Gone Home Developer Banned a User from Steam Discussions for Calling the Game 'Mediocre'

José Mourinho

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And yet there is still no explanation for why the user was banned in the first place.
 
User was banned for using four words in a three word review, obviously.

As for Gone Home... I will admit I allowed myself to be coerced by reviewers back then who said this was some kind of masterpiece. While I'm not going to say it's a piece of shit, I will agree that the praise this game got is bewildering. It's 90 minutes of walking through a home and finding bad music and finding journal entries of your sister which... don't add up to anything. Does your sister die? Does anything bad happen? No, she decides to run off with her lesbian girlfriend. The end.

"Mediocre" is a fair statement. I would have probably said "hollow" or "pretentious" or "Unfulfilling" but that's just me.
 
I'm glad I never played Gone Home. I've played Ether One and that was pretty close.
 
"Mediocre" is a fair statement. I would have probably said "hollow" or "pretentious" or "Unfulfilling" but that's just me.

From what I've heard about it, "mediocre" is being generous. Of course, the game has a well developed hatedom, so some of the criticism might be a trifle overblown, too.
 
I've played Gone Home. I rate the game a 3/5, mediocre is a fair assessment of the game.

It is a point-and-click mystery game, and I'm not going to waste my time with a plot summary since at this point you all know what it is. However, the problem with the game is that all you do is go around and explore the house, there is nothing to do besides that. Sure you need to uncover some secret passageways and figure out some lock combinations, but beyond that nothing to do but explore and collect items. They should have added more puzzles to solve. It does not tie up all the loose ends and most of the things you discover as part of the mystery are red herrings. The only resolution you do get is what happened to your sister. There are a lot of missed opportunities on that front. I tried to go into the game blind, and it is a lot better if you don't know what happened. Once the game got spoiled for me it killed the game. The game does get preachy in places, but I've seen worse.

For what they were trying to do though, if they added too much more into the game it could drag the game out too much.

Technically the game runs fine and I didn't come across any glitches that interfered with the game in my play-through. The controls were fine and the atmosphere worked for what they were trying to do. I wish they could have done more with the mystery of their house being haunted but it is used more as a tease. The visuals are fine. It is clear that effort was but into the game and not something put together in a few days and then chucked onto Steam like you would see with Digital Homicide's game. Their is good attention to detail on the house.

If you want to try the game, then I highly recommend waiting for it to go on sale. Like a 75% off sale, this game is not worth 19.99. Maybe $9.99 but even that is pushing it. Once you've played the game there is no reason to go back and play the game again. If you take your time you could get maybe two hours out of it.

The game feels like something you'd see on gamejolt.

I don't think Gone Home necessarily deserves all the hate, but it is not the masterpiece that the developers delude themselves into thinking that it is. They need to accept that their game is not perfect and it is not something that will appeal to the mainstream. The developers deserve flack for their conduct, and a lesson to be learned from this is when you act poorly, your actions can also reflect on your product as well.
 
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I liked Gone Home. Rather, I didn't dislike it- I think I got it in a sale or bundle, I'd have been annoyed had I paid actual money though.

I mean, there wasn't much game to it, but it had some feels in it.

Then again, I spent a ton of the game convinced that ghosts were going to kill me.

It's not worth the hype though.

On-topic it seems the developers backpedalled a bit; at least they tried damage control and stuff.

Off-topic they're way more reasonable and sane than the Nidhogg developer was in the same situation.
 
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I liked Gone Home. Rather, I didn't dislike it- I think I got it in a sale or bundle, I'd have been annoyed had I paid actual money though.

I mean, there wasn't much game to it, but it had some feels in it.

Then again, I spent a ton of the game convinced that ghosts were going to kill me.

It's not worth the hype though.

On-topic it seems the developers backpedalled a bit; at least they tried damage control and stuff.

Off-topic they're way more reasonable and sane than the Nidhogg developer was in the same situation.
Gone Home would have gotten the seal of approval from me if you find Sam and her girlfriend's dead bodies in the final room of the house. As it stands, the story seems to lack any sort of conclusion beyond them just fucking off somewhere together with weird rapey undertones. It makes everything up to that point seem trivial and pointless, since the puzzles didn't matter in the end and you can just finish by finding a room.

I'm also still bitter that the misleading advertisements made it out to be a horror game.
 
And yet there is still no explanation for why the user was banned in the first place.

A four word review with a condescending tone. Still, a "fair" review so is nice to hear the user was unbanned. Still, the Hatedom of this game is a little to much to me to take this stuff as serious.
 
A four word review with a condescending tone. Still, a "fair" review so is nice to hear the user was unbanned. Still, the Hatedom of this game is a little to much to me to take this stuff as serious.

I've found the more intense the hatedom, the more aggressively average the media in question is. Actual bad things don't have hatedoms, they have people enjoying it for different reasons than the maker intended.

Nobody spends hours a day spergsploding at the keyboard over Ride to Hell or Ed Wood movies for instance.
 
But Home Home is a boring, mediocre, pretentious piece of shit.
 
User was banned for using four words in a three word review, obviously.

As for Gone Home... I will admit I allowed myself to be coerced by reviewers back then who said this was some kind of masterpiece. While I'm not going to say it's a piece of shit, I will agree that the praise this game got is bewildering. It's 90 minutes of walking through a home and finding bad music and finding journal entries of your sister which... don't add up to anything. Does your sister die? Does anything bad happen? No, she decides to run off with her lesbian girlfriend. The end.

"Mediocre" is a fair statement. I would have probably said "hollow" or "pretentious" or "Unfulfilling" but that's just me.

Finished this game some weeks ago, and I have to agree. While I had fun piecing together what had gone on with the family while the player character was gone ( The family moved to his dead uncle's house. The father was probably molested by the uncle when he was young. The father and mother have a failing marriage. The sister discovered she was a punk rock lesbian...), over all I found the conclusion to the game really anticlimatic and flat.

The teenage sister ran away from home (probably giving up on college) to be with her girlfriend (who ran away from joining the army). That's nice I guess? I couldn't really relate to it. Not because of the sexual orientation of the couple, but because it just felt like a lot of teenage drama. I'll point to Undertale for a game with really interesting narrative elements.

I am suprised that the Gone Home Developers went as far as to ban the guy for a really harmles comment like that. It's not like the guy went "AMG THIS GAME SUCKS!!!".
 
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