‘Gone Home’ Is Proof We Like Digging Through Other People’s Stuff

I’m a bit late to the party for Gone Home. It fits neatly in the genre of games I’m not likely to pay for. While I enjoy puzzle games, they don’t tend to hold much in the way of replayability, and that makes a purchase hard for me. For free though, I’ll try anything once, and since Gone Home is one of Microsoft’s free games this month, I gave it a go.

As any of these new-fangled “walking simulators” will tell you, people love to dig through other people’s shit, especially if it means you might learn some deep dark secret about them. In the case of Gone Home, it’s okay though because you play as a young woman who actually lives there. So she’s just learning about her own family’s secrets, except that we aren’t actually her and we’re really just tickling our fancy by digging through a stranger’s home and breaking into their private stuff using found keys and discovered locker combinations.

All this is done with the ever-dangling carrot right in front of our faces. Why is this house empty? Where is everyone? Why did the character’s little sister litter the entire house with supposedly private material? Seriously, for a girl who is apparently hiding her sexuality and extra-curricular activities from her parents, she sure does seem to leave proof of it all over the house.

I’ll admit, when I first started the game, I was intrigued. There was a great air of mystery about the whole thing. Unfortunately, the more I learned what was going on, the less I really cared. What began as a creepy mystery turned into a made-for-MTV special. The one time I thought the game would take a very dark, gut-wrenching twist, it pulled back and gave me something even worse: a boring ending.

This game was obviously targeted at a very specific demographic, and my being a straight male obviously didn’t put me in that group. It was hard for me to care, but I still played through the entire thing, reading every note I could find, and examining almost every object I came across. Why? Because I like rooting around in other people’s houses, apparently.