Gone Home from The Fullbright Company

[Twig]

I like Gone Home.

[Badfinger]

Just noticed that the background image on Steam is the Brother 150 motorcycle ad.

[malkav11]

Personally, what matters to me isn't the game's total length, but the length of time it engages me and whether I can reasonably get the complete game experience given my limited time.  As such, I tend to prefer shorter and punchier and games like Gone Home and Thirty Flights of Loving certainly deliver. So I would never say that either of them are "too short". The problem is, I also have a finite number of dollars to spend on entertainment, and so I feel like if you're going to give me fewer hours of entertainment, you should adjust your price accordingly. Which, fortunately, Fullbright and Blendo did, to a degree (I certainly wouldn't have bought either at $60) but if I was looking at them as complete unknowns rather than the history I have with them thanks to listening to Idle Thumbs I probably would have waited for that price to go lower. 

 

(Similarly, as someone who can read your average 300-ish page book in roughly one workday (i.e. not at a sitting), I was appalled that publishers expected me to be willing to pick up ebooks at $13-15 per. I couldn't possibly afford that at the rate I read - $3-5 is more my speed, and even that represents them getting a lot more money than they used to when I got most of my books from the library. But I have paid it once or twice for authors I really loved.)

[Erkki]

This conversation is too long for the value I'm getting out of it.

[Denial]

This conversation is too long for the value I'm getting out of it.

 

Wait for the sale?

[TychoCelchuuu]

This conversation and others will be cheap as dirt in the next Humble Idle Bundle.

[Tanukitsune]

You can already get this conversation 20% off at Green Man Gaming with the coupon code GMG-CHRISTMASDUCK.

[TheLastBaron]

I just came to point out that there is most definitely shooting in FIFA. Carry on.

[Latrine]

I just came to point out that there is most definitely shooting in FIFA. Carry on.

 

Imagine a game where when you shoot you have to avoid hitting people to score points. I call it footbullet.

[Noyb]

Damn fine game.

 

If I have a story complaint, it's

how many of the back-and-forth notes end with Sam talking rather than Lonnie... Shouldn't Lonnie's house have all the notes that end with Sam's writing?

Lonnie and Sam had the house to themselves that weekend and good reason to reminisce. I figured Lonnie brought those notes with her on her last visit and deliberately left them with Sam. Some documents also made a point that Lonnie wouldn't be able to bring much with her, which likely includes their notes. (which would probably also be risky to bring in the era of Don't Ask Don't Tell)

[Argobot]

Played through the game for a second time, which is something I rarely do with games, but I kept thinking about the story and just had to play it through another time.

 

It's just so refreshing to experience something so contained and personal in a video game. Matthew Burns summed it up best here: Gone Home is one of the first modern games -- a game that doesn't depend on any genre or pulpy tropes to tell its story. I hope that more games are written about real people, living real lives, dealing with real problems. That is a direction that I'm very excited to see games writing take, and can't what to see what comes next from Fullbright and those that are inspired by their success.

[osmosisch]

A very fun interview/discussion with Steve over at http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/'>The Brainy Gamer. Including a bunch of secret rooms and interviews!

[feelthedarkness]

Oh man, secret room! My old adventure game training kept telling me to bring mitten's collar from Sam's closet to the basement and fix the missing call bell. 

 

Also, I agree with Argobot about the style. It reminds me of something they talked about on the cast, which is the focus on the small, or a deep exploration of a contained space. I hope the next project has some physical characters. I'm kind of fascinated how much I enjoyed the game, when one of it's core mechanics (audio logs) are something i don't think is particularly thrilling in and of itself. Ultimately, it really works in Gone Home, because the game is so much about exploring a memory as much as a space.

[SecretAsianMan]

Also, I agree with Argobot about the style. It reminds me of something they talked about on the cast, which is the focus on the small, or a deep exploration of a contained space.

 

I love the idea of exploring a space in great detail.  It's one of the many reasons I was excited to play Gone Home.  It's even better that most things aren't explicitly spelled out.  Piecing together a story from bits and clues is more satisfying to me than just seeing it happen. 

 

Also on the topic of exploring a contained space, Gone Home makes me want to play Last Express, which I have yet to do despite the many accolades given to it by the Thumbs.

[sclpls]

I also complain a lot about the use of audio logs in games which often feel like a huge crutch. Of course they are totally appropriate in Gone Home, although it is too bad that the game has to overcome an awkward structure before the player really understands why these audio logs are playing.

 

Argobot's point about this being a modern game is on point. I was thinking the other day about the use of text in Gone Home is similar to how T.S. Elliot recalls fragments of things in "The Waste Land". Also, to continue this strained comparison, both works are focused in an intensely personal story, have texts that constantly shift points of view, and contain many allusions and references.

[Erkki]

The electrical engineering in this house sucks!

