Gone Home is an
immersive, first-person Serious Game focused
on story exploration and narrative, by indie developers The Fullbright Company.
Gone
Home received a number of awards and acclaim from
critics. Emily Morganti for Adventure
Gamers commented that the game has a "realistic, engrossing
story that’s beautifully told through environmental clues and audio narration
and that many people read books for the opportunity to see life through someone
else’s eyes, but it’s rare for a game to do it as well as this one does. “This
is an incredible work of interactive storytelling, and anyone remotely
interested in the subject matter or the practice of telling a story via a video
game should play it”, she said.
Available for Windows, Mac & Linux, you can buy
Gone Home from the
developer’s website or from Steam Even if you don’t
consider yourself a gamer, if you’re a writer you may find this is an exciting
example of how interactivity and good stories can play nicely together.
On February 7, 2014, The Fullbright Company announced
that the game had already sold 250,000 copies.
Gameplay
It takes place in June 1995 at a house in the
Pacific Northwest, when Kaitlin Greenbriar returns home after a yearlong trip
abroad. She spots a note on the door from her sister, Samantha, telling her to
not go looking for answers as to where she is.
As she enters the house Kaitlin realizes nobody is
home, not even her parents, so she investigates the house to find out where
they all are. Players guide Kaitlin through this process, learning new facts
about her family and their experiences over the past year.
Gone Home does only one thing but does it superbly: telling a touching story solely through exploration that makes it well worth experiencing.
About
The Fullbright Company
The
Fullbright Company is an independent video game studio founded in Portland,
Oregon in March, 2012. Its co-founders are Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen,
and Karla Zimonja, who had previously worked together in various capacities on
BioShock 2, Minerva’s Den, XCOM, and BioShock Infinite.
Gone
Home was The Fullbright Company's first game,
released in August 2013.