Gone Home has come a long way since it was released. When it first came out it ran horribly on Linux and happily I can say that is no longer the case. It will be tough to talk a lot about the plot of Gone Home without spoiling it so I will simply say I enjoyed the story and liked how it was presented. You arrive home after catching a late flight to an empty house and trying to figure out where your sister is. Your parents are also not home but that is more of a side story. You have to explore the house trying to find clues. When you find certain ones it triggers a audio journal from your sister. You can also learn a lot about your parents lives and that of your late uncle if you dig around enough. I liked the form of many of the clues such as crumpled pieces of paper; diaries; letters; etc. You will have to find combinations to many locks as well as keys. It is a little convoluted at times as you will have to start finding wall panels to tear off and secret passages, I can’t imagine the cleanup after I was done searching. The game really nails the nostalgia of the 90’s well. It takes place in 1995 and I can say they hit on many things I remember doing back then. The music is also great for the time period. One thing I will also mention is that, while the game is not a horror game, it did a great job having some creepy horror vibes at times. There are times where between the rain storm going on outside; the creaky floor boards; and the music that I expected things to take a grim turn. The graphics are mediocre to decent. The object detail such as furniture; appliances; etc were decent to good. The shadows and lighting were a little sub par but not terrible.
I played Gone Home on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. There is an AF toggle; an AA toggle; an AO toggle; a Vsync toggle; an FOV slider that went from 60-90 and 3 other graphics options. The games save system is to save on exit and there is just the one save slot. Alt-tab didn’t work. I did find the mouse movement to be a little funky where it felt slow and unresponsive at times but normal at others. This didn’t seem to correspond to a frame rate issue as that was always 60+ FPS. The game seemed to use 100% of my GPU for much of my play through, which given the detail level seemed odd, but the performance was great.
Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: OpenGL
Save System: Save on Exit
Disk Space Used: 3.03 GB
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Settings Used: AO; AF; AA; Bloom on; Motion Blur off; Shadow Distance at Max; 90 FOV @ 1080P
GPU Usage: 1-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1667-1876 MB
CPU Usage: 16-33 %
RAM Usage: 3.1-3.5 GB
Frame Rate: 72-121 FPS
Overall if you enjoy walking sims you should give Gone Home a try. It has a great atmosphere and story as well as really nails it’s time period. I finished my play through in 110 minutes although I didn’t find all possible clues; journal logs and secrets. It is easily worth it’s current price of $16.99 CAD.
My Score: 8/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.3 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.5 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.12.2-1-MANJARO | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz