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Serious Games Replacing High School English Books


Gone Home is an immersive, first-person Serious Game focused on story exploration and narrative, by indie developers The Fullbright Company.

Gone Home received a number of awards and acclaim from critics. Emily Morganti for Adventure Gamers commented that the game has a "realistic, engrossing story that’s beautifully told through environmental clues and audio narration and that many people read books for the opportunity to see life through someone else’s eyes, but it’s rare for a game to do it as well as this one does. “This is an incredible work of interactive storytelling, and anyone remotely interested in the subject matter or the practice of telling a story via a video game should play it”, she said.

Available for Windows, Mac & Linux, you can buy Gone Home from the developer’s website or from Steam Even if you don’t consider yourself a gamer, if you’re a writer you may find this is an exciting example of how interactivity and good stories can play nicely together.

On February 7, 2014, The Fullbright Company announced that the game had already sold 250,000 copies.

Gameplay

It takes place in June 1995 at a house in the Pacific Northwest, when Kaitlin Greenbriar returns home after a yearlong trip abroad. She spots a note on the door from her sister, Samantha, telling her to not go looking for answers as to where she is. 


As she enters the house Kaitlin realizes nobody is home, not even her parents, so she investigates the house to find out where they all are. Players guide Kaitlin through this process, learning new facts about her family and their experiences over the past year. 



Gone Home does only one thing but does it superbly: telling a touching story solely through exploration that makes it well worth experiencing.

About The Fullbright Company

The Fullbright Company is an independent video game studio founded in Portland, Oregon in March, 2012. Its co-founders are Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen, and Karla Zimonja, who had previously worked together in various capacities on BioShock 2, Minerva’s Den, XCOM, and BioShock Infinite.
Gone Home was The Fullbright Company's first game, released in August 2013.