Gone Home

Gone Home
Developer(s)	The Fullbright Company BlitWorks (Switch)
Publisher(s)	The Fullbright Company Majesco Entertainment (PS4, Xbox One) Annapurna Interactive (Switch)
Designer(s)	Steve Gaynor
Programmer(s)	Johnnemann Nordhagen
Artist(s)	Karla Zimonja Kate Craig Emily Carroll
Composer(s)	Chris Remo
Engine	Unity
Platform(s)	Linux Windows OS X PlayStation 4 Xