Polygon: "Why Gone Home is the Most Important Game of the Decade" - Polygon does it again

[Capsaicin Addict]

Sadly, I am also one of the suckers who wound up with this piece of trash.

I will offer this in my defense: the blurb lied and said it was a supernatural puzzle game, and it was on sale for $5, so I suppose as lessons go it wasn't an expensive one.

The kindest thing I can say about it is that it's interesting, from a technical perspective, to be able to rummage around, opening drawers and shit. But ultimately, the game misleads you; you will not find your sister and her lover's corpses in a mutual suicide pact. You will not find your parents having sex in their room. It is dull, though I can state that at least you are involved directly in the story, which is more than I could say for Sunset.

There is not a single criticism made here I will try to refute, because they are all true and honest. This game isn't game of the year. It wasn't game of the month. As noted, it's not even game of the week. At best it's a nicely assembled walking simulator.

You want a game of the decade? Fine. Skyrim, with a 'Best New Idea' consolation prize going to the gorgeous and weird game Journey.

 

[Absolutego]

How many people does Zoe Quinn have to kill before people stop furiously sucking her clit? One is clearly not the answer.

Gone Home is literally too much of a real game to be made by Zoe Quinn, why are so many people ITT whining about her and Kotaku when a) she didn't make this game, and b) the article was listed on Polygon?
Admit it, how many of you actually read beyond the headline before sperging about your most hated gaming lolcows?

Sadly, I am also one of the suckers who wound up with this piece of trash.

I will offer this in my defense: the blurb lied and said it was a supernatural puzzle game, and it was on sale for $5, so I suppose as lessons go it wasn't an expensive one.

The kindest thing I can say about it is that it's interesting, from a technical perspective, to be able to rummage around, opening drawers and shit. But ultimately, the game misleads you; you will not find your sister and her lover's corpses in a mutual suicide pact. You will not find your parents having sex in their room. It is dull, though I can state that at least you are involved directly in the story, which is more than I could say for Sunset.

There is not a single criticism made here I will try to refute, because they are all true and honest. This game isn't game of the year. It wasn't game of the month. As noted, it's not even game of the week. At best it's a nicely assembled walking simulator.

You want a game of the decade? Fine. Skyrim, with a 'Best New Idea' consolation prize going to the gorgeous and weird game Journey.

I bought it because Errant Signal told me it was like an entire game of Bioshock audio logs, but he failed to mention that Gone Home somehow managed to remove even more mechanical depth from the Bioshock version of that concept, and that the story in question was beyond puerile. I have never come even close to taking his opinion seriously again.

 

[Coolio55]

I agree that gone home was very influential. Like many of you in the thread it made me completely disillusioned with the current gaming industry, here were the supposed indie saviours po facedly lying in their trailer and getting praised for the most barebones "gameplay" and "story" imaginable because lesbians.
Luckily the UNDERTALE demo would release later that year to cheer me up.

I still laugh over how Sunset immediately sank below the waves when it got thrown off the developers' proverbial slave ship. Even then people were sick of this shit.

Gone Rome where you get breastfed by a wolf

Finally, a game for TRUE gamers...

Errant Signal

I remember that turd. He was one of those wankers who thought they were the new critiquers of fine art and had ego to boot when all they did was lather shit with their tongues because it was indie and popular with the usual suspects.

 

[Positron]

How many people does Zoe Quinn have to kill before people stop furiously sucking her clit? One is clearly not the answer.

The more men the bitch kills, the more desirable she is, as in the opera Turandot. Men are such pigs.

 

[Keystone]

I like to think this walking simulator's real legacy is that it clued people in to the fact that if game journalists all like a certain game and shill it at the same time, then it's nigh guaranteed to be complete garbage made by some San Fran bay area hipster faggot that's friends with many of the journos.

 

[Pissmaster]

I looked to see if Gone Home was ever covered by Yahtzee or Jim Sterling, two jurnos that are notoriously very left wing.

Yahtzee never gave it a ZP, and even Jim Sterling mocked its praise, saying he "didn't believe (it) to be the second coming of Christ".

