Gone Home: Console Edition

In an effort to avoid a build up of games going forward I recently decided to buy about ten new ones in a sale. Stupid I know. I’m just throwing this out there though. Gone Home: Console Edition was a Games with Gold title from mid-September to mid-October so I have sort of prevented build up by getting this one off the list as soon as it was on it. At the time of completion anyway...

I have to say I didn’t think there was much to write home about with this one. I found the story both pretentious and depressing for the most part and the way your character moves about the house is slow and laborious.

I am sure there is more to the story but I really couldn’t be bothered to find and read all the crap around the house to try to understand what was going on. And I didn’t really feel I had a reason to. The game didn’t give me anything that made me want to invest in the characters. It just dumps you at the front of house and wants to find out stuff so I think I can be forgiven for looking to a quick way to the end.

The house design and layout is questionable too. It’s a big house with lots of rooms but not a lot of it is easy to get to. For example, most houses would have easy to access kitchens and bathrooms but they are not central to the house. If you want a sandwich and you are in the study, get your hiking boots on.

Musically again, it’s just depressing and this appears to be a growing theme of this genre of games. They make you want to kill yourself. I don’t know whether some developers have a mission to cure the world of gaming but Gone Home is definitely evidence of this.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The headline here is that it’s probably possible to complete in less than an hour but some of these things are just stupid. And I got lucky.

The entire list, with the exception of completing the game, is missable. There are two timed runs which are the biggest challenge. The one I got lucky on was for completing the game in under 10 minutes finding all 24 journal entries. I did this twice, collecting 23 entries both times and being annoyed at myself for missing one on my second attempt... but the achievement unlocked anyway. I guess I managed to trick the game into thinking I had them all because I missed a different one on both playthroughs. Who knows.

The second timed run is for completing the game in less than a minute. I know, right? You have to get the key to front door, run to the secret room, and then run to the attic. It took me a few attempts to get right but you can imagine my frustration at this achievement coupled with the protagonist’s ability, or lack thereof, to actually move.

The others are all for doing miscellaneous things around the house with the exception of the last one I unlocked which was for going around the house with modifiers on to collect all director commentary nodes. Now, I’m not being funny but this did feel a lot like a celebration of the game but as I didn’t like the game to begin with, this just added to the pretence for me. Especially when you get to the one about the ‘Easter Egg.’ For a start, one of the miscellaneous achievements is related to the Easter Egg. It’s not an Easter Egg if you point it out to people as an objective. Secondly, having one of the voiceover actors repeatedly meow into a microphone in a monotone is not my idea of Easter Egg content either.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Gone Home: Console Edition was not a title for me but I can see where others may find enjoyment in such things. It’s all about media for me. This would have been much more suited to a novella of written text. That way I may have been able to find some engagement with the characters. That said, I’ve also read some really shitty books in my time.