To start with a quote from another game, What Remains of Edith Finch :
The house was exactly like I remembered it. The way I'd been dreaming about it. As a child, the house made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn't put into words. Now, as a 17-year-old, I knew exactly what those words were. I was afraid of the house.
A few years ago, Yann Leroux interviewed me on Skype, among other people, as part of a study he was doing on the role and weight of locations in video games, for gamers (I've never seen the results of this study and regret it, as the subject is fascinating).
I wrote about it here:
https://l-idiot-mystique.blogspot.com/2015/10/some-thoughts-on-weight-of-places-in.html
I think I went on at length to describe my feelings about Gone Home, a game whose scenario left me relatively indifferent, but whose exploration of places in themselves, for themselves, had, on the other hand, transfixed me.
However, there's nothing very threatening about the scenery, and even if the rain at the start, the empty house, the shadow play... all conspire to create an atmosphere of mystery, in no way does Gone Home really try to scare the player - but it's true that generally games that try to scare the player do so in such a crude way, like Alan Wake, which I intensely disliked, that anything that doesn't fall into that category falls into the "creepy games" category.
I remember telling Leroux (but why? in what context?) that my most vivid, haunting memories, the ones that haunt me and have shaped my personality, are rarely "biographical" memories - i.e. linked to events – but memories of perception.
The play of light through the shutters in the morning, in the Vosges chalet where we usually spent our vacations.
The yellowish light in the kitchen, in the early hours of the morning, when it was dark, in the small apartment where we lived when my sister and I were still children.
The strange, vaguely distressing sound, for reasons difficult to formulate, of water running through the pipes at my parents' house, when I took a bath at night, alone at home.
The greyness, dirt and rusty garage doors of Nancy, when I first drove there in 1998.
And so on and so on.
When I started Gone Home, I was transformed into pure perception. Obviously, the game has a storyline, but to be honest I've never managed to get interested in it; not that it's uninteresting in itself, but finding myself in this empty house, at night, with the sound of the storm outside and all the time I want to wander around and examine every room, every object, from every angle, exerts such a fascination on me that no story could really interest me.
The game is set in the 90s, which doesn't help matters since that's the decade in which I spent my adolescence, and the few cultural, musical, video-game and other references offered by the places to explore are those of my own past. Gone Home allows you to (re)live an experience that everyone does, of course, in their lives, but here it's accentuated by the fact that it's at the heart of the game: realizing that you're embodied in an era, with its daily way of life, its aesthetics, its objects, its architecture. And, above all, to become aware of all that is ineffable, untransferable and so soon to be forgotten.
