14 DAY TRIAL // 
Gone Home is not a modern video game for many reasons, but I would argue that all those who have played and liked any game that includes diaries, written or recorded, should play it, explore it, internalize its lessons and hope that more developers try to use story as it does.
The core premise of the title, created by the The Fullbright Company, is that you are a college student that comes back from a long road trip through Europe in the middle of the ‘90s and find that a house that should be teeming with life is actually empty.
Anything more specific after the player enters the house is already a spoiler, because so much of Gone Home is solid narrative delivered simply and directly to the player.
There are diaries that talk about the family, each of its members, most of them descendants of the younger sister, but almost any sort of object in the game becomes important and can give a clue as to the lives of those who live there.
The team limits access to some areas initially, making sure that gamers find the story bits in a specific order, but this is a game where nothing is clear.
By the end, most players, even the most thorough ones, will have more questions than answers and, more importantly, they will have plenty of theories about what various pieces of information actually mean and how relations between some characters worked.
I would also urge players to make sure that they don’t let the strength of Sam’s story to overshadow the other narrative threads integrated in the game, which have their own power and emotional impact.
At the start of the game, I thought (knowing a little bit about the story) that there was no way I could become involved in the narrative as long as no real characters were involved, but the team at The Fullbright Company manages to show once more how well used words can be more devastating than cinematics of New York being blown up.
As mentioned, the gameplay of Gone Home is fairly limited because the player does not have to fight anyone or solve puzzles or use stealth to move past enemies.
The only challenge is to observe the house you are in and make sure that you understand that there’s a link between the words that are narrated and the objects that have a physical presence in the game space.
The team has created an interesting world, that’s easy to explore, with a lot of light required to spot all the important elements and a nice positioning for some of the artifacts that can be discovered.
Gone Home might not actually be a game in the truest sense of the word, but this experience is notable for its ability to spin a few very solid stories in less time than it takes to get through the prologue of most big releases of modern times.
The stars of the experience are the characters that The Fullbright Company manages to create, with their travails, failures and hopes.
And the performance is even more impressive because we never actually see them in their virtual flesh.