There are at least 4 lights you cannot turn off without switching off the mains (which I still haven't found). What's worse is that once you have read all the journals, turn off the lights and close the bathroom doors, you can't actually open the front door and leave. Somebody has trapped Katie inside and she can't get out! The windows are somehow reinforced and cannot be broken. I tried throwing all sorts of things at them. What's more, after I turned off all the lights, I discovered that the light from outside is casting shadows roughly orthogonal to each window. E.g. the light is coming from the north near the north wall, and south near the south wall. And yet only trees are visible outside the house, but THEY CAST NO SHADOWS! This is getting creepy.

[TychoCelchuuu]

This is all explained by the player being a ghost.

[Latrine]

So in retrospect I have a little problem with the whole premise of the game...

 

If Sam knows that her parents are gone for the weekend and Katie is coming home that night and assuming Sam trusts Katie, why don't she and Lonnie wait to meet up with Katie and say goodbye?

 

I guess Lonnie is AWOL and running away is kind of an impulse decision that you don't delay. Or maybe Katie is too much of a square and Sam thinks she'd try to stop them. But after thinking about the timing of this and the characters, I still think they would've waited.

[TychoCelchuuu]

She doesn't know Katie is coming home that night, does she? She took off before Katie left the message I thought.

[Latrine]

Oh whoops, I forgot the content of the last diary. But still some tricky stuff.

 

Lonnie asked Sam to drive to her, she didn't come back to the house. But that diary entry is on June 6th, and I'm pretty sure Katie's message is from Europe. Actually the timing there is weird because the last two diary entries should be around the morning of June 6th but Katie's message is after Lonnie's and in her message she says the day she is arriving is June 6th, implying that it currently isn't that day? Maybe she's calling in the afternoon in Amsterdam and just said the date so there's no confusion about time conversions.

 

Also from the messages that Sam left for Katie it seemed pretty clear that she knew she'd get back before their parents. So I think what happens is first Lonnie leaves the first two messages, then Sam answers her third call. As Sam is preparing to leave, loading VCRs into her car, Katie leaves her message. Since Lonnie called from a payphone (before cell phones, there's a reason this game is set in 1995!), Sam has no way to tell Lonnie to come meet Katie so instead decides to leave the messages and diary for Katie. And they can't go back to meet Katie because of the storm.

[Argobot]

I'm not sure if this is a more recent phenomenon, but people seem more invested in sorting out the details in fiction or discovering supposed plot holes in stories. I'd assume it's linked to the rise of the internet fan communities, where large groups of people would analyze a piece of writing to a level that the author never intended or expected. Sometimes that can be fun, but most of the time it ruins the purpose of fiction. Who cares if all the little details don't match up perfectly? That's not what the fiction is about and it's not what we should focus on.

 

(Obviously, you're ability to overlook questionable details in a story is directly related to your overall enjoyment of said story. I am not concerned about the little details in Gone Home matching up, because I enjoyed the overall story so much.)

 

Anyway, speaking of fiction, here is some Gone Home fanfiction I wrote (spoilers?): http://sarahargo.tumblr.com/post/59518972461/gone-home-fight-the-future

[feelthedarkness]

It's easier than talking about FEELINGS. 

 

Also, I really love GH, but I hope some of the interest surrounding this shines a light back on Kentucky Route Zero. I think some of the surreal elements will probably prevent it from grabbing a broader audience. 

[tegan]

I'm not sure if this is a more recent phenomenon, but people seem more invested in sorting out the details in fiction or discovering supposed plot holes in stories. I'd assume it's linked to the rise of the internet fan communities, where large groups of people would analyze a piece of writing to a level that the author never intended or expected. Sometimes that can be fun, but most of the time it ruins the purpose of fiction. Who cares if all the little details don't match up perfectly? That's not what the fiction is about and it's not 

 

I've always thought it was weird and hilarious that terrible internet people pick plot holes to shreds but also obsess over comparing things to Citizen Kane, which is entirely centered around a massive plot hole.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I think it's just that nerds really like plot holes because they want everything to make logical sense and talking about things in terms of emotion and feeling is a foreign concept to them. It's the sort of thing that makes people think that a story with a twist is better than one without a twist, and that it's more important for a story beat to make logical sense than emotional sense, and that a story where nothing happens is worse than one where lots of things happen.

[Patrick R]

I think it's also that nerds tend to gravitate towards genre fiction, in which the joys are more often mechanical and plot-driven. If most of what you consume is sci-fi, action, fantasy or horror, the way you consume art will start to be more about whether or not works can tick off certain boxes. Was the horror movie scary? Did the sci-fi novel have good world building? Did the fantasy game have an epic storyline? Were the fights in the superhero comic badass? You can start to train your mind to view all art as whether or not it matches a rigid set of criteria.

 

"Did the video game make you think about the importance of the environments we populate, and the stories they can tell?" isn't a criterion nerds would be trained to look for.