I had to check my Humble Bundle account to see if I ever accidentally ended up with a Gone Home key in one of the countless dollar bundles I've bought, and later checked my Steam account because I have no idea if I even have the game (I don't).

Article is pretty much "most important because queers".

If we're gonna go that route, then even Saints Row 3 is more deserving of the title for being an actual good game with gender on a slider, allowing you to mix and match absolutely anything for your character. I never see praise for that game from any of the loonies, and it was in a ton of humble bundles and often sold for like $3 on Steam sales. It even got a Switch port FFS.

Is she the one behind all the broken McDonalds Icecream machines?

My nigga here going to McDonalds trying to get ice cream right before closing

 

[Dannyboy]

Flash games made in the 2000s probably have more impact.

The Meet N Fuck genre is the most influential game genre of our generation

 

[Marissa Moira]

I know there was like a 180 dollar version of Gone Home that came in a replica drawer.

It was like super limited and it makes me wonder how many scalpers bought them and are now stuck with them.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I'm going to have to go against the grain and say I don't think Gone Home is that bad.

Keep in mind I knew nothing about the LGBT content going in, I knew nothing at all beyond the initial set up, I was intrigued enough to piece together the mystery, snoop around a house and piece together the story of the people that live there, that's not a bad idea for a game.

After all was said and done I was a bit disappointed in the story, but I wasn't like, angry, the amount of salt this game has generated is kind of ridiculous, sorry.

Yes, the game is overpraised, yes it isn't great, but I do think the game does one thing genuinely well and that's capture the feel of 1995, that idea of games acting as sort of a virtual time travel is intriguing to me and the house in Gone Home reminded me of the old house an aunt, uncle and cousins of mine lived in in 1995, which was also rumored to be haunted interestingly enough.

On top of that I liked the atmosphere of hearing the storm outside, the storm warning on the TV, it was nice.

So yeah, I think it's an alright game, but I don't think it's anything worth getting so worked up over, both the people who overpraise and the people who get so angry at it, it's all pretty silly.

 

[Mimic]

I'm in the same boat. I thought its atmosphere was legit kinda spooky and could've really helped a horror game. It pisses me off that potential was wasted on such a shit story. And asking $20 for it when there's an achievement for beating it in under a minute or so.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I'm going to have to go against the grain and say I don't think Gone Home is that bad.

Keep in mind I knew nothing about the LGBT content going in, I knew nothing at all beyond the initial set up, I was intrigued enough to piece together the mystery, snoop around a house and piece together the story of the people that live there, that's not a bad idea for a game.

After all was said and done I was a bit disappointed in the story, but I wasn't like, angry, the amount of salt this game has generated is kind of ridiculous, sorry.

Yes, the game is overpraised, yes it isn't great, but I do think the game does one thing genuinely well and that's capture the feel of 1995, that idea of games acting as sort of a virtual time travel is intriguing to me and the house in Gone Home reminded me of the old house an aunt, uncle and cousins of mine lived in in 1995, which was also rumored to be haunted interestingly enough.

On top of that I liked the atmosphere of hearing the storm outside, the storm warning on the TV, it was nice.

So yeah, I think it's an alright game, but I don't think it's anything worth getting so worked up over, both the people who overpraise and the people who get so angry at it, it's all pretty silly.

It's not the LGBT content that bugged me. It's the fact that the game is barely a game at all. I'm also salty as fuck over the false advertising.

As you say, there's a lot of atmospheric and technical stuff that's really neat. But it's wasted in Gone Home. It's barely meaningful.

 

[Dom Cruise]

It's not the LGBT content that bugged me. It's the fact that the game is barely a game at all. I'm also salty as fuck over the false advertising.

As you say, there's a lot of atmospheric and technical stuff that's really neat. But it's wasted in Gone Home. It's barely meaningful.

There's not much to it, but I don't think what's there is that bad, the gameplay is paying close attention to your surroundings to piece together the story, some of the details of which aren't super obvious (for example I've not heard people often talk about the implication that the uncle molested the dad as a kid.)

