This is my last review for this year, and what a game it is! Well, Gone Home is barely a game, but it's an amazing experience. A bit like The Stanley Parable, it's quite difficult for me to have a look upon the gameplay concepts in it and not spoil anything. Playing Gone Home is like reading a good book.
Basically, you walk around and inspect things. The game builds up tremendous atmosphere and believable characters by adding a ton of things that would make sense in the mansion you explore. And by that I mean cups, tables, trashcans, chairs, beds, dolls and cereal boxes, and a cubic ton of handwritten content. You don't NEED to inspect and pick up everything or read everything, there's a clear critical path through the game, but if they removed all the 'flavorful' clutter, the game would be incredibly empty. Instead they masterfully crafted their small world.
I loved reading all of the handwritten stuff, each videotape, each note, each cassette, each map and little thing they've stuffed in that game. I'm not a big fan of the nineties - because it was mostly time for KLAX - but I got about all of the references, and it was pretty period accurate. You also craft a story in your head about different characters that you never see, which is nice.
Gone Home is great, but I thought it was going to go in a different way on me at some point, normally I would expand on it here, but I'd rather have you play it for yourself, it's about an hour and a half long, but it feels like an important game, Let's just say that I rushed to open all lights when I got into a new room and left them open.