Let’s Play Gone Home

Let’s Play Gone Home

Let’s Play Gone Home!Let’s Play Gone Home

***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS***

Gone Home is my kind of game in terms of a let’s play because it can be beaten, soup to nuts, in under an hour and you don’t even have to have any previous experience with the game to figure it all out.

Let’s Play Gone Home:

This is an interesting game because the entire game sets you up for a very dark ending, but in an M. Night kind of twist it ends a very different way.

You play as a young woman in her early 20’s, just out of college or right near the end of college, and you’re coming home after living abroad in Amsterdam for the better part of a year.

Upon returning to your family’s home in the Pacific Northwest on a stormy, rainy night, you find the house empty and initially the only clue you can find as the whereabouts of your family come in the form of cryptic notes left by your sister.

***SPOILERS BEGIN NOW***

Your mind starts to jump to conclusions. Has part or all of your family been murdered or kidnapped/what the hell is going on?

The more clues you find, the more you learn that things aren’t as happy and simple for the rest of your family as you likely thought they were when you left. While you’ve been having a presumably great time in Europe, the rest of your family has been falling apart.

A number of letters between your mother and an old college friend indicate that she’s losing interest in your father and either considering or already in the early stages of an affair with a coworker.

Your father’s professional life as a conspiracy thriller novelist is mostly floundering, likely feeding into the troubles in the marriage. He’s even living in the shadow of his much more successful father, and you can all but feel the disappointment and regrets he likely feels on a regular basis as a loser in his private and professional life.

The main story revolves around your younger sister, Sam, though; she’s the one leaving you notes and bits of her journal which are played in her voice as you come across tokens, clues, and other momentos of significance to her.

You learn that the family has recently moved to this new house. You learn that Sam hasn’t had an easy go of it since moving and leaving her old life behind. Her only solace is in a new girl she meets named Lonnie and the two become fast friends, bonding over music, video games, and even a love of the occult (obviously).

She begins to feel more than a friendship to Lonnie and through her clues you begin to suspect and subsequently learn that the two become lovers. Your parents don’t take well to the news that Sam has learned who she is when she shares it with them. To make matters worse, Lonnie eventually has to leave as part of her ROTC, leaving Sam alone in every sense of the word.

The game takes place in the mid 90’s and there are plenty of references to the decade many of us grew up in, including Super Nintendo, references to 90’s bands, and plenty of 90’s technology all over the house.

The game really takes you on a journey through your own mind, creating a really creepy tone throughout. I’ll admit I was more than expecting to find Sam’s body hanging from a rafter when I finally made it up to the attic.

Gone Home just goes to show what you can do in both a video game and a short amount of time if you have a well told story.

The only drawback is that once you’ve beaten Gone Home and know the twist, you really have no reason to play the game again. This is part of why it made such a good freebie for Playstation Plus peoples.

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