Remember the 90’s? It’d probably really help your appreciation of the newest trailer for the upcoming “explore a house-’em up” Gone Home. Watch it and then we’ll talk:
Full Bright’s debut game is about finding out what happened to your family while you’ve been away. They aren’t there. They should be. You need to pick apart the house and learn about their lives in order to have a chance at seeing them again.
So much of what sells Gone Home is the sense of place that it offers. It goes to great length to seem period appropriate. It’s set in Portland in the mid ninties, that means drawers full of plaid, Trapper Keepers. X Files VHS tapes, functional Magic Eye puzzles and most importantly, bootleg cassette tapes of Riot Grrrl bands. The trailer’s backed by a Bratmobile track, but there’s also other licensed songs by Heavens To Betsy.
You can see the time period being appropriate from a narrative construct, the lack of ease with communication from no one having a direct link to any human they know on the planet sitting in their pocket facilitates your need for discovery. You can’t just call people who are missing, you have to pick apart the last year of their lives to see where they’ve likely disappeared to.
As a nice cap-off, in response to this trailer, Full Bright’s Steve Gaynor has been asked by a real Riot Grrrl festival to come and show off the game. That’s real. That’s happening.