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| Sam's bedroom |
Five
minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down. It wasn't a big thing, really. The game starts you off at the front door of
a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning. I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip
to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond
the porch. A steady torrent of rain
beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense
of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and
cold? I'd just figured out how to unlock
the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby. It was an actual relief entering the house and
putting walls between me and the raging storm outside. I took a look around, the first glimpse at
the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam)
and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark
stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning. None of them were here apparently for my
homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much. My parents were on holiday, my sister had
something to deal with. So, I
contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either
side. Then I turned around, went back
outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them
inside. No dice. Trying to pick them up had been one of the
first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done
nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys. Perhaps now that I had the front doors open,
Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the
game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately,
the bags still proved unresponsive. The
game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a
logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to
do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit. This was a small thing, of course, that I was
being bothered by, and you can forgive
small things. But it’s often these small
surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a
game.
