10 Times Gameplay Directly Informed The Narrative

Gone Home is an absolutely genius bit of queer fiction and an even more genius bait and switch with the game initially framed as a horror.

All of your standard horror tropes are present and correct: night time, flickering lights, creaking floorboards, dark, foreboding corridors. Its all rather perfectly set up to imply that Katie's sister Sam has disappeared due to the machinations of some evil spirit/entity or something similar.

However, as you explore further you find more and more evidence that there's not any eerie explanation for why the house is empty, but the mystery is far from solved at this point.

Then, in a heartbreaking double bluff, you realise that Gone Home has been, all along, a horror game. You discover that Sam is a lesbian, coming to terms with her identity and falling in love with a girl called Lonnie. Her parents went into deep denial regarding Sam's sexuality which eventually led to her running away from home.

The horror that you feel during Gone Home - hardwired after years with the genre - is, in fact, very real. Because, really, is there anything more terrifying than being shunned or betrayed by those who were meant to love and protect you?