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Gone Home, an engaging but frustratingly slight narrative game from new Portland indie outfit The Fullbright Company, announces its intentions quite clearly with its title and its setup. It's 1995 and you play Katie, returning to Oregon after a long trip to Europe to find your family's new home empty and an enigmatic note taped to the door. Where is everyone? Exploring the large, unfamiliar house, you search for clues to where your parents and teenage sister Sam might be - and what might have happened to them in the past year that won't fit on the back of a postcard.This game has a resolutely domestic scale: with a storm raging outside, you're not even permitted to leave the house. The Fullbright Company has decided that family drama, the subject of so much great art, ought to make a suitable subject for a video game - and quite right too. It's a noble aim, and it's executed with some skill, within the curious limitations of the format the studio has chosen. But noble intentions aren't enough in themselves, and when the screen fades to black it turns out that Gone Home doesn't have much to say for itself. It's more manifesto than message.
That it succeeds in holding your attention for a couple of hours is down to some strong writing and effective, if slightly cheap, use of a couple of potent hooks. The first of these is a fine eye for 90s pop culture nostalgia that chimes with the archaeological feel of the gameplay as you rummage through a disordered house that might have been left 20 minutes or 20 years ago. Anyone who was a teen in the period won't be able to resist a misty smile at the home-taped copies of The X Files, the cut-and-pasted riot grrrl 'zines, the mixtapes scrawled in biro, the plaid-filled closets and the gig posters announcing turns by Buffalo Tom, Lisa Loeb and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. There are even tracks from Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile on the soundtrack.
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