8 Video Games That Did More With Less

Gone Home is a game whose pared-down approach actually became a bone of contention upon launch, given that many assumed the walking simulator - which sees the protagonist returning to her empty family home - would be horror-themed.

And so, the eeriness of traipsing around this house left many waiting for the genuine terror to ramp up - and yet, it never does.

It's a masterstroke for more open-minded players, honestly - subverting our most base preconceptions as players by swerving away from the expected genre, offering up none of the stock gameplay mechanics like combat or puzzle-solving, and instead focusing solely on exploration.

And yet, Gone Home still delivers an affecting and well-wrought experience, and one that's still passionately discussed over a decade after release, largely thanks to its gorgeous single setting, emphasis on environmental storytelling, and refusal to kotow to what players typically expect.

It's an exercise in pure atmosphere, where it feels like the developers kept subtracting and subtracting until they had the purest distillation of their idea possible.