Gone Home 12+

I’m not a game-player, other than word-type. So, wandering around worlds and destroying demons (or the like) doesn’t appeal to me. That this is a “story” to explore appealed to me. As others have written, it is not particularly complicated. The novice can figure out what to do without much difficulty. It took me an afternoon (couple of hours) to play through to the end. It’s a single story game, without ways of changing the ending or the story. Now that it’s finished, I’m not sure there’s a point to my playing it again.

Well conceived, nice animation. Good story.

I wouldn’t expect a game like this to cost as much as it did. Not sure, had I realized it would be so short and a one-time play, that I’d have purchased it. But, I did, and I enjoyed playing. I guess I expected something more complicated, given the cost. That’s the basis for 3 stars - only an afternoon of entertainment, and nothing left to do with it.

Simply put, I loved this game. The story was moving and captivating and the end was wonderful. The mechanics of the game made it easy to play and very intuitive. I definitely enjoyed all of the little nuances in the game (music, stories, notes, that comment about leaving all of the lights on) and they really made it feel like you were in a real house with real people. It was definitely interesting to try and predict where the story was going at the beginning since I didn’t know anything about it, you could see it going in a lot of different directions. My main complaint would have to be either the price or the length of the game. I loved the fact that it was short enough to play in one sitting (I actually reccomend not breaking it up), but because it is so short there really isn’t any replay value, $15 or $20 seems a little steep. The only reason that I was willing to pay that much is because I had heard multiple good reviews and I had some money left over on my account. I would absolutely love it if there were additional installments though. Overall, it was a great game, but if more like this are made (which I sincerely hope there are) they should be longer, replayable, or cheaper.

Briefly, this game was very immersive and managed to keep and aura of spookiness around itself despite there really being nothing spooky at all. The developers succeeded in making a game where you begin to understand and care about the characters they’ve created despite there being no actual characters to interact with directly. I thought the game was, overall, very unique and enjoyable, and at the end it was rather heartwarming. That said, I do agree with some other reviews which say the game is overpriced. It’s not that it isn’t a game deserving of $20, but that compared to other, larger games with more developers and more hours of gameplay, it seems overpriced. I would say a perfect price point for this game would be $15, not $20. But hey, that’s just me, and like I said this game was good and interesting, although not quite challenging enough.