As we settle into the winter months and the Northern climate becomes less hospitable, Gone Home does somewhat reflect a desire to recess into cushy family life and run away from looming essay deadlines.

Except Gone Home doesn’t present a comforting family retreat: the house is empty and is left as if someone merely popped out. So where are your family?

I’ll say this first: Gone Home is an exploration game. There is no shooting, no change of environment; you don’t meet anyone else and there aren’t any side quests. But that is what makes it intriguing. You’re completely isolated, and the raging storm outside really makes you conscious of this at times, especially when you hear a clap of thunder and jump out of your skin. But this isolation is the most crucial aspect of Gone Home; there is no one to tell you which direction to take, where to start and how deep to delve into the story. You could breeze through it in about 45 minutes if you tried, but if you take your time and examine the scraps of information left behind, you find out a surprising amount about why your family left and even begin to feel concern for them.

What makes it so immersive is the story and how it unfolds as you discover more scrawled memos, letters and bits of junk that you’d usu- ally throw in the recycling that can give you a suprising amount of information about where people went and how they might have felt about it, considering the places that some of these things turn up in. It turns out that in the end, Gone Home isn’t about finding your missing family but understanding why they left.

Zoe Delahunty-Light