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Over the past few days, I've replayed both Gone Home and Tacoma (both made by the same company). Twice, even, with the first times being without commentary and the second times being with commentary. For Tacoma, I've already written a post about it, back in 2019 (and I should point out that I rebought it on Steam just before starting this new playthrough, since it was on sale at the time, even though I already had the free copy of it downloaded), but for Gone Home, I apparently never wrote a post about it. So, this is that post.
I would say it would be better to go into Gone Home not knowing anything about it, but it's kind of an It Was His Sled situation at this point, so...
Have some spoiler space, even so...
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There. This spoiler space will serve both for Gone Home and Tacoma (and the other shit I unfortunately ended up having to talk about), even though I'm mostly going to be talking about Gone Home here.
(Mostly spoiler-free description between here and the additional spoiler space below.)
So... Gone Home is a game in which you play as a 20 year old woman named Kaitlin Greenbriar, who at the start of the game is just getting home (specifically at 1:15am on June 7, 1995) after spending the previous year touring Europe. In the year while she was gone, lots of things happened with her family, not the least of which being that they moved into a brand new house. Well, it's actually a rather old house that used to belong to a man named Oscar Masan, who was the uncle of Terrence Greenbriar, Katie's father, to whom the house was bequeathed after Oscar died.
When Katie returns home, the house is locked and nobody is home. After solving the initial, simple puzzle of getting into the house, the rest of the game is basically exploring the house and figuring out why nobody is there and what's going on.
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Spoilers begin in earnest, after this point.
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I think, to the game's detriment, some of the initial marketing for the game apparently tried to make it seem like it was a horror game, i.e. that you are supposedly in a haunted house and spooky shit is happening. And when you first start playing it, it does kinda sorta seem like some bad shit might be going down. There are some concerning messages that have been left on the answering machine, and the lights sometimes randomly flicker, and there are occasionally weird sounds that could be interpreted as potentially ghostly stuff.
Just to get it out of the way right off the bat, there is no supernatural element to Gone Home, and there is no real horror (well, there kind of is, but it's of a much more mundane variety). The main story of Gone Home is that of Sam, Katie's younger sister. Sam is 17 years old and has apparently just finished her senior year in high school. And, as you progress through the house, finding more and more clues, you discover that over the past year, Sam met and fell in love with another girl, named Lonnie. Sam's parents, when they eventually found out about this, did not react well. Also, Lonnie was about to ship off to basic training for the Army almost immediately after graduation. Toward the end of the game, there are hints that Sam might have committed suicide because of this and that you, the player, are about to stumble upon her dead body up in the attic. However, it turns out that Sam actually picked up the third call (after the first two you find left on the answering machine, which were from Lonnie) and has simply run away from home (and also stole a bunch of shit from the house on the way out) in a rush to be with her girlfriend.
That's the main story of Gone Home, and the one that received by far the most focus. There are other threads you find concerning the other characters over the course of the game, as well. There's Sam's lapsed friendship with her childhood friend, Daniel. There's the ongoing fictional story written by Sam about a pirate captain and her first mate that Sam has been writing and rewriting since she was very young, which is a reflection of the changes in her life at various points in time. Sam and Katie's mother, Jan, might or might not have possibly been having an affair with one of her co-workers. Their father, Terrence, at first seems to be a failed writer (with a strained relationship with his own father) who is drinking himself into a failed marriage. By the end of the game, though, it is shown that the parents are away on a couple's counseling vacation and that Terrence has recovered from his writing slump and was given a second chance by a new publishing company, after his first one cut him loose due to poor sales. However, there is another thread in the game that has a bit of a (mundane) horror thread to it. Terrence was apparently really close to his uncle, Oscar, up until the end of the year 1963, which is when the game hints at Oscar having abused Terrence, after which all contact between Terrence and Oscar was cut off. 1963 was also the year of the Kennedy assassination, which was a big influence on Terrence's life and the subject of his books.
The game is very much a "walking simulator" game, and I don't mean that in the insulting way that too many others seem to mean it. You walk around, pick things up and look at them, find notes to read (which occasionally triggers a voice-acted journal entry from Sam), and solve the mystery of what happened.
I'm not going to even touch on the main reason why too many people don't seem to like this game, except to mention it in passing here and the fact that I'm not going to get into that bullshit, because it's bullshit.
