It posed as a serious, hard science fiction take-down of the doomed hubris of technophilic selfishness, but in truth the game was just a spruced-up first-person shooter. The problem is, Bioshock never really deserved the praise it received. The game was an enormous commercial and critical success. All but Craig had worked together on the hit Bioshock series, a frequently cited example of purportedly mature storytelling, at least where “maturity” refers to something more than gruesome violence.īioshock sported many of the features of serious narrative media: an auteur figure (creator Ken Levine), a serious subject (freedom and enslavement), a set of apparent moral conflicts (delivered via genetically modified girls called “little sisters”), a range of cultural intertexts ( Atlas Shrugged, Logan’s Run), and a stylish environment (an underwater Art Deco dystopia called Rapture). The Fullbright Company is a name whose corporate formality betrays the fact that it’s really just four people, Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, Johnnemann Nordhagen, and Kate Craig. To understand Gone Home, you must first know something about its creators’ history. But it is Katie’s teenage sister, Samantha (“Sam”), who supplies the game’s central plotline, a journey of queer self-discovery. Her mother, Jan, is bored and frustrated with her marriage. Katie’s father Terry is a failed novelist whose own narrative obsessions arise from a terrible secret. Instead, Gone Home methodically reveals details of its characters’ inner lives. The game slowly dismantles this expectation, until you are left with only the embarrassment of having had it in the first place. You expect something to go terribly wrong at any moment. Tropes from horror fiction are present in Gone Home from the start: you are stuck, at night, in a thunderstorm, in a big, empty mansion. There, you discover where Katie’s family has gone, and why, by interacting with artifacts in the home, some of which act as narrative keys to unlock subsequent slices of story. The player maneuvers Katie using the controls common in modern games, piloting her around 3-D space. You are Katie Greenbriar, a 20-year-old student who has just returned from a year abroad to the home your family moved into while you were away. As the game starts, you find yourself on the porch of an old house. ![]() It is set in Oregon circa 1995, and it tells the story of an ordinary family. GONE HOME IS A VIDEOGAME about releasing secrets, the kind of secrets that you should have known all along.
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