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Gone Home has many ways of pulling on the player's heartstrings - especially if you're of a certain age, and given to welling up at the sight of button badges, or the lush click of cassette player buttons - but one of the game's most affecting tactics is simply that it lets you put objects back, exactly as you found them, with a context-sensitive input. Houses in video games are seldom treated with this level of courtesy. They exist to be barged into and ransacked, their incidental furnishings trampled or smashed in the quest for loot. 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. Even the Greenbriar family's garbage has an aura of sanctity. 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.
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.
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