Context of Practice Indie Research: Gone Home

While I am currently obsessed with playing short Indie games I decided to give Gone Home a go. This is a very narrative atmospheric game in which you play as Katie, a girl who has just returned home to her families house after spending a year traveling Europe. You arrive home to find that the house is completely empty with no trace of life inside.

This game is beautiful but has such a tense and creepy atmosphere. Set during a thunderstorm and in a house where your crazy uncle used to live just makes the tension in the house even worse. At first I was very dubious about getting or even playing the game as I don't like playing horror game or anything that is going to make me jump. But this game is completely the opposite. There is nothing in this house that is going to jump out and scare you; apart from the squeaking of the floor boards from above and the occasional clap of thunder, which admittingly does make your heart race faster.

But this is all part of the game and the atmosphere it is trying to create - which it does beautifully. The gameplay for me was just perfect though. Although it may appear to be boring as all you do is walk through a house, it is just isn't. In every corner of this gigantic house there is something to interact with - making you want to search every inch of the house to uncover all of its secrets. In each room that you explore there are new things to discover enabling you to learn where the parents are and also your sister Sam.

The general plot of the game is all about finding out where Sam is but at the same time find out what has happened to her over the past year and also how she met her 'friend' Laurie. Throughout the game we find letters that shows us more about Sam's life and how it has changed. Some objects can also trigger tape recordings to be voiced over by Sam over the top of gameplay to indicate her whereabouts. At the same time we also learn about Katie's parents and why they are not in the house and their own troubles that they are having - which is probably down to the dad's over obsession with the JFK shooting.

To sum up this fantastic game, it is only about 2 hours long depending on how long you spend scouring for clues and tit bits around the house, which for me was a long time, but it is definitely worth the time and money. The house, set in the 90s is rich with nostalgia and is amazing to explore. You find objects of your childhood and it really take you back, like finding the completed X Files series recorded on tapes and mentions of a new film entitled Pulp Fiction, to which they don't think will be very good.

Gone Home is probably the best game I have looked at so far in terms of storytelling and how the environment can be used to portray the emotions that someone is feeling at that one, or multiple times. We see the troubles that Same is going through in the environment of the house and the items that she has in her room. As we walk around the house and dig through the past tales start unravelling in front of us as we walk around. This is definitely the best example of storytelling using an environment as it opens up the whole house for us to explore at our own will, finding out secrets of the past and finding out where your family is and using the environment to tell that story.