They managed to design a house that actually felt like someone's real home, which is harder to do than it sounds and they managed to capture 1995 in esoteric ways that go beyond obvious 'memberberries like the Super Nintendo.

I'm the kinda gamer that really likes to stop and smell the roses, to really pay close attention to my surroundings, most gamers barrel through games without ever taking a moment to stop and soak anything in, so of course Gone Home is not for that type of gamer, it's not going to be for everyone's tastes and that's fine, but that doesn't make it an objectively bad game for doing something different.

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

I'm the kinda gamer that really likes to stop and smell the roses, to really pay close attention to my surroundings, most gamers barrel through games without ever taking a moment to stop and soak anything in, so of course Gone Home is not for that type of gamer, it's not going to be for everyone's tastes and that's fine, but that doesn't make it an objectively bad game for doing something different.

In that case I'd say check out What Remains of Edith Finch if you haven't already. That seemed to be more as advertised while Gone Home lied about its supernatural elements (as noted by others).

Draugen's pretty baller as a narrative experience too.

 

[The tired cat]

I actually wonder when this game was in development, that it was supposed to be a horror game. But, somewhere during the progress they realized they cannot pull off a good horror mystery or pay off and instead switched gears to the whole lesbian angle.

 

[Coolio55]

I actually wonder when this game was in development, that it was supposed to be a horror game. But, somewhere during the progress they realized they cannot pull off a good horror mystery or pay off and instead switched gears to the whole lesbian angle.

Nope!
I was so burned I actually bothered reading about the development, this was the plan from the start. Everything was prototyped in the Amnesia engine though due to it's mass physics objects that the player can interact with (But the Amnesia devs wouldn't license it).

 

[ZehnBoat]

In that case I'd say check out What Remains of Edith Finch if you haven't already. That seemed to be more as advertised while Gone Home lied about its supernatural elements (as noted by others).

Draugen's pretty baller as a narrative experience too.

Edith takes gone home and shoots it behind the shed
Edith actually does things that keeps it interesting
gone home is LOOK AT THIS HOUSE ANYWAY IM GAY AND I WANNA TRIB

Edith made me fucking cry

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

Edith takes gone home and shoots it behind the shed
Edith actually does things that keeps it interesting
gone home is LOOK AT THIS HOUSE ANYWAY IM GAY AND I WANNA TRIB

Edith made me fucking cry

If we have to declare a walking sim as "game of the decade" can we go with What Remains of Edith Finch and call Polygon a bunch of cucks?

 

[byuu]

So yeah, I think it's an alright game, but I don't think it's anything worth getting so worked up over, both the people who overpraise and the people who get so angry at it, it's all pretty silly.

It's a game someone made over the weekend in Unity yet was sold for the price of an AAA game at release.

Any game reviewer, whose sole reason for existence is to inform people's purchasing decisions, should neck himself for recommending paying that amount of money for such a game.

Someone stupid enough to get suckered in by them would be understandably angry.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Article is pretty much "most important because queers".

View attachment 1009636

Lol gaynor

 

[Next Task]

The claim is that it's the most important game of the decade, not the best. It's definitely not the best or the most important, but it certainly seems to have been an important game, in that it made a lot of people realise just how shit the gaming press had become, and they completely lost trust in them.

So a growing antagonism between people who play games and people who write about games was really kicked off by Gone Home, which definitely would have contributed to Gamergate, and the gaming press now being openly hostile to their intended audience.

So, like Hitler being Person of the Year from Time magazine in 1938, the importance of Gone Home wasn't that it was any good, but about the impact it had. And that it was extremely disproportionately praised for what it was, cementing many people's dislike of gaming journalism. Which this article will continue, because instead of mentioning anything like that it instead goes for the game itself being world-changing, which is blatantly incorrect.

(I also get maybe even more annoyed be something I like being over-praised rather than something I dislike getting praised. In the latter case, the person's just someone I disagree with. But in the former, they're doing things like making the flaws in something I enjoyed stand out by pretending they aren't there, or claiming something that was just some fun was actually a profound, meaningful work, in a way that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.)