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Gone Home is a critic's dream game. I liked it a little more than Oli did, a little less than most other reviewers, but whatever you think of it, there's plenty of thematic meat to chew on, some brilliant writing, and a particularly progressive bit of character development (which shouldn't really be considered progressive but, in terms of video games, it absolutely is). More importantly, it's over in two hours. You can get a review and a couple of features out of that, easy, with a total time investment far less than that 6/10 action game you trudged through for 20-odd hours a couple of months back.I tend not to read articles about games I know I'm going to write about myself until after I've said my piece, so this week I've been catching up with what others have been saying about Gone Home. It seems to have struck a chord with many, and I'm delighted about that. I'm far less comfortable, however, with claims that this is "the future of games" - partly because it's a continuation of a trend I think is actually quite harmful.
This isn't Gone Home's fault. It is, like Dear Esther, an experiment in interactive narrative, and for my money a more successful one. I'm not entirely enamoured with its approach to storytelling, as good as the writing is, because to me it's structured like a bad movie, where the protagonist stumbles around awkwardly before triggering the next piece of exposition that advances the plot. But it's hardly unique in that regard: that kind of delivery is used in plenty of games. The difference is that Gone Home is being cited as a step forward simply because the quality of the writing and the environmental storytelling is superior.
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