But let me not make anyone think I’m scolding them for finding it funny, that sequence was pretty goofy I’m just inclined to feel a certain kind of way.
While we are dunking on hifalutin walking sims for having tryhard pun names may I present for your consideration Dear Esther
OH MY GOD
There’s also a chemistry Esther/ester thing going on with all the chemical formulas scattered on the walls
Gone Home is still the best of them, hasn’t been topped imo. Play it!
I also want to shout out Tacoma. It’s very good if you’re into those! (Nina Freeman did some writing for it too.)
Got to room 46 in Blue Prince, credits rolled, most of my notes it turns out are pointing at entirely unrelated puzzles to finding room 46z.
It’s a good game, debating about how deep I’m going to keep digging, but I’ve already dug pretty deep.
I got there last night too! I thought it was going to be a lot more involved than that, considering how many locations I haven’t reached and puzzles I haven’t solved. I think the ultimate goal might be to get all the red envelopes. I’m still having fun with it so I’m gonna keep playing a bit, but yeah, the lack of clear end goal now does diminish my drive to carry on. I do want to know what’s behind the radiation symbol door though.
you should go back to room 46 again
let me continue that L riff and chime in that imo Gone Home is not very good
bad vibes
nowhere near as facile as what remains of edith finch, tho… that one is a legit stinker for me
not a new thought for me, i never thought Gone Home was all that, personally
Nice, I was wondering whether it’d let me go in there again.
I have lately played (well, more recently than Gone Home’s launch date anyway) some of those games where the conceit is “you are poking around in someone’s phone or computer to figure out who it belongs to or determine a missing person’s whereabouts”. And it occurs to me there’s a throughline here I hadn’t thought of before because instead of a device you’re rummaging through it’s a house. And the house is sorta boring! I think I like rifling through virtual closets better when I have to worry about breaking stealth. Maybe if your character had snuck back into their parents’ house and needed to not get busted, IDK.
Maybe Gone Home is better written than something like Sara is Missing but yeah I don’t know that the environment of the house is much more compelling than the fictional filesystem/apps. Points in the former’s favor that it feels less invasive and unsavory though.
I’m rambling
Gone Home is alright, I doubt I’d like it much these days but it’s elevated a thousandfold because that Heavens to Betsy song is that fucking good.
I remember really liking it at the time because I like walking around Spaces and I thought it was a good space.
Plus it’s fun to complain about how the game says it’s set in Portland when clearly it’s set in Olympia
they shoulda kept it as a fridge rummaging simulator
I really like that you can just go into the house and open the secret passage and immediately win the game and I keep thinking about that video that some gamers made where they did just that and made fun of the game for being so short and easy
I really liked it when The Witness did that because it made the game shorter.
I liked gone home because the house had good level design and the writing wasn’t embarrassing
It didn’t set my world on fire but it didn’t annoy me either
Gone Home is squarely in the middle for me on the “prestige walking sim” list. it’s fine, although i always thought it was weird how big the house was in it. it doesn’t contain the hamfisted self-serious attempts to tell a genuinely sad story i.e. Dear Esther or attempts to liven up the genre with minigames that fall flat because the core story is too dumb like Edith Finch. it’s about at the level of Firewatch with me in how it fakes out a horror premise while is mostly being a basic melodrama, though that one does contain some slightly irritating voice acting. i think i like Firewatch more on a moment to moment level tho so they both even out.
my galaxy brained pick for best walking sim is Soul Axiom, which i’ve talked about before as being like a Southland Tales of indie games. is it good? maybe not? but i think about it more than all the others.
The highlight of Blue Prince for me so far was bringing the electromagnet to the locksmith when I had already put the Great Hall down earlier.
The item/room interactions are often quite good. I think I would like the game more if they were the sole focus of the game.