Gone Home

Intimate, minimalist and very good at being both familiar and unfamiliar, it's a story unraveling with care. I didn't even mind that we had to walk around a lot nor that they pulled an Edith Finch ("Is this a spooky story? No, it's a family drama. Well, okay then").

The presentation of this story reminds me of old epistolary novels, and I enjoyed hunting for clues and gradually piecing the whole family's story together. Everyone is very believably written; these feel like real people, and Sam and Lonnie in particular feel like real teens dealing with a difficult, homophobic world. The house itself is an interesting environment to explore, and so much of what we come to understand about the people who live and have lived there comes from just seeing how it's put together, and what's in it. Everything to do with Oscar Masan being stuffed in the basement and hidden away, the way he himself seems to have been, is in my opinion the hardest-hitting thing emotionally outside of the girls' relationship. The way Sam and Lonnie squeezed themselves into the hidden spaces of the house and made a place for themselves there is the perfect metaphor for the way they have to exist as queer teens, and if you choose to interpret certain elements of Oscar's story as evidence that he himself was gay, it also fits with the way queer elders carve out these spaces for the next generation even when neither side quite recognizes it. My only complaint is that your movement through the house is very slow. Maybe it's realistic, or maybe there's actually a problem on my end and it's not supposed to be that slow, but I felt like I was trudging through molasses every time I had to cross a room or go down a hallway. This is a problem when most of the game is walking around looking for things and unlocking secrets.