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Only found out about this game tonight, and then proceeded to play it for like 3 hours, to its conclusion. It's one of the best games I've ever played, and no other game has ever come close to provoking the emotional reaction in me that this one did. Like, god drat, it hit me like a ton of bricks... about five or six times.
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Aug 24, 2013 11:10
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Roumba posted:I really enjoyed this. Kind of like Dear Ester, but likeably different. I probably had quite a different experience than most. I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought about this. I actually never even tried that door because I didn't want to ruin any photographs up there and wasn't sure if maybe they might be clues to whatever happened in the house and I figured that just clicking on the attic door would open it up. (It is, of course locked). Near the end, like I said earlier in the thread, I basically sprinted upstairs without regard to photography paper once I found the key, because I thought there was a chance that Sam was actually still up there and had maybe fallen asleep before heading out to wherever she was going. In retrospect that was a pretty ridiculous thing for me to think with the information I had already been given, but I really wasn't thinking all that clearly by that point. This probably gave me the most complex emotional reaction I've ever gotten from a game. Over the years I've certainly been excited, thrilled, creeped out, and made to laugh. But, the kind of complex confusion and concern that I ended up feeling from this was something else entirely. I mean, at the end I'm (well, Katie is) standing in an attic and realising my sister is gone, and only speaking about "maybe seeing me again someday", I've learned all sorts of things about my parents that span a whole range of emotions, none of which are all that great. Where do you even go from there? What do you tell? What do you hold back? Is Sam going to be back in like a week? Maybe Katie, Sam and Lonnie could all get an apartment together in Portland or something. Who knows!~
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Aug 24, 2013 17:10
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I could tell that Sam ran away because the family has two cars and neither were in the garage. I didn't really get a suicide fakeout at the end at all, but there was this pit in my stomach because I was waiting for Lonnie to die overseas, or cheat on her, or something to trigger it. I'm much happier with what I got  E: nice detail number two: Sam left so quickly that she actually burnt out. So you can tell which side was hers 
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Aug 24, 2013 19:58
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I'm pretty sure the principal characters of Gone Home went on to become the founding members of Sleater-Kinney.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:13
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I can definitely understand problems with the price. In this economy, twenty dollars goes a long way, and it might not be worth it to spend it on an afternoon. But if games don't just exist to distract us from our lives, and instead to enrich them, then the way to compute value changes. In terms of dollars spent to hours played, its not much of a game. But it moved me, it showed me something new, it taught me things about myself. It did everything I want art to do, so it was absolutely worth my money. If this isn't your type of thing, if it holds no interest for you, then it certainly isn't worth your money. But even Skyrim, with its never ending gameplay, isn't worth my money if I won't feel involved in a meaningful way. Rather than dismiss it as too short for the price, we should consider what we really want out of a video game. One of my favorite things about Gone Home is the unusual critical reaction. Not the mostly positive one, that's not unusual. But its such a different beast than most games. Its like the press is kinda turned on its head. Stripped of their usual tools for reviewing (gameplay was tight, multiplayer was fun, graphics were blah) the find themselves in a situation where a game transcended "gameness" and reached them in a personal way. So all the reviews are full of crying game critics telling me about their relationship with their fathers. I love it, I really think it is a new step for the medium. I will admit to doing the same thing. After finishing the game and talking about it with friends, I wrote a big tumblr post about how the game had changed my whole attitude towards my past. Spoilers within http://idonthavetodowhatyousay.tumblr.com/day/2013/08/19
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Aug 24, 2013 20:35
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death .cab for qt posted:I could tell that Sam ran away because the family has two cars and neither were in the garage. I didn't really get a suicide fakeout at the end at all, but there was this pit in my stomach because I was waiting for Lonnie to die overseas, or cheat on her, or something to trigger it. I'm much happier with what I got I doubt You could actually fit a car in that garage. It seems really shallow.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:36
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exquisite tea posted:I'm pretty sure the principal characters of Gone Home went on to become the founding members of Sleater-Kinney. Corin Tucker's first band is already in the game.  Also, her solo album rules. Apologies if you already know all this
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Aug 24, 2013 20:56
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suztan posted:I feel a little weird that, despite my love for weird 'non-games' (Dear Esther), I couldn't really get into this. I check some of the boxes for the Relate-o-meter (young, female, non-heterosexual), but I wasn't ever a teen in the 90's, no interest in punk or riot grrl, no rebellious phase (I was too busy being a massive nerd during my teen years), no siblings, and I never went to high school, either. It feels like having a birth year some time in 1980-something is a requirement for enjoying Gone Home. Sure, I remember TV shows recorded on VHS and the days before internet and cell phones, but those weren't my formative years, and they don't hold nostalgia for me. I enjoyed this game for being a loud and confident statement about what games can do, what games should be, but I didn't enjoy it for what it was: to paraphrase a poster earlier in the thread, a mildly spooky historic mansion exploration simulator with a neat short& story. It's a game of horror playing on the strings of what the upper middle class fears. Nothing happened in the game of coming home to a new mansion but that's enough to freak people out because of the implications that something could have happened if "other people" were involved. So it's interesting in that way. I went in blind, just saw that it got great numbers on Metacritic, and after a couple of minutes I played it as a simulator of angry middle class teens in the 90's that hate their parents for providing because that was what the game told me. So I read all the notes, turned off the lights. The only thing I feared was the very real possibility of some lame last minute twist where it turns out I was a gay ghost all along that had to suffer grrlpunk. edit: added spoiler-tags And that's not a negative, it means gaming is getting more diverse in what it offers and with that comes choice of what you enjoy, just like with music. Long gone are the days when a game was good just because it kind of worked out in what it tried to do, so you played it no matter what it was.
