(This article spoils Gone Home, so if you haven’t played it and want to, stop reading.)

Last year I played Gone Home, and loved it — not for its gameplay (more on this later), but for its near-perfect capture of teenage girl angst in the 1990s.  It’s a wonderful mental snapshot that is difficult to evoke in more traditional visual media; it raised genuine emotion in me, which is rare for a game.

Or, rather, narrative.  Gone Home only barely qualifies as a game; it’s more of an interactive narrative where the pace is controlled by the player and can be explored non-linearly.  To qualify as a game, the user’s actions would have a bearing on the narrative; for example, actions would dictate branching paths, alter the choices given to the player, the ending would be different, etc.  The developers changed the Gone Home page at some point to describe it as “A Story Exploration Video Game”, maybe to mitigate some of the (admittedly very small) criticism from journalists and gamers who point this out.

What’s interesting is that you actually do have a single choice to make, and it can change the ending completely.

Credit for finding this one goes to my wife Melissa, who stumbled into this completely by accident.  The narrative towards the very end of the game flows essentially like this:

1. Sam loses girlfriend
2. Sam gets girlfriend back
3. Sam apologies to sister that she’s leaving

(#3 implies that she’s running away from home to be with her girlfriend again.)  These are told in the form of journal entries that you click on as you navigate the game world.  You have to find and click on them to activate them, or you’ll never read/hear them.  So what happens if you skip journal entry #2?  The narrative now becomes:

1. Sam loses girlfriend
2. Sam apologies to sister that she’s leaving

That last part is the end of the game, and is portrayed with the following text as somber grunge music starts to play:

Katie… I’m so sorry.
That I can’t be there to see you in person.
That I can’t tell you all this myself.
But I hope, as you read this journal, and you think back, that you’ll understand why I had to do what I did.
And that you won’t be sad and you won’t hate me, and you’ll just know…
that I am where I need to be.
I love you so much, Katie. I’ll see you again. Someday.

Without knowing why Sam is leaving, this reads like a suicide note.  Imagine the horror in my wife’s face as she missed the relevant journal entry by accident and arrived at this ending.

The good thing about this unintended consequence is that Gone Home can now officially be called a “real” game, as a player choice can result in a second ending.

Well, there’s a third ending too, but you’ll need guns.  Lots of guns.