Editorials

[GDC 2013] First Impressions: ‘Gone Home’

Published

11 years ago

April 20, 2013

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.

Adam Dodd

Gamer, writer, terrible dancer, longtime toast enthusiast. Legend has it Adam was born with a controller in one hand and the Kraken's left eye in the other. Legends are often wrong.

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Editorials

Finding Faith and Violence in ‘The Book of Eli’ 14 Years Later

Published

20 hours ago

April 22, 2024

Luiz H. C.

Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.

To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.

Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.

After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.

SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?

Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.

For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.

Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.

Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?

AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?

Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.

From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.

The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.

Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.

With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…

There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.