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Aug 24, 2013 22:20
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Best Gamers did a review of this pile and rock cock spits some mad truth at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwMjXnBWBuQ
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Aug 24, 2013 23:25
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Is that ... Jazz the Jackrabbit music? edit: guess you didn't like it then!
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Aug 24, 2013 23:33
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RobTG posted:Best Gamers did a review of this pile and rock cock spits some mad truth at the end. Man, people sure do get angry about this game. Which it is. A game. EDIT: VVV No, dude, you don't get it. If I can't relate to something on a completely superficial, surface-deep level then it's obviously just some weird niche thing that I can safely ignore. VVV Phylodox fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Aug 24, 2013 |
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Aug 24, 2013 23:42
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The best part of this game is watching people out themselves as basically being Katie's conservative dad. "Grrrrr, how dare you make me listen to your riot music and show me you rebellious ways!!"Ein posted:
Come on dude, you couldn't have missed the point more if you tried.
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Aug 24, 2013 23:43
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teethgrinder posted:Is that ... Jazz the Jackrabbit music? Phylodox posted:Man, people sure do get angry about this game. Which it is. A game. It's a parody youtube account.
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Aug 24, 2013 23:47
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OatmealRaisin posted:It's a parody youtube account. It's literally impossible to parody gaming journalism. Parody uses hyperbole and exaggeration. How do you exaggerate something that's already at peak ridiculousness?
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Aug 24, 2013 23:49
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exquisite tea posted:I'm pretty sure the principal characters of Gone Home went on to become the founding members of Sleater-Kinney. Gone Home is a Portlandia prequel.
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Aug 25, 2013 01:06
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I finished this a few nights ago and I'd now put this right up alongside Journey as being one of the most amazing games I've ever played, especially at a time where I'm finding myself burnt out and unimpressed at a lot of gaming. I'm not saying that it's some kind of Second Coming of Gaming Jesus but I do agree that - as other's have put a lot more eloquently earlier in the thread - that this is an important game. I feel like the very fact that this exists is going to lead to some extraordinary things being made, and that's really exciting. Plot thoughts/spoilers: I initially thought that Sam was going to have accidentally killed Lonnie somehow, triggered by Lonnie cheating on her or abusing her trust or something along those lines. Sam's voice actress gives a fantastic performance and the uncertainty and giddy love that comes across when she's narrating journal entries related to Lonnie is just beautiful. I had my heart in my mouth at the suicide fakeout point - I didn't find myself rushing to the attic though, I let the journal entry play out first before very slowly walking up to the attic and going inside. I'm not ashamed to say I had tears in my eyes when I got to the final journal entry. People have made the point that they think Lonnie and Sam's relationship is going to burn out, but I think one of the big themes in the game is the idea of hope. Their dad has a new hope of publishing a third book and will hopefully be able to move on from the horrible things that happened to him as a child, their mum reignites hope for their struggling marriage and for Sam and Lonnie it's the hope that things will work out okay as long as their together. We might see it as doomed to failure looking back with the benefit of more life experience, but for two teenagers in love at the time the game ends they're looking at a world full of possibilities. I think the whole game ends on a spectacular upbeat note.
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Aug 25, 2013 02:16
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Have you guys who say this game has punched you in the gut more than ever before, just curious have you guys played Telltale's Walking Dead? If so what made this hour house simulator affect you so much more than Walking Dead? I can see if one hit you more than the other, but I'm seeing so many people say it pretty much made them weep and I feel like maybe they never played Walking Dead. That or their expectations are so low going in. I dunno I'm just having a problem figuring out how this game made people so much more emotional than something like WD.
