Critical Play: Gone Home

My first inclination is to not call Gone Home a “mystery game.” The focus of the game is not framed as solving a mystery per se, instead it is exploring your childhood home and figuring what happened there, indeed ‘solving a mystery’ but less so than in traditional mystery games. There is no deductive process beyond finding a letter and learning “oh, so then that happened.” It is uncovering, not deducing. Exploring instead of uncovering.

The narrative is the mystery, there is no weaving (well yes there is, that's the point, but I don’t think it’s the right way of framing it). As you progress through the game, you uncover notes and details that feed you more details about the story, chiefly that of your sister. There are light puzzles, like a combination lock or a hidden compartment, but the game is structured so that you easily find the solution to them. There is not challenge, it is simply controlling the pace and progression of the story.

There are two ways the game feeds you the story: telling you and showing you. The game is the physical exploration of your childhood home, and you will ind physical artifacts of your family there, such as unsold books from your father or pay stubs for your mother. The way the bulk of the story is told, however, is by finding letter/tapes from your sister coupled with narration of her story. The game is very directly telling her story. It is given bit by bit, and you have to progress to the next area and find the next thing in order to trigger the next narration event.

By pacing it in this way, Gone Home is very directly telling a story while still pulling the player into it by requiring the player to ‘uncover’ the next part. The pacing of it is the part that gives it mystery, as well as that the story is told in a way that does not ever ‘spoil’ what happens next.