spacetime coordinates: Boon County, Oregon.
June 7th, 1995. 1:15 AM. You arrive home after a year abroad. You expect your family to greet you, but the house is empty. Something’s not right. Where is everyone? And what’s happened here? Unravel the mystery for yourself in Gone Home, a story exploration game from The Fullbright Company.
Gone Home does not feature much interactivity, but instead has the player explore the house at their own pace and determine what has transpired by examining items, journals, and other items left around the various rooms. The Fullbright team, having previously worked on BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den, took concepts and ideas from that game to craft an exploration game to engage the player in uncovering the narration by non-linear progression by searching the house, while keeping the project manageable for their small team.
Gone Home was critically praised at release. Several outlets used the game as an example of video games as art, as its non-standard gameplay format demonstrates progression of the video game industry into more artistic forms. However, this also raised the question of whether Gone Home should be considered a game, and led to the derogatory term “walking simulators” to describe exploration games with little interactivity, though since then, the industry has come to embrace the term. Gone Home‘s characters and story were praised for addressing LGBT issues with which some players could identify. (wiki)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): Windows 7 SP1 or higher / 1.80GHz Processor / 2GB Memory / DX10 Video card with 512MB of VRAM // (NOTE: Intel HD Graphic 4000 NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORTED on Windows 8) /2GB HDD space