edge gave this a 9. But 19 i dont think so.
Buy it on their website directly if you're from europe, it's only 14 then due to $=> conversion
http://www.gonehomegame.com/
edge gave this a 9. But 19 i dont think so.
Did anybody else see the PHAEDRUS idle thumbs reference?
I was openly weeping by the end.
Just beat it. Thought it was amazing until the goddamn thing just ended out of nowhere at the two hour mark and.completely retcon'ed the story for no reason
Pretty sure I did everything except.open the safe in the basement
First 114 minutes: A+
Last 2 minutes: Triple F minus
I feel bad saying this because the devs did a really great job and the concept was sweet, but IMO there's no way in hell it's worth $20.
I find it quite ridiculous how people focus on the price vs. length. There is enough information to warrant a second playthrough, and then you will have spend at lease 4 hours on this game.
I have bought 50 euro games which I stopped playing after way less than 4 hours because they were too boring. Gone Home is quite the opposite to boring.
I still find it intriguing why all the VCR's are removed from every room in the house..
I think it's more a value proposition thing than time=money specifically, along with many other recent small team standouts coming in at $15 or less at launch fueling perspective. I respect that they went for what they felt their work was worth and great word of mouth will sell more copies, but coupled with the inevitability of sales it's not an impulse price point for many, even those interested in the concept.I find it quite ridiculous how people focus on the price vs. length. There is enough information to warrant a second playthrough, and then you will have spend at lease 4 hours on this game.
I have bought 50 euro games which I stopped playing after way less than 4 hours because they were too boring. Gone Home is quite the opposite to boring.
Speaking of screenshots, did anyone get the note in theservant's quarters? The one with Sam writing about her and Lonnie kissing in bed or whatever? I don't think it's like smut or anything, probably more innocent than that but just curious about what they actually had written down on it before Katie went 'nope'.
On the Terry/Oscar subplots.
-More evidence is the way that Oscar's letter to Terry is worded. He mentions how Terry's writing is related to his psyche and very close to him. This makes the letter even colder.
-The destroyed portrait of Oscar
Here you go:
Kind of took me out of the story a bitas I was kind of ticked that I couldn't read it in its entirety. Luckily the Steam community is good with this kind of thing.
Magic Eye pictures. The bane of my existence!
Has anyone actually gotten them to work? In real life I just have to cross my eyes and the image appears but it doesn't work at all with these ones.
I just figured it was a reference to Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
I found a ghost game in the paren'ts closest and the overlay text said "oh look a ghost game"
it's probably just for babies though
I was so swept up in the game but I didn't even notice no mirrors. I wonder if they thought seeing yourself in the mirror would take away a little bit of the immersion
Also, I think stuff like this and Dear Esther (which shares a lot of similarities) are properly on the fringe, if not beyond, of the classical interpretation of a "video game". I don't necessarily think they're ground breaking or revolutionary, but they eloquently drive home that point that the "interactive medium" casts a wide net. Much in the same way that I think Dear Esther is very much true, proper "virtual poetry", I think this is a virtual story that really doesn't warrant the criticisms and analysis associated with most work of this medium we're familiar with.
It's really very far removed from what 99% of this forum discusses, and is hard to even rank or put on the same page as anything else. It's a different beast in the same way not film follows a strict set of rules beyond simply being a motion picture.
I don't think Gone Home is that far removed from other video games.
Imagine a level of Bioshock Infinite with no combat. What are you doing? Running round looking at the environment, picking up audio logs, interacting with whatever objects are interactable and getting as much story from the world as possible. That's pretty much Gone Home in a nutshell. When you remove combat/puzzle solving/the usual gameplay loop from a story driven first person game you get this.
Buy it on their website directly if you're from europe, it's only 14 then due to $=> conversion
http://www.gonehomegame.com/
Yes I bought it directly from them, it's a humble store transaction.Do they give a steam code?i want to play this on linux
I don't think Gone Home is that far removed from other video games.
Imagine a level of Bioshock Infinite with no combat. What are you doing? Running round looking at the environment, picking up audio logs, interacting with whatever objects are interactable and getting as much story from the world as possible. That's pretty much Gone Home in a nutshell. When you remove combat/puzzle solving/the usual gameplay loop from a story driven first person game you get this.
That or they felt like it wasn't worth having to create and animate a model for Katie when it really wasn't important (especially considering there are no other character models either).
The only reason I even noticed was because of that one journal from Sam (which, by the way, was maybe my favourite for what will be an obvious reason once you run into it).
Yes, except in BioShock it's deliberately paced downtime between other traditional elements...like the shooting. The point isn't that Gone Home does things removed from the medium, it's that the work itself focuses exclusively on a set of elements that are rarely not just the cornerstone, but the basis for an entire experience. Like Dear Esther. It is the "game", not just part of it.
Valtýr;76674887 said:I'm curious about what exactly you thought was being retconned?
Gone Home has the benefit of lacking any win and lose states, stats or abilities so that alone makes it a lot different than the scenario you described in Bioshock.
The entire game was leading you to believe Oscar's ghost was in the house (or at least something supernatural) even leading all the way up to the second to last room where Sam and Lonnie had the pentagram seance. I also don't think it was much of a leap to assume Sam had killed herself in the attic and discovering her body was going to be the tear-filled end to your mysterious journey.
The game spent two hours trying to make you uneasy with those concepts (and awesomely so), then you find the final couple journal entries in the attic and it's just "oh lol nevermind we ran away together and none of this meant anything we were just yanking your chain in a video game."
I went in completely blind so it's not like I was expecting Amnesia or anything, but the game spent 99% of its time really trying to convince you something unsettling was going on then it was all just undone or thrown under the rug in the end.
