As the famed independent exploration game Gone Home has finally come to consoles, we take a look back at the inner workings of The Fullbright Company’s haunting masterpiece of a first game.
Thinking about Gone Home, I find it impossible to separate the game from something my grandmother once told me. So, forgive me for starting this off on a personal note.
“Never ever don’t think that ghosts aren’t real. I can’t prove to you there’s supernatural things, and none of us will ever know if heaven or hell are real until we get there, but make no mistake. There are ghosts.” – Ancient West Virginia Proverb, Apparently
I won’t say that Gone Home is the thing that finally crystallized my grandmother’s words for me in some dramatic moment that forever bound my soul to the story of Gone Home. The title of this piece is not “How Gone Home Changed My Life,” which is not to disparage those for which Gone Home did change their lives or articles titled as such — Gone Home has that kind of capability, that kind of subject matter. It is one of the rare stories that is so good, in both the critical and possibly moral meaning of the word, it really can do so.
I’ve always interpreted my grandmother as saying a ghost is simply something you feel. It is the weight on your shoulders you feel for no good reason. A memory of the last time you were here — the “here” being relative. If a haunting is a following, then ghosts are the way you feel it in the bottom of your heart.
But that is not the way we think of ghosts. The modern expectation of the term ghost is one of terror and the supernatural. We imagine the violent specters from Poltergeist, the angry souls of The Conjuring, and the stories you once heard about the figures in the window of the house at the edge of town. We imagine the thousands of photographs we’ve seen of strange shapes in the fog, or of bizarre light phenomena caught on accident by a security cameras, or whatever you saw of the corner of your eye a couple weeks back. The blending of the supposedly common sightings and the violent tales passed down have not only given us expectations of ghosts to be violent, hostile things, but placed expectations on locations, too.
We’ve been taught, since the dawn of modern horror literature with the 10th century collection of Middle Eastern/South Asian folktales One Thousand And One Nights and 19th century with Germany’s Fantasmagoriana to the modern kiddie spook stories of Are You Afraid Of The Dark? and Goosebumps, that certain places are naturally conducive to hauntings and violent ghosts. Those moved from ancient palaces and castles, stories concerned with ghosts as the legacies of the powerful, to the manor homes of Victorian England swamped in fumes from gas lamps, to the modern understanding of a haunted place — your home. Or a home that looks like yours.
That is the appeal of the modern horror story — Halloween and The Exorcist, perhaps the founding visual references of modern horror, take place largely in typical Western homes. Rosemary’s Baby takes place in an apartment complex that could be found anywhere. The original Paranormal Activity’s entire thrill is that the bedroom looks exactly like yours – or at least, close enough that your brain makes the connection. And human beings were taught long before we came up with those horror stories to fear something much more elemental; the dark. Together, the everyday dark house has become the modern expected image of a horror story.
And an everyday dark house is exactly the image that Gone Home presents you with.
This is the first view you get of Gone Home. It is the main menu image. It is the cover image Fullbright uses on Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. It is the front of their absurdly cool limited edition physical release for PC cut to look like a Super Nintendo box. It is the image Fullbright has chosen to represent Gone Home, and it is a perfect representation of the collective image of what a scary dark house looks like. The art style lends the house’s peaks a sharpness that feels dreamlike or sketched from a memory, the trees loom large and impossibly dark in the night, and there’s that one lit window almost calling you in, offering the assumption that someone is home. The house is described in all synopsis as “The House on Arbor Hill,” deliberately evocative of horror stories. Gone Home leans into the expectation that this dark house is like many others – it is filled with ghosts. Something terrible has happened here. We are about to be haunted.
Gone Home’s spook house storytelling doesn’t stop at the game’s primary image, or with the opening dialogue and note on the door. The opening dialogue sets up your role in the game as Kaitlin Greenbriar. You’re returning to your uncle’s mansion after a year abroad a few minutes past midnight on June 7th, 1995. The note was left by Samantha, your sister, with a warning that begs you to expect a supernatural occurrence – “Please please don’t go digging around trying to figure out where I am.”
Instead, Gone Home’s design inside the house begins to directly play with both the classic and modern tropes of video game “survival horror” design. Almost all the lights are off, of course, and must be turned on manually. Doors are locked by keys, of course, and must be found. The majority of Gone Home’s content and storytelling comes from objects, notes, and audio logs you must examine, all things laid out in such a way that they never would normally. The objects lie out of place, scattered seemingly at random, recalling both classic adventure games such as Myst and modern horror design that is obsessed with object examination like Amnesia and P.T. The notes and doors feel ripped from the pages of the games that defined survival horror in the 1990s. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, these things designed to build tension and set you up for the reveal of the terrible thing when you put the note down or unlock the next door. And the audio logs bridge time to connect to System Shock 2 and BioShock, games that use the voices of the past to bring context to the monsters at hand – the expectation that those being talked about will appear all of the sudden.
The layout of the house sometimes feels specifically designed to create a consistently unrewarded Pavlovian expectation of a fright around the next dark corner. No house would be laid out like this, of course, but the design is such that it feels like a real house, convinced of its tangibility, its specificity. That specificity is the way Gone Home’s narrative design pushes into ever more horror-esq situations. The examination of a closet while in an abandoned house. Boxes of documents with family secrets. The game’s slow narrative pull toward the attic.
And even that narrative pull leans into the expectations for Gone Home to become a horror story. The House on Arbor Hill has another name – “The Psycho House.” Samantha is known at school as “The Psycho House Girl.” Dig enough dirt on the history of the Greenbriar’s and you can find evidence of all manner of dark happenings in the house – suicide, parental abuse, traumatic betrayals. All things that in any other ghost story would lead to a violent haunting
For any other game, describing it as leaning this hard into the image of a haunted house would imply some kind of subversion. That Gone Home isn’t really a ghost story. And by the technical definition laid out by horror literature and by horror game design, it isn’t. There are no ghosts in Gone Home. There is no horrible supernatural entity. No monster lurks in the long dark halls of The House on Arbor Hill. There is nothing to combat, nor run away from.
But Gone Home isn’t a subversion. Gone Home may not be a horror story, but Gone Home is a ghost story, played completely straight. And make no mistake, there are ghosts, entities, and monsters in The House on Arbor Hill. They just aren’t the kind you think of in your mind – the dead, the nightmarish, the supernatural, and the mad.
They’re the kind my grandmother talked about. They’re the ghosts you feel. They’re the ghosts inside your heart.
(End-game spoilers from here on out.)
Gone Home is, of course, the story of Kaitlin Greenbriar ignoring her sister Sam’s pleas and seeking out where her sister, mother, and father have gone. What is found is, on the surface, a story that doesn’t seem to be so revelatory or effective. Kaitlin’s mother and father are gone on couple’s counseling vacation, attempting to save their collapsing marriage. Sam, however, has run away with her secret girlfriend – Lonnie DeSoto, an Army recruit who is now AWOL – without telling anyone in the family…except Kaitlin, whom Sam expected to ignore her warning and head to the attic, lead by the “Letters to Katie,” Sam’s private journal, whose narration you hear throughout the house.
Such a reveal technique is not unheard of. Certainly not in horror games. But, like the best games, it is the fact that Gone Home is a game, and acts, feels like, and uses the tropes of a horror game specifically, that lends Gone Home it’s emotional power.
After all, you don’t actually find the scraps of Sam’s journal around the house. You only find it at the end of the game. But still, when adjusting objects and finding keys and clues, you hear her talking to you, narrating her diary, leading you through the house even though you haven’t found it yet.
The path she leads you down is the one through locked doors and illogical pathways and moved objects, a path Kate would know through her own memory but you experience through the narration of Sam’s disembodied voice. The family moved the objects around, left out the boxes of old papers and left the closet doors open. The family left the state of the house as it was when you walked in. Each piece of Gone Home’s tale of the many personal apocalypses of the Greenbriar family is tied to a horror trope, but instead of the reveal being the ghost left the note, or that a supernatural being tossed about the objects, it keeps specifically telling you which of the Greenbriars did what. To the point that you begin to be able to imagine the Greenbriars moving about. You can see them moving the objects – the cassette tapes, coffee mugs, and notes on Street Fighter. The father writing his new book. The mother planning her affair. Sam and Lonnie, watching Pulp Fiction. Daniel, Sam’s estranged childhood friend, coming to collect his Nintendo games. The parents dismissing Sam and Lonnie’s relationship as a phase. Sam and Lonnie, crying as they realize that in a few days they may never see each other again. And then you are almost able to imagine them watching you do this. Like they’re still there.
They’re the ghosts. Real people, but gone and left a story behind in horror tropes and horror design, a method to put you in the right mindset. As the game begins to pull you towards the attic, you can imagine Sam running up in front of you. You can feel it in your gut, and on your shoulder, and simultaneously you can almost feel Sam watching you follow her up, press down the button and move the stick forward – even though she can’t be real.
When you reach the attic, you can feel Sam’s heart racing as she agrees to run away. And when you hear the final letter to Kaitlin, at once you can imagine Sam writing it, with tears in her eyes, and Sam watching you read it, tears in her eyes.
“I love you so much, Katie. I’ll see you again. Someday. Love, Sam.”
It clicks. Gone Home is actually told in past tense, with Kate’s reading of Sam’s journal at the end of the story played back over the objects she found. But the game never makes this explicit, not until the end. It blends your experience with the ghostly voice of Sam with Kate searching through her family’s actions into one cohesive memory of life that speaks to you, from the past, the present, and the future.
Gone Home is a ghost story. All that is changed is that Gone Home’s ghosts, entities, and monsters are people, emotions, relationships, and memories, using the trappings of a horror story to make you feel their presence. Gone Home fills your heart full of ghosts that were never real, and yet they remain, as solid as the walls of The House on Arbor Hill.
And by the time the credits roll, you are beautifully haunted.
