Gone Home Critic Reviews

Gone Home proves that a game focused on story and exploration, starring a decidedly non-traditional cast of characters can be utterly thrilling. With excellent writing and environments that made me want to explore every nook and cranny, Gone Home simply, effectively drew me in.

It’s epic, personal and revelatory to the people involved, and that’s why it’s so special. The moments in my life that I cherish the most--my first love, realizing my brother was my best friend, moving to San Francisco, getting married--would not register against saving the universe from an alien threat, but these are the epic moments in my life. Gone Home grounds itself by reveling in life’s quiet, defining moments, the ones you might write down in a diary, underneath a set of books, only to find years later.

Despite being a very short experience, the mundane acts of walking through hallways, opening doors, or reading pieces of paper become a poignant adventure dealing with personal issues that are handled brilliantly and provide a strong basis for a great game. For that, Gone Home is as much an introspective journey into human life as it is a game so very worthy of your time.

An experience that is so startlingly, unexpectedly and enjoyably different than anything else on the market right now.

Gone Home achieves an unexpected and effective range of emotions. Although it’s a mostly sad eerie poignant story, it has flashes of anger and frustration, and the way it manages to fold music into these emotions, as well as the choice of music, is every bit as good as what Bioshock Infinite did with its music.

Gone Home tells a story unlike any other game in recent memory, and yet it does so in a way that only a video game can. The masterfully executed environmental storytelling guarantees that each player will walk away from Gone Home with a different experience.

Its unconventional, non-violent subject matter and gameplay also skilfully and confidently prove that not all games need an "attack" button to be enjoyable and interesting -- and given the growing sense of weariness a lot of us have been feeling with super-violent experiences, that's something that should be celebrated.

In Gone Home, there are moments of fear, moments of joy, moments of sadness, and moments of peace. In the end, there is acceptance, the kind which comes from a tale naturally concluded and a chapter neatly closed.

Gone Home is not only an important game in its own right, but is absolutely vital to the advancement of how we approach narrative in games, as well as the subjects we tackle.

Gone Home is a remarkable achievement, and piecing together its poignant story will stick with me forever.

With excellent writing and remarkable attention to period detail, Gone Home turns the process of exploring a house into a captivating and deeply poignant journey of discovery.

Gone Home is the video game equivalent of those movies that nobody knows about, but the originality of which overturns the concept of cinema and pierces the big blockbuster movies like a small but sharp sword.

A beautiful, emotionally engaging, artfully crafted game, completely centered around exploration and telling a mature story through interaction.

Gone Home is a story in which you'll get to know a handful of characters without physically meeting any one of them. A game where engagement is driven by exploration and absorption at a pace that perfectly suits the story it needs to tell. An experience that offers first and third person accounts of different stories and trusts the player with filling in the blanks. It's not that they don't make them like this anymore, but rather they've never made one like this before.

Gone Home toys with suspense, thriller and adventure. It grabs me by the throat with its tense atmosphere. It seduces me with its side stories and touches me with its intimacy.

Gone Home is a first class adventure, very well written and quite charming.

Gone Home is the kind of work that will impress people who write off the medium because of the prevalence of guns in commercial titles. Its potential wider significance aside, however, the Greenbriars’ story is unforgettable.

Perhaps Gone Home’s greatest surprise lies in the apparent ease with which The Fullbright Company has joined the game’s subject and its medium: it’s a domestic tale of girl-to-womanhood told with the tools of an action game. As a statement that games can express emotionally resonant stories, Gone Home is a triumph. But that’s not why you should play it. Engrossing, touching and rewarding, it’s well worth the experience on its own terms, too.

Play Gone Home because you want an engrossing and detailed environment to explore. Play it because you want something new and introspective from your games. Play it because you want to reconnect with a sibling or family member who has grown distant. Play it because ten years from now there will still be people playing and discussing its intricacies.

Similar to its more experimental bretherin, Proteus and Dear Esther, it’s a triumphantly successful demonstration that narrative doesn’t need to be funnelled down the barrel of a gun, balanced on the edge of a blade or relegated to a background cut scene for the sake of gameplay. Instead Gone Home actively embraces the unique possibilities of interactivity, laying out a breadcrumb trail of fascinating trinkets that leads to its touching crescendo without ever withholding control.