In the father's case, this bureaucratic numbness adds pathos to the portrait of a novelist whose insecurities and inhibitions infest his work - among my favourite touches in the game is the doleful discovery of a porn mag underneath a pile of dusty press copies.
The mother and father are more reserved, their emotional lives ossified within letters to publishers, schedule planners and legal correspondence. The Fullbright Company has laid out and lit the contents of the house with great skill, ensuring that the overarching narrative is coherent regardless of the order in which you encounter crucial objects. It evokes how children cobble together their own colourful languages of metaphors and motifs as camouflage against the probing of parents and siblings. This isn't just obfuscation for the sake of challenge. As the centre of the mystery, Sam's debris is the most abundant and mischievous: her bedroom, which plays host to a combination lock puzzle, is a delightfully cheeky jumble of red herrings. You can also now disable Sam's voiceovers if you'd rather play blind.ĭrawing on its collective experience with the BioShock series, The Fullbright Company has amassed a landscape of suggestive trinkets that don't merely echo or elaborate upon one another, their shared themes sinking in as you trot from room to room, but which are palpably the property of intelligent personalities who are well aware, amongst other things, that their possessions tell a story. These are sparing interruptions, however: for most of the game you'll be sifting the detritus in silence, filling in the blanks at your own pace with only Kaitlin's winningly personalised context-sensitive command text (e.g. On picking up certain objects you're treated to a voiced extract from Sam's journal - the most prosaic of the game's narrative techniques, and the area in which the story sometimes veers from sweet to sickly, thanks in large part to a cloying guitar accompaniment. An almost silent presence throughout, she's a smart choice of protagonist - sufficiently independent that, like the player, she can take more of a detached interest in the private lives of her relatives, where Sam is still struggling to escape their coils. Kaitlin must then scour the place for hints about events during her absence, poking through bookshelves, closets and under sofa cushions for pregnant snippets such as biro sketches or concert tickets, while polishing off a couple of find-the-key puzzles. You play the eldest Greenbriar daughter, Kaitlin, who returns from a gap year in Europe one dark and stormy night to find the family's new house deserted and dotted with cryptic Post-It notes from her sister Samantha. Three years on, Gone Home's cast of fully developed female characters remains sadly unusual in video games. This is a troubled kind of reverence, however, because Gone Home is also a charming if familiar tale about how our belongings may come to define and limit us, a lesson about the periodic necessity of letting everything go - and, without wanting to sound too bookish, a clever excavation of the operations of sexuality and gender within a white, middle class American family in the 1990s. I carefully replaced a scrunched-up manuscript page on the floor next to a bin after reading it, for example, wary of disturbing the scene in however trivial a fashion. Even the Greenbriar family's garbage has an aura of sanctity. But in Gone Home every object is a belonging, and the game cultivates enough sympathy for its cast that meddling with their effects comes to feel indecent. They exist to be barged into and ransacked, their incidental furnishings trampled or smashed in the quest for loot. Houses in video games are seldom treated with this level of courtesy.
#Gone home ps4 Ps4#
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