does not have to engage with the story aspects at all -- I am driven by curiosity, not need, in my exploration of the game world. Bioshock, in contrast, weaves the narrative and the gameplay together, such that events in the game world affect the player, including reflections on player agency. However, more reflective of Bioshock’s influence are the audio logs in Gone Home, a staple of the narrative exploration genre, in addition to the emphasis on personality and first-person exploration.
The game forges its own identity in a way that none of those other games manage, even ascending the likes of Life is Strange, a narrative experience that would come out two years later. Gone Home may begin in a dark, eerie place, but takes the player on an adventure of humor, punk, nostalgia, and romance, at least with the primary story of Samantha. The tale of young, queer love means a lot to this gay gamer, who rarely sees representation in games not specifically catered to that market, or only as background threads in a larger experience. Further, most LGBT love stories seem to end in trauma, like the aforementioned Life is Strange, while this story ends in a dizzying, beautiful array of lights and sounds. Happy endings, pure happy endings, are not a staple of the walking simulator genre, and certainly not of queer stories. That the game proceeded from a place of darkness and terror to a secret place of warmth and acceptance left me thinking about my own journeys and struggles, and for once, in a positive light.
Everywhere I walked in that house, I turned on the lights. Each new light made the house feel more comfortable and full. By the end, every story was told, every stone uncovered, every light was one. It was incredibly fitting, then, that when I walked into the final room and found myself surrounded by a beautiful display of lights, that I finally felt like the empty, terrifying house had become a home.
