I'd decided against posting this, because it's not like Fullbright has made a better game that they can make available for free, but since the cucktard assbaby shat in the thread, I now consider it open.
Gone Home is vicious homophobic shit.
Here's why. (I'll be using Wikipedia for reference.)
On June 7, 1995, 21-year-old Kaitlin Greenbriar returns home from overseas to her family in Oregon:
Entitled adult babby returns to her family's
mansion after a year abroad "finding herself".
This is just one room.
If this game was set in my home, you could win it over an Amazon Warehouse lunchbreak.
While we're at that,
Fullbright set the game in 1995 because they considered it the latest year in which technology had not made the majority of communication digital in nature.
The majority of communication? No one in the company questioned this notion. Fullbright have their heads so far their collective elite white asses they need to have a special geometry invented to describe the asspretzel.
Ten years later, 1 out of 3 people in the US didn't have a cell phone. iPhones took 12 years to appear.
her father, Terry, a failed writer who makes a living reviewing home electronics; her mother, Janice, a wildlife conservationist who recently got promoted to director; and her 18-year-old sister Samantha.
Can you imagine a whiter family? Dad is a failure (lol "makes a living", married to a CEO), Mom steals from a charity, one daughter just finished rediscovering and reconnecting with her true inner self.
Upon arriving, she finds the house deserted, with a note on the door from Sam imploring Kaitlin not to investigate what happened.
Guess what the twat does?
Searching the house, Kaitlin begins to piece together what happened during her absence: After moving in, Samantha found it difficult to adjust to her new high school, but eventually made friends with another girl, Yolanda "Lonnie" DeSoto, a JROTC-cadet. The two bonded over Street Fighter, punk rock, grunge and the burgeoning riot grrrl movement, and after sneaking off to a concert, the two became romantically involved.
She invades the private life of a gay person who specifically asked her not to do it.
Optionally, Kaitlin can find various other clues that provide information on additional events that happened during the time: it is implied that Janice was beginning to have romantic feelings towards a subordinate, and that in his teens, Terry was abused by Oscar Masan, his uncle and former owner of the house.
Holy fuck! I really *adore* the word "optionally". Way to go, editor. So outing a person who asked to not be outed is mandatory, but while you're at that, you might consider being a massive entitled twat to the rest of your family, too!
I'm "old", by which I mean I've been alive and sapient by the 1990s. I didn't start digging in my parents' things every time I came home and they weren't there. Kaitlin doesn't accidentally take a book to curl up with while waiting for her folks and a letter addressed to herself falls out, she breaks into a fucking safe in the basement. Unless you think someone's skull is in there --
especially if you think someone's skull is in there -- call the fucking cops. Remember, this shit was bait-and-switch marketed as a horror game so there was a nonzero chance there was motherfucking Acererak inside. The house looks like a crime scene (because it is a crime scene). Look around the place to see if anyone is in need of immediate help, then call the police.
Players kept thinking they were investigating something actually important, maybe saving a relative, maybe stopping a murderer. In horror, not calling the cops is part of the genre compact: you grab the feather duster and try to defeat the murderer and leave complaining about it for Cracked articles. Here, players were tricked into playing a massive fucking twat because they followed a particular behavioral model based on altruism and/or self-preservation which makes sense in the horror genre but not in the real world. It's like that hilarious party game about shipping Jews to death camps I'd referenced in one of the earlier posts.
After various incidents at school, Sam's parents found out about her relationship, and forbid them from seeing each other and are in denial that their daughter is a lesbian.
Sam herself is a vicious caricature of a gay teen. For starters, she's 18. How do you prevent your legal adult kid who goes to school from seeing another person in that school? Sure, her parents are homophobic, but they're, like, the nicest homophobic parents ever. In real life, teens face homelessness, harassment and assaults at home, conversion therapy (soon in every state, thanks Mike Pence!) And they're partially right. This "romance" bears all the hallmarks of an idiotic tween crush; Sam is in no way an adult. She has an Ouija board! She defies her Christian parents by practicing primary school pretend dark magic. At 18.
Compare and contrast: Yolanda, the girlfriend, is a Latina cadet who intends to enlist, to face not just the endemic sexism and homophobia, but also perhaps actual enemies with actual guns. She *is* an adult. She's everything Sam is not. Sam's "love" for her is basically hatred of her own worthless retarded white middle class infantile self.
Sam's final journal entry to Kaitlin explains that she packed up her things and took her car to find Lonnie, hoping to start a new life with her outside of Oregon.
Sam robbed her family and fled (perhaps assuming that the parents are too obsessed with propriety to raise a fuss), and Yolanda chickened out. (About 50% of cadets don't enlist and that's okay, but for decent people it's not a spur-of-the-moment decision.) It's 1995 so it's been a year and something of both DADT and the combat exclusion lightening. "Lololololol I'm too airheaded to be trusted with military service, girls just wanna have fun amirite?"
In-game conclusion: homosexuality is "a phase", young "gay" women are entitled "hysterical" whiners who don't know what they want and obviously can't be trusted with anything no matter what level of maturity they outwardly display -- you never know when they might fold and go chase pussy instead, the ethical "transgression" of homosexuality leads to further criminal behavior.
IRL conclusion: Gone Home is homophobic vomit.
To clarify, I'm absolutely okay with gay media which isn't grimdark. Aspirational stuff is important! But Gone Home has probable child rape and confirmed drug addiction in it as a backdrop for entitled adult babby angst. It's not okay to make the "gay teen runs away from home" plot into a massively overblown non-problem when it was the only representation of gay teens in the medium.
---
Muslim woman: I was beaten and robbed
Latinx child: other children at school chanted "go back to Mexico" at me
Cancer patient: I won't be able to afford treatment in 2017
Black man: *gets shot, dies*
Fullbright: here play this game about how sad it is to be the whitest middle-class teenager ever
