One of the most rewarding moments of Gone Home, and any work of fiction for that matter, is when you take a jumbled mess of oddly shaped metaphorical puzzle pieces and finally put them together to resemble something familiar. This revelation sprang forth for me a few hours into my first-person walkabout through the Greenbriar household. As I rummaged through an abandoned kitchen examining refrigerator notes, discarded paperback books, and surprisingly named bottles of salad dressing, the proverbial light bulb suddenly illuminated.

Yes, I was exploring the Greenbriar home, a digital space where the first game by The Fullbright Company is set. But perhaps more importantly, I was exploring something strikingly similar to the house I grew up in. Each time I clicked on an item owned by a family member and studied its various traits, like empty liquor bottles belonging to a father who may or may not drink too much, or a sarcastically written term-paper on the female reproductive system that highlights a young woman's sharp wit, I was brought back to the uncountable innocuous nick-nacks that populate my parent's house.

Despite an ever-present sense of dread – lights flicker sporadically, a fierce thunderstorm rages outside, and the house itself seems to moan at times – there's nothing to fear in Gone Home. The only skeletons here are figurative, which you'll eventually discover as you explore the house and begin to unravel the family's past.

As you delve deeper into the Greenbriar residence, you'll come across telephone messages, scrawled notes, and diary entries that provide the clues needed for you to begin illuminating the dark corners of this family. The writing and voice work here are among the best I've ever experienced in games. It's not stylish or exaggerated, but rather painfully real. Unraveling the story of your character’s teenage sister Samantha's coming of age, the complicated intricacies of your parent's marriage, and eventually the reasons why you left home in the first place make Gone Home a powerful piece of storytelling. I'm being a bit vague for a reason, because so much of the emotional impact I felt stemmed from discovering these bits of backstory and piecing them together myself.

The writing and artifact design are so good that I felt compelled to grab everything that wasn't bolted to the floor and give it a closer examination. Turning around a can of soup reveals a fully written label. Thumbing through a VHS collection highlights a wealth of classics from Gone Home's mid-'90s setting. And entering a closet only to find it filled to the brim with board games, subtly weathered with use, all contribute toward making the Greenbriar household feel like a living, breathing place.

BUY ORIGINAL ON STEAM
http://store.steampowered.com/app/232430/

DIRECT LINKS
http://archive.org/download/GoneHome...games.com_.rar