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Aug 25, 2013 02:22
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Fair to Midland posted:Have you guys who say this game has punched you in the gut more than ever before, just curious have you guys played Telltale's Walking Dead? If so what made this hour house simulator affect you so much more than Walking Dead?
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Aug 25, 2013 02:28
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I thought Walking Dead was fantastic too. It's not an either/or situation for me, they're just two games that succeed because they portray people as human beings with actual motivations and imperfections.
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Aug 25, 2013 02:29
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Corin Tucker's Stalker posted:I thought Walking Dead was fantastic too. It's not an either/or situation for me, they're just two games that succeed because they portray people as human beings with actual motivations and imperfections. Alright that's cool, I'm just talking like this guy who I feel needs to play WD: Alain Perdrix posted:Only found out about this game tonight, and then proceeded to play it for like 3 hours, to its conclusion. It's one of the best games I've ever played, and no other game has ever come close to provoking the emotional reaction in me that this one did. Like, god drat, it hit me like a ton of bricks... about five or six times.
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Aug 25, 2013 02:30
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It is a well known fact that you can only be emotionally affected by one game in your life.
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Aug 25, 2013 02:33
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OatmealRaisin posted:It is a well known fact that you can only be emotionally affected by one game in your life. "no other game"
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Aug 25, 2013 02:34
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It's probably because most every other game, The Walking Dead included, relies so heavily on melodrama and hyperbole to illicit an emotional response. It's so rare that video games tell just plain, simple people stories without them somehow being couched in a fantastic, larger-than-life setting. The unexpected simplicity of Gone Home's story is what I think is what makes it so surpassingly poignant to some and so needlessly infuriating to others.
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Aug 25, 2013 03:12
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I have a tougher time relating to a post-apocalyptic zombie survival story than something like Gone Home.
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Aug 25, 2013 03:40
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How did people interpret the $100+ beauty salon receipt under the couch? Is it just more of the Mom/Rick storyline? Also is it the consensus that they never actually got together?
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Aug 25, 2013 03:43
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Ulta posted:How did people interpret the $100+ beauty salon receipt under the couch? Is it just more of the Mom/Rick storyline? Also is it the consensus that they never actually got together? Or possibly trying to keep her husband's interest.
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Aug 25, 2013 04:06
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Just played through the entirety of this game, here are my thoughts: I didn't ever feel a lot of emotion towards the story of Sam and Lonney, sure it made me sad because that's the intent of the story and the writers were good enough to accomplish it well, but it didn't make me want to cry or left me thinking about it after it ended like some other stories have done in the past. In fact her whole character for me felt less like an actual person and more like a character whose personality and story were written with the express purpose of making the reader feel sadness/pity, which is a bit of a shame as I expected for her to be the character that would touch me most: I'm fairly close to her age and I listened to plenty of punk while in high-school, I even wrote stories about some dumb self-insert adventurer! Surprisingly the character that really made the game for me was Terry, his whole back story as a failed writer, the assumed abuse at the hands of his uncle, that cold letter from his father all made for a character that I felt was much deeper and that I cared for a lot more than I did Sam in a whole lot less words, even if he is a middle-aged christian that doesn't believe in gay people and writes the kind of literature that I hate I still like him way more than any of the other characters and felt genuinely happy when I got to the part where his books were republished and he overcame his writer's block. As I write this and think about the game I'm honestly more worried about the rest of the family and how they are gonna react about Sam being gone than Sam herself, all the other characters felt more real than she did for me. All in all, I guess it was worth 20 bucks: it did keep my heart racing even though I knew there were no monsters, the atmosphere and ambiance are terrific and it somehow kept me, who will stop playing literally any game if it scares him even slightly, going through it all, so it was certainly compelling.
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Aug 25, 2013 05:25
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Fair to Midland posted:Have you guys who say this game has punched you in the gut more than ever before, just curious have you guys played Telltale's Walking Dead? If so what made this hour house simulator affect you so much more than Walking Dead?
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Aug 25, 2013 06:52
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Just played through the whole thing, and it was really quite the nostalgia trip. For the record, I'm a female hetero big-sister who moved out of state at 17 and it was Katie who resonated with me. Coming home to my parent's new, unfamiliar house after being away for over a year was something I've actually done, and having a rebellious little sister when I was the model A+ student was really familiar. My parents having marital issues only after I left the house was something else that hit home hard. I think the way it ended is really interesting just because it's so open. Mom and Dad might work out their problems, Dad might get published again, Sam and Lonnie might be happy together... But it could all swing the other way too. I hope that eventually Sam does reconnect with Katie, even if not with her parents. I didn't cry, but it did dredge up a lot of old and mostly good memories, so I'm glad I played it.
