Gone Home Play Analysis

Gone Home is a narrative exploration game by the company Fullbright that stars Kaitlin Greenbriar returning to her family home after being overseas. Gone Home is often questioned on the complexity of its game play, and is often thought to be more of an interactive story, however it does fulfill the requirements of a game and I will be discussing various game play mechanics in Gone Home such as the different objects and their attributes, rules for game play and the overall design that help to support the narrative, as well as how all of this is used to create an effective story and why this is the best medium for such a story.

I will start by giving the briefest of summaries; the game opens with Kaitlin, who we control in a first person perspective, returning home to a locked house all set in the 90s Their is a note left …show more content…
Gone Home breaks a few of these implicit rules. Firstly, the dark atmosphere and empty house implies a more horror-esque game. There are even dark red stains in the bathtub - that end up being hair dye. All of this plays with the players expectations. However, it is not a horror game, nothing ever pops up or scares the player. Thus an implicit rule is broken. Another implicit rule that is broken is that the player expects all the rooms to have light. In most video games, the player does not need to search for light fixtures – the room is automatically lit. Some implicit rules it does follow are; if you move your mouse your cursor moves, and clicking 6

The design of the game is very simple, the setting takes place inside Kaitlin 's family house, but despite this there is mountains of information the player must piece together on their own. It is played with a mouse and keyboard or a controller and their are very few actual actions to do, thus which type of controller you use does not matter very