After working a few years at 2K Marin, two studio professionals decided that it was time to start a new stage. Their main bond in common was forged during the development of Minerva’s Den, an excellent expansion of Bioshock 2that overflowed imagination and talent, also developed in a climate far from the production of a large commercial game like the one they had lived in Bioshock 2.
The expansion was developed with a talented group but also very small and multidisciplinary, with great operational freedom and creative, so the result was something that shined with its own light.
That joint experience could have been the last together, but how much they had enjoyed it left their mark and they were not able to return to the reality of the production of great games, to be a small part of a great gear. On their own feet, they threw the safety of their
work overboard, convinced another 2K Marin programmer and signed up a new member to form a studio in Portland called The Fullbright Company.. Gone Home is your first game, and it’s exactly the kind of unique and personal game you wanted to do.
First of all, the facts: Gone Home is a purely narrative game that can last about two hours, more or less. To draw an approximation to the experience, it is a mix between what
Dear Esther offersand what it would be like to play a Bioshock in which there were only recordings. In it, we put ourselves in the role of Katie, the oldest daughter of an American family who returns home after a year traveling around Europe.
We are in the mid 90’s and the protagonist has used her time to travel the old continent, sending postcards from time to time and without knowing much of what was happening with her family at that time. He only knows that his parents and his little sister,
Sam, have moved to a new house, inheritance of our uncle. The game begins with her calling home, leaving a message on the answering machine warning that she had already returned and that she was going directly home.
To his surprise, upon arriving at the old manor house is the closed house and a cryptic note from his sister at the door .. From there we took control of Katie ,
found the emergency key to enter and we went into the house apparently empty. Neither his sister nor his parents seem to be there, so we are alone in a house we barely know and with a great storm outside, which makes it unwise to turn around. With nothing else to do, we
began to explore and mess around with the objects of the house, especially those that contain clues of what has been going on during all this time.
This is all the interaction that we will see in the game, there are no puzzles, no platforms, no action of any kind, only exploration. We can take all kinds of objects, see them from different angles and leave them anywhere – most without any effect, they are completely normal objects.
We can freely explore the house – more or less, accessing certain parts requires certain knowledge that we find along the path that the narrative traces. The main activity is to find the pieces of our little sister’s diary, audio piecesrecorded to cover the fact
that her older sister, with whom she had always shared everything, was no longer there with her. That will be the only voice we encountered during the rest of the game, an account of the different and important life experiences of our sister during that year.
Along with these recordings, the house is dotted with details, post it, letters of all kinds and writings that in a coherent but disconnected way are drawing a global scenario of what has been happening. The attention to detail in these objects and texts is really remarkable, creating the feeling of really being in a house of the 90s , gossiping in the lives of normal people with normal problems.
Although technically our avatar is the eldest daughter and part of the family, in practicing the game we know practically nothing about her, so it is through all objects that we discover their circumstances. All this is optional, things that are spread around the house and that we can review or not, although this is really the only thing to do.
