After beating Gone Home in one sitting

- Who uses white wicker for their bedroom furniture and dresser drawers?
- Things there are way too many of in this game: drinking glasses, tissue boxes, three-ring binders.
- There are too many useless items and spaces in the game in general, in fact. Only about 10% of the pick-uppable items have a use or convey information or character insight in-game; the rest are just copypasted household goods, and there're a lot of empty drawers, cupboards, etc. This is far from a long title, and yet I found myself impatient with sifting through all the garbage to find the stuff that actually mattered.
- When I found the first photo of Lonnie, in her shoulder-length light-pink hair and army uniform, I was wondering what the hell Lightning was doing in this game.
- The designers really, really wanted you to play the femme punk mixtapes with which they pepper the house, providing cassette players waiting with their trays ajar at every corner, and every single tape I inserted I wanted to turn off immediately. I'll never beat the patriarchy at this rate.
- Despite the trailers focusing almost exclusively on all the band posters and Lisa Frank folders and homemade VHS tapes of X-Files episodes you can find in the house, the game is not I Got Two Tickets to That Thing You Like: '90's Edition as I previously feared. About the worst the game gets in that department is when the little sister is suspended by her school for distributing her cutting-edge punk zine.
- So Dad effectively wrote 11/22/63 back in the '70's, and then he immediately went and wrote it again. I know they're trying to get us to go all "oh, boo hoo" over Dad's work not selling, but goddamn what we see of it is bad.
- If Oscar's transgression was molesting Terry, then would Terry really want to live in the house where he was molested? I mean, Jesus Christ, there is way too much house here for even a family of four, and both girls are either leaving or have left the nest. Sell the place, use the proceeds to live elsewhere, and lessen your tax burden, man.
- Those aren't SNES carts; they're Super Famicom carts. The style of the indentation below the label is the giveaway. ~*~My immersion.~*~
- This game loves its jammed drawers like Silent Hill loves its jammed doors.
- I found the controls to be a fairly complete clusterfuck. They combine the worst of 3D tank controls and 2D, and you have to be WAY UP CLOSE actually to look at anything. The protagonist also gets hung up on doors like whoa.
- The most fun I had in the game was throwing shit down on the ground instead of putting it neatly back in place. After all the drawer-opening and closet-raiding, it's nice to be able to tell the fifteenth can of Comet cleanser you've found to get wrecked.
- Mom bought two separate purses in the exact same style. It's not even a nice style of purse.

Regarding spoiler information, I am of two minds about the game:

a) I'm glad we finally got a story in modern media where a gay romance didn't end in tragedy. The opening intimations of suicide are pretty smartly turned on their head.

b) Holy freaking Christ, this is not worth twenty bucks.

To back up here: from the perspective that we got a), OK, it probably is worth twenty bucks. As a game, though, absolutely not. A runthrough lasts three-and-a-half hours, and the title has no replay value. (Well, it does if you wanna find a few hidden audiologs, which apparently involves bringing each of the approximately three billion possible interactable items to every room and seeing what triggers voiceover narration.) You could argue that the game has no play value - the only gameplay, really, is finding a few easily-discovered and completely optional safe combinations. The creators are adamantly against the idea of presenting to the player any sort of challenge or task to perform that might present a possible obstacle to progress, which kind of disqualifies Gone Home as a game by definition. I mean, you can go to Metacritic and find dozens of critics who testify that they found the game a life-changing experience and that it helped them appreciate their own families, so maybe something's just broken inside me here (or maybe - and I suspect this more and more with every review I read - reviewers slog through so many "insipid Halo boomfests" in the courses of their jobs that they're disproportionately impressed when a title comes along where the objective is not to bash something's head in). But while I found the romance itself, particularly its denouement, sweet - and it is a bit of a landmark - you have to keep in mind that half the game is Little Sis realizing that she's in love with her best friend, and you're gonna reach that conclusion far sooner than the game does or expects you to do.

And, yeah, these stories are about the journey more than the destination, but the other problem there is that Gone Home is often just bluntly and obviously written. For example, you're led to believe that the mom might be considering an affair with a fireman at her workplace, and though the conclusion's quite obvious from the tone of personal notes and employee-performance reports you find, the game then inelegantly throws in your path a Harlequin paperback starring a firefighter just to double-underline the idea in case you're thick. The game's a certain, familiar variety of immature in its outlook, in that it presents you with these Life Moments that it thinks are blindingly insightful but which are actually kind of trite and fakey (the whole overwrought "STAY WITH THE GROUP" entry comes to mind). I acknowledge that it's a tough balancing act to have an immature narrator and not be immaturely written, but I can only note here that they didn't fully succeed. There are a few good spots - I should note that I appreciated that it was not intolerant family but Lonnie's career aspirations that initially tore the girls apart - and family drama is an inadequately-explored milieu for games, but there's not much here regarding characterization and storytelling through environment that, say, the better Silent Hill games haven't done.

I actually do like the mechanic of bringing items to associated places to trigger memories (albeit from the unseen sister, not the protagonist); it's a more organic way of making progress, particularly in this setting, than inserting the lion crest into the pantry door or what have you, and I'd like to see it explored in other titles. Here, though, there's way too much uninteresting junk through which to sort. But, then again, if there weren't tons of uninteresting junk, then the game wouldn't take even three-and-a-half hours, and they wouldn't be able to charge $19.99 for it, would they. I'm not sure the idea that we will pay twenty bucks for three hours' worth of nonreplayable entertainment is a beneficial message for the consumer market to be sending right now. I'll just have to chalk up the cost of my purchase as a contribution to the Tell Penny Arcade What For Foundation.
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