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Aug 25, 2013 07:22
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Turkeybro posted:Just played through the entirety of this game, here are my thoughts: I agree about the dad being the most interesting character, especially since you actually kinda have to go digging around to get his full story unlike Sam whose journals are very much front-and-center. Really a lot of stuff about Sam's story and how it was told felt a little too contrived compared to the rest of the family. It's like the devs had a good idea of how they wanted the game to play out but when it came to Sam they just couldn't help themselves and lavished all this extra attention on her and inadvertently spoiled it. I'm gonna play through it again with all the diary stuff turned off and see if that helps any.
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Aug 25, 2013 07:26
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Ulta posted:How did people interpret the $100+ beauty salon receipt under the couch? Is it just more of the Mom/Rick storyline? Also is it the consensus that they never actually got together? The haircut is the day before she accompanied Rick to the Earth, Wind, and Fire concert. I interpreted as being related to that storyline.
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Aug 25, 2013 09:28
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Republicans posted:I agree about the dad being the most interesting character, especially since you actually kinda have to go digging around to get his full story unlike Sam whose journals are very much front-and-center. Really a lot of stuff about Sam's story and how it was told felt a little too contrived compared to the rest of the family. It's like the devs had a good idea of how they wanted the game to play out but when it came to Sam they just couldn't help themselves and lavished all this extra attention on her and inadvertently spoiled it. I'm gonna play through it again with all the diary stuff turned off and see if that helps any. I thought it was appropriate for Sam's character. These are people who are defined by their personal belongings, and teenagers can have a way of dominating the household with all their stuff. I thought the whole layout of the house was interesting itself, as you can get an idea of who occupies certain spaces.
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Aug 25, 2013 12:13
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Fair to Midland posted:Alright that's cool, I'm just talking like this guy who I feel needs to play WD: I have played WD. WD is very good, but I could relate directly to this game in a way I couldn't to WD. While this game obviously still manipulates the player, WD is flat-out cloying, as stated by a poster above, which is a big part of the reason that it never impacted me in the same way. So yeah, I said "no other game" had the same impact on me, and to this point, that's the truth. That is just me, though. Sorry if that is The Wrong Opinion or whatever.
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Aug 25, 2013 14:01
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This may just be me, but the reason Gone Home is so emotionally effective to me (and Walking Dead was less so) was mainly because I didn't grow up during a zombie apocalypse.
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Aug 25, 2013 14:05
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Played it, finished it, was really taken with this new type of 'game'. Or if not new at least rare enough that I don't remember playing too many visual novels done as well as this one. Here's to hoping for more games heavy on story and absent on shooting things.
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Aug 25, 2013 14:37
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I think the Walking Dead is also great, definitely deserving of all the GOTY 2012 accolades, but I see no reason to rank it above/below Gone Home in my mind. Both are supremely ambitious and well-written, and it's good that we can look forward to more titles like this in the future.
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Aug 25, 2013 15:04
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OmniDesol posted:The haircut is the day before she accompanied Rick to the Earth, Wind, and Fire concert. I interpreted as being related to that storyline.
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Aug 25, 2013 16:25
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the black husserl posted:The best part of this game is watching people out themselves as basically being Katie's conservative dad. "Grrrrr, how dare you make me listen to your riot music and show me you rebellious ways!!" I played the game wrong? drat, that's a possibility I guess. But I read the notes, zoomed in, spun objects and listened to audio and quickly figured out what was going on and what could happen as the primary story moved forward. I was not scared, surprised or broke down and cried at any point. It's a well made game I had fun playing simply because I like rummaging around, but it's pretty much The 7th Guest with an indie twist and a splash of Lifetime. Maybe that's just too much up in my face with rebellion.
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Aug 25, 2013 19:40
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Phylodox posted:Man, people sure do get angry about this game. Which it is. A game Except that it's not. It's the same thing as those japanese visual novel things, but you get to move around. If there were puzzles, or some kind of interaction that wasn't just reading stuff, you might be able to get away with calling it a game. But really it's just an interactive storybook with no gameplay whatsoever, and it's really shallow at what it's trying to do too. The only reason this gets any praise at all is because it's DEEP and PROGRESSIVE and a dozen other buzzwords you can throw at it. I finished it in under an hour and was confused as to why anybody would actually enjoy this. If you want an adventure game that's heavily story-focused but actually feels like a game with gameplay, there's games like MYST which actually have puzzle and gameplay elements. This is just... I don't even know what to call it.
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Aug 25, 2013 22:57
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The Shortest Path posted:Except that it's not. It's the same thing as those japanese visual novel things, but you get to move around.
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Aug 25, 2013 23:09
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