All that retroactively ruined the game for me. The only positives I could list now would be the awesome 90s nostalgia and how fun it was piecing together the branching webs of the subplots.
When you're in a quiet part of Bioshock where you're just exploring the area around you, and you're not in a combat situation, there are also no win/lose states (you can't die by examining the wrong painting on the wall), stats are meaningless, and so are your abilities (except for perhaps traversal).
Is anyone else getting stuttering while playing? I have a Radeon 7850 and an i5 3570, and playing with the graphics settings doesn't get me anywhere.
The entire game was leading you to believe Oscar's ghost was in the house (or at least something supernatural) even leading all the way up to the second to last room where Sam and Lonnie had the pentagram seance. I also don't think it was much of a leap to assume Sam had killed herself in the attic and discovering her body was going to be the tear-filled end to your mysterious journey.
The game spent two hours trying to make you uneasy with those concepts (and awesomely so), then you find the final couple journal entries in the attic and it's just "oh lol nevermind we ran away together and none of this meant anything we were just yanking your chain in a video game."
I went in completely blind so it's not like I was expecting Amnesia or anything, but the game spent 99% of its time really trying to convince you something unsettling was going on then it was all just undone or thrown under the rug in the end.
All that retroactively ruined the game for me. The only positives I could list now would be the awesome 90s nostalgia and how fun it was piecing together the branching webs of the subplots.
Is anyone else getting stuttering while playing? I have a Radeon 7850 and an i5 3570, and playing with the graphics settings doesn't get me anywhere.
In the momentYou thought she killed herself? jesus christ, my mind didn't go there at all. I knew there were nothing super natural in the game ahead of time but I don think it mattered because despite that all of the Oscar stuff still spooked me out anyway. The light went out in the basement right when I grabbed the crucifix and i totally jumped. But anyway yeah, I just assumed Sam was gone for some reason or another at the beginning, It didn't feel to me like the game was leading me to believe that Sam killed herself. I thought the ending was set up perfectly with the messages Lonnie left on the machine.
Is anyone else getting stuttering while playing? I have a Radeon 7850 and an i5 3570, and playing with the graphics settings doesn't get me anywhere.
The entire game was leading you to believe Oscar's ghost was in the house (or at least something supernatural) even leading all the way up to the second to last room where Sam and Lonnie had the pentagram seance. I also don't think it was much of a leap to assume Sam had killed herself in the attic and discovering her body was going to be the tear-filled end to your mysterious journey.
The game spent two hours trying to make you uneasy with those concepts (and awesomely so), then you find the final couple journal entries in the attic and it's just "oh lol nevermind we ran away together and none of this meant anything we were just yanking your chain in a video game."
I went in completely blind so it's not like I was expecting Amnesia or anything, but the game spent 99% of its time really trying to convince you something unsettling was going on then it was all just undone or thrown under the rug in the end.
All that retroactively ruined the game for me. The only positives I could list now would be the awesome 90s nostalgia and how fun it was piecing together the branching webs of the subplots.
In the momentyou might concerned about Sam feeling suicidal ('sleepy in the attic', etc) but when you look at it afterwards it really was to fuck with the player's expectations, considering the first thing you read was that note from Sam which clearly did not even remotely sound like a suicide note.
This is pretty much the way I read it, but I think the uncleOn the Terry/Oscar subplots.
-Terry's books are all related to a secret agent going back in time to fix what happened on the day that Kennedy was assassinated, November 22nd, 1963
-In the room with the safe you can see some measurements of Terry's height; the tallest one being November 22nd, 1963.
-In Oscar's letter to his sister he says he has done something horrible and that's why he has become a hermit.
-My theory is that Oscar molested Terry on the day JFK was killed.
-More evidence is the way that Oscar's letter to Terry is worded. He mentions how Terry's writing is related to his psyche and very close to him. This makes the letter even colder.
-The destroyed portrait of Oscar
-The basement is pretty much totally untouched after the family has been living in the house for a whole year. Kinda like they're afraid of it.
-The resolution to the subplot being the success of the reprinting of the books giving Terry the confidence to grow his fictional character and work through what happened to him as a child.
Valtýr;76697731 said:Well, interesting.At no point during the game did I feel that the "ghost" subplot was actually about ghosts. I saw it as kids being kids. I never thought the game was implying there would be ghosts or that the girls would get wrapped into a ghost story. In fact I never felt the game was pushing the ghost elements as the main story you were meant to attach yourself to. It was a single part of a large narrative meant to show their relationships development.
I guess I can concede that maybe it was more an issue of what I wanted to happen instead of what was actually happening.
I don't think anyone could try and claim the game wasn't at least attempting to make you think creepy stuff was going on though.
- Crucifix lightbulb
- The two televisions being left on, one off-air and the other a severe weather warning
- The missing VCRs (which could be explained when Sam said she had to take some stuff)
- All the Oscar stuff, I mean come on
- Location based ambient sound effects (hearing the typewriter typing before you walk into the green house / the attic stairs sounding like they're being closed once you pick up the first note / etc.)
- I'm fairly certain some hallway doors closed even if you left them open
- How the house started to age (for lack of a better term) around the halfway point. You get into the basement with all these relics from the 60's, turn a corner and you're in a frickin' Servant's Quarter
So that being said, yes, I did spend a good amount of time spinning in 180's and staring down hallway stretches hoping to see something, hehe.
I feel awful for posting this, but I have no idea where to find the. I know that it has to do withcode to Sam's lockerbut do I really need to search the entire house?hidden panels on the walls