Editorials
[GDC 2013] First Impressions: ‘Gone Home’
Written by Hayden Dingman, @haydencd
I went to GDC, I saw some games. Some were horror games. These are games I felt were memorable at the event (Part 2 of 3, read part 1 here).
I’ve actually been looking forward to Gone Home for a while now. I had the chance to play it at GDC, but I knew this was a quiet game that relied a lot on atmosphere—not the best demo to play with Thirty Flights of Loving’s awesome soundtrack in the adjacent booth and dozens of industry figures chattering in the immediate space around you.
Luckily, the kind developers at The Fullbright Company (co-founded by Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen, and Karla Zimonja—veterans of Bioshock 2’s superb Minerva’s Den DLC) provided me with a copy of Gone Home’s GDC build I could play in the darkened, silent confines of my own apartment.
And you know what? Despite the team’s cautions that Gone Home is not a horror game, it’s genuinely unnerving to play.
It’s 1995. You play as Kaitlin Greenbriar, newly returned from a year abroad in Europe. While you were away your family (mom, dad, and sister) moved into a new house. You arrive at the house in the midst of a storm only to find it completely empty. Tacked to the front door is a note from your sister, imploring you not to come looking for her. In fact, the note says, “Please, please don’t go digging around trying to find out where I am.”
Naturally you start digging around trying to found out where she is.
Now, the team at Fullbright is correct—Gone Home is not a traditional horror game. You’re not sprinting away from horrible monsters or hiding in the shadows. This is an adventure game, through and through. You’re tasked with simply exploring the house as it stands, unlocking the secrets of this mansion while learning about your sister Sam.
You’re going to examine a lot of objects. You’re going to open a lot of drawers. You’re going to turn on a lot of lights (something the game teases you for later when you find a note tacked to a bulletin board that says, “Sam, stop leaving every damn light in the house on! You’re as bad as your sister!”). You’re going to read a lot of notes, personal and impersonal.
This is a voyeuristic game about exploring a house. Think about how many items you have scattered around your room. Now imagine while you weren’t home someone came into your place and started piecing together a narrative about your life based solely on those objects. That’s what playing Gone Home is like.
The 1995 setting facilitates the gameplay by presenting a largely pre-digital age. While computers and cell phones certainly existed, they hadn’t quite become omnipresent yet. Nowadays if I need to remind somebody to pick something up from the store I just text them. Need to get in touch with an old friend? Facebook. If you wanted to know almost everything about me, all you’d have to do is sit at my computer desk for a while. There’s not much exploration.
Gone Home is a reminder of life before computers. Notes tacked to bulletin boards and scattered across desks are a primary form of communication for this family. Your mother has been keeping in touch with her old college friend by mailing letters. Your dad is typing his next novel on a typewriter. You find reminders of your trip to Europe strewn about the house—postcards you wrote to your parents during your excursion. Newspaper clippings preserve background information about the town and the house you live in.
Then there are those 90s touches. It all seems a bit quaint, and yet oh-so-familiar to anyone who lived through the era. You’ve got your Lisa Frank binder, the music magazine commemorating Kurt Cobain’s death, the bootleg VHS recordings of films. Gone Home is the 90s (or, at least, the early 90s) summarized in one family’s home.
The more random objects you look at, the more connections you’ll make. You’ll start to follow narrative threads through the house. This is a game that seems, on a surface-level, to have the thinnest of stories. You show up, you see your sister’s note, and that’s it. The more you dig, the more you find. You’ll read a letter from the 90s discussing how your father hates his long-time job, then find the letter from the 70s where an old school buddy convinced him to take on the job in the first place. This house has a story.
And just like any empty house, I started to get freaked out.
If you’ve never gotten that oh-no-was-that-a-person-walking-around-upstairs-or-just-the-wind-blowing paranoia while sitting in a house by yourself, maybe this isn’t the game for you. Gone Home is a game that knows your expectations and manipulates them expertly.
For instance, the lighting in the house flickers on a regular basis. Horror game, right? It must be ghosts or something.
That is, until you find the letter from the electrician complaining the house has faulty wiring. According to the letter, walking around the house causes the circuits to come loose, resulting in the flickering lights.
Still, it’s awfully scary when the lights flicker. Are you sure it’s not ghosts?
That’s the thing about Gone Home—you don’t really know. This is mysterious psychological horror at its finest. Is there really something more to this house, or is it just your mind playing tricks on you? Why is your sister so adamant that you not uncover the mysteries of this house? Why is there a girl’s sobbing message on the answering machine?
And most of all: where the hell is everyone?
I haven’t even gotten into how amazing the game’s art direction is (simplified shapes, but amazingly high-resolution textures on most examinable objects), or how the excellent Chris Remo (composer for Thirty Flights of Loving and co-founder of Idle Thumbs) is attached to do the soundtrack.
I’ll let you know when the game’s released if the rest of the experience lives up to the demo I played, but for now it’s safe to say Gone Home is one of my most anticipated games this year.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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