Or to put it another way, it’s a haunted house in which the house is the monster. It’s a game of emptiness, of voids that can’t be properly filled. There are no jump scares, nothing lurking behind locked doors or sharp corners. You know from the letter on the door that Sam’s missing, and Katie’s parents aren’t home, either. And that’s how the story unfolds: by the player simply looking through the family’s stuff to learn about their disappearance. After the initial lamp, the lights don’t flash on and off, and the doors and floorboards don’t creak - unless you’re the one causing them to do so. Picking up certain items triggers a voice-over for Sam, Katie’s sister who left the note on the door. The player, as Katie, picks up and puts down household junk, inspecting it for meaning and clues. The things you do (and the things that happen to you on your walk) aren’t particularly menacing. The thing is, Gone Home isn’t a horror game, not in any traditional sense. No one told me this was a horror video game. All I had was an option to turn the light off.Īs you might expect, when I clicked it, the lamp went out and the room went dark. Besides the door, it was the first object I was able to interact with. I remember turning and seeing a lamp plugged in. I read that note on the door and then entered the house. I remember the first time I played Gone Home. The best movies of the decade, according to us And we’re reevaluating the all the ways in which the face of entertainment changed from 2010 through 2019. Graphic: James Bareham/Polygon | Source images: Various The best of the decade, 2010-2019Īs the 2010s draw to a close, we’re taking stock of the best pop culture of the decade. A note is on the door - don’t go looking for me, Katie’s sister writes - and it’s clear something has gone awry. As the screen fades in, the player steps onto the house’s front porch.
She’s never lived in this house, since her family moved while she was overseas in Europe. Gone Home opens with a voicemail message: Katie Greenbriar is going home. But it was Gone Home’s cultural success, more so than its commercial victories, that helped catalyze what I like to think of as the decade of the walking simulator. Both games, which arrived close together, have since sold more than 750,000 copies each. But the term itself, “walking simulator,” was revitalized around 2012 thanks to The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther.
WOODS HAS GONE HOME HOSPITAL SIMULATOR
Gone Home was not the first walking simulator the genre, if we can call it that, dates back to the 1980s. Everyone else - critics and fans alike - had a different name for it: a walking simulator. When The Fullbright Company released Gone Home in 2013, the developer called it a first-person narrative exploration game.
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