Also, it occurs to me that if Sam Greenbriar and Yolanda DeSoto were real people, and they were both presumably 17 in 1995, they'd be 47 now. I.e. a year older than me, IRL. I'm... not entirely sure how to feel about that, to be honest. >_>;
As for Tacoma, I don't actually have much else to say about it here that I didn't already say about it in the post linked above. No brazen spoilers about it in this post like there are about Gone Home in the previous section. I'll just say this, though: given recent events currently ongoing in the United States of America, the couple of Easter Egg references to a "President Musk" (of South Africa, in the game, not of the United States, as is ostensibly the case in real life) are simultaneously hilarious and tooth-gnash-worthy. This game was released probably during the height (or maybe the beginning of the end) of the Elon Musk rampant-dick-riding era of history, back when lots of well-meaning people still thought of Phony Stark as a legitimate genius and friend of humanity, rather than the raging piece of transphobic, Nazi shit that he's since revealed himself to be. My oh my how things have changed since 2017.
Oh, and while Sergio Venturi may not be quite at "fuck Ted Faro" levels of stupidity and villainy, he's certain worthy of a hearty "fuck you," even so.
I would have said that I'm looking forward to whatever Fullbright does in the future, except that the next game they put out after Tacoma was... ... ... a game called... ... ...TOILET SPIDERS. (Actually, the full name is Fullbright Presents TOILET SPIDERS, which is actually worse, somehow.) A fucking game about fucking spiders in fucking toilets. No fucking thanks.
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...
There's also a game called Open Roads, that was released in 2024 and seems more in line with the games that Fullbright had put out before, and was, in fact, originally being developed by Fullbright, but... well... seems almost everyone on the Fullbright development team abandoned Fullbright entirely, because of behind the scenes horseshit, as usually seems to be the case with such things. *weary goddamned sigh* The Fullbright escapees seem to be part of Annapurna now, which I guess is cool, since Annapurna has put out some good stuff over the years.
And... I was actually completely unaware of any of this until as of the process of writing this post, in fact, which is rather disappointing and even a little depressing, especially after playing both Gone Home and Tacoma with commentary on. So... I guess I will stop giving a shit about Fullbright and Steve Gaynor entirely (especially if dogshit like TOILET SPIDERS is what "Fullbright" is going to be focusing on in the future) and instead shift my focus to anything "Open Roads Team" (which basically seems to be Fullbright, in all but name, minus Gaynor) and Annapurna does in the future, especially since I was already doing the latter.
Also, fuck Steve Gaynor and fuck what remains of Fullbright (which is apparently just Steve Gaynor now?), I guess.
In fact, I just bought Open Roads, so maybe I'll be writing a post about that soon, too.
I would say it would be better to go into Gone Home not knowing anything about it, but it's kind of an It Was His Sled situation at this point, so...
Have some spoiler space, even so...
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There. This spoiler space will serve both for Gone Home and Tacoma (and the other shit I unfortunately ended up having to talk about), even though I'm mostly going to be talking about Gone Home here.
(Mostly spoiler-free description between here and the additional spoiler space below.)
So... Gone Home is a game in which you play as a 20 year old woman named Kaitlin Greenbriar, who at the start of the game is just getting home (specifically at 1:15am on June 7, 1995) after spending the previous year touring Europe. In the year while she was gone, lots of things happened with her family, not the least of which being that they moved into a brand new house. Well, it's actually a rather old house that used to belong to a man named Oscar Masan, who was the uncle of Terrence Greenbriar, Katie's father, to whom the house was bequeathed after Oscar died.
When Katie returns home, the house is locked and nobody is home. After solving the initial, simple puzzle of getting into the house, the rest of the game is basically exploring the house and figuring out why nobody is there and what's going on.
|
|
|
Spoilers begin in earnest, after this point.
|
|
|
I think, to the game's detriment, some of the initial marketing for the game apparently tried to make it seem like it was a horror game, i.e. that you are supposedly in a haunted house and spooky shit is happening. And when you first start playing it, it does kinda sorta seem like some bad shit might be going down. There are some concerning messages that have been left on the answering machine, and the lights sometimes randomly flicker, and there are occasionally weird sounds that could be interpreted as potentially ghostly stuff.
Just to get it out of the way right off the bat, there is no supernatural element to Gone Home, and there is no real horror (well, there kind of is, but it's of a much more mundane variety). The main story of Gone Home is that of Sam, Katie's younger sister. Sam is 17 years old and has apparently just finished her senior year in high school. And, as you progress through the house, finding more and more clues, you discover that over the past year, Sam met and fell in love with another girl, named Lonnie. Sam's parents, when they eventually found out about this, did not react well. Also, Lonnie was about to ship off to basic training for the Army almost immediately after graduation. Toward the end of the game, there are hints that Sam might have committed suicide because of this and that you, the player, are about to stumble upon her dead body up in the attic. However, it turns out that Sam actually picked up the third call (after the first two you find left on the answering machine, which were from Lonnie) and has simply run away from home (and also stole a bunch of shit from the house on the way out) in a rush to be with her girlfriend.
That's the main story of Gone Home, and the one that received by far the most focus. There are other threads you find concerning the other characters over the course of the game, as well. There's Sam's lapsed friendship with her childhood friend, Daniel. There's the ongoing fictional story written by Sam about a pirate captain and her first mate that Sam has been writing and rewriting since she was very young, which is a reflection of the changes in her life at various points in time. Sam and Katie's mother, Jan, might or might not have possibly been having an affair with one of her co-workers. Their father, Terrence, at first seems to be a failed writer (with a strained relationship with his own father) who is drinking himself into a failed marriage. By the end of the game, though, it is shown that the parents are away on a couple's counseling vacation and that Terrence has recovered from his writing slump and was given a second chance by a new publishing company, after his first one cut him loose due to poor sales. However, there is another thread in the game that has a bit of a (mundane) horror thread to it. Terrence was apparently really close to his uncle, Oscar, up until the end of the year 1963, which is when the game hints at Oscar having abused Terrence, after which all contact between Terrence and Oscar was cut off. 1963 was also the year of the Kennedy assassination, which was a big influence on Terrence's life and the subject of his books.
The game is very much a "walking simulator" game, and I don't mean that in the insulting way that too many others seem to mean it. You walk around, pick things up and look at them, find notes to read (which occasionally triggers a voice-acted journal entry from Sam), and solve the mystery of what happened.
I'm not going to even touch on the main reason why too many people don't seem to like this game, except to mention it in passing here and the fact that I'm not going to get into that bullshit, because it's bullshit.
Also, it occurs to me that if Sam Greenbriar and Yolanda DeSoto were real people, and they were both presumably 17 in 1995, they'd be 47 now. I.e. a year older than me, IRL. I'm... not entirely sure how to feel about that, to be honest. >_>;
As for Tacoma, I don't actually have much else to say about it here that I didn't already say about it in the post linked above. No brazen spoilers about it in this post like there are about Gone Home in the previous section. I'll just say this, though: given recent events currently ongoing in the United States of America, the couple of Easter Egg references to a "President Musk" (of South Africa, in the game, not of the United States, as is ostensibly the case in real life) are simultaneously hilarious and tooth-gnash-worthy. This game was released probably during the height (or maybe the beginning of the end) of the Elon Musk rampant-dick-riding era of history, back when lots of well-meaning people still thought of Phony Stark as a legitimate genius and friend of humanity, rather than the raging piece of transphobic, Nazi shit that he's since revealed himself to be. My oh my how things have changed since 2017.
Oh, and while Sergio Venturi may not be quite at "fuck Ted Faro" levels of stupidity and villainy, he's certain worthy of a hearty "fuck you," even so.
I would have said that I'm looking forward to whatever Fullbright does in the future, except that the next game they put out after Tacoma was... ... ... a game called... ... ...TOILET SPIDERS. (Actually, the full name is Fullbright Presents TOILET SPIDERS, which is actually worse, somehow.) A fucking game about fucking spiders in fucking toilets. No fucking thanks.
...
...
...
There's also a game called Open Roads, that was released in 2024 and seems more in line with the games that Fullbright had put out before, and was, in fact, originally being developed by Fullbright, but... well... seems almost everyone on the Fullbright development team abandoned Fullbright entirely, because of behind the scenes horseshit, as usually seems to be the case with such things. *weary goddamned sigh* The Fullbright escapees seem to be part of Annapurna now, which I guess is cool, since Annapurna has put out some good stuff over the years.
And... I was actually completely unaware of any of this until as of the process of writing this post, in fact, which is rather disappointing and even a little depressing, especially after playing both Gone Home and Tacoma with commentary on. So... I guess I will stop giving a shit about Fullbright and Steve Gaynor entirely (especially if dogshit like TOILET SPIDERS is what "Fullbright" is going to be focusing on in the future) and instead shift my focus to anything "Open Roads Team" (which basically seems to be Fullbright, in all but name, minus Gaynor) and Annapurna does in the future, especially since I was already doing the latter.
Also, fuck Steve Gaynor and fuck what remains of Fullbright (which is apparently just Steve Gaynor now?), I guess.
In fact, I just bought Open Roads, so maybe I'll be writing a post about that soon, too.
