First off, I follow your blog religiously, love your work, and study your thoughts on narrative as The Truth. Secondly, the ending of Gone Home left me in tears — like, Oprah in the 90s tears. Like "the moment I realized were weren't ever going to be together again" tears. With my biases acknowledged, I'll say that I didn't feel unsatisfied with the ending in the slightest.

I think the game's engagement comes from the part where you fill in the blanks with your own experience, more than trying to figure out the characters'. Clearly there's the primary, spoon-fed "Lonnie and Sam" narrative — but I think that serves as the distraction necessary to preserve the sense of discovery with the other threads. It's like "narrative hierarchy" that rewards you for sniffing out the lower ranks. Specifically, I'm thinking of the blurry mystery of what happened in 1963, the implications of the toy in the basement and the height chart. With those I felt engaged as a detective, and I think the experience would be entirely deflated if it were mapped out in stark relief. But even more than that: the vagueness, the space in-between the facts allowed me to squeeze myself in there.

Having experiences like the abuse referenced and reflected in a situation where you have agency, well, that's a Big Deal. Heck, simply as a boy who fell madly in love with another boy over a shared interest in the paranormal — a boy who unknowingly wrote incredibly symbolic (and equally transparent) weird-as-fuck short stories throughout his youth, who ran away from home to follow that love — it's going home in a big way. And for no logical reason, it was cathartic as fuck. As in "this actually gave me closure and had a discernible difference in my life."

I suspect that if the story ever left the realm of reality with the sort of ending that demanded swelling orchestral music that effect would've been ruined. Sometimes "and life just happened, maybe things fell apart, but the feeling was real" is enough — because that's life.

I don't think Gaynor & Co. were self-consciously using the tropes of video games to mess with your head and prove a point. I know the video game industry tends to get pretty naval-gazey (as much as I loved it, that was what I felt kept Little Inferno from having a sense of universality) — but I'd love to give them the benefit of the doubt. I felt the rain outside, the creepy house were purely aesthetic and tonal.

The triumph of the game, in my mind, was the ability to keep such a small-scale story engaging and wrought with suspense. Clearly there's not enough tension within the story elements themselves to carry a game, but there is tension between the story elements and the player's expectations. I don't know that it would've worked if those expectations didn't already exist, but the player is responsible for those — not the game, right?

As an aside, I even got a ton out of trying to piece together Lonnie's point of view contrary to Sam's. Was she really into her? Was she just stringing her along? Did it matter?

I don't know man, to me Gone Home was the most resonating and meaningful experience I've ever had in front of a computer (aside from talking to other human beings). I don't think we're necessarily in disagreement, I just wanted to share my experience and say that the game, for me, as what it was, was more than enough as it was.

I question if I could have the same catharsis in a story that unfolded around me in realtime — only because of the distraction that comes with that sort of engagement and the specifics required. I never had time for meaningful reflection during The Walking Dead, I was too caught up in the moment, in what was. With that said, I can't wait to encounter a game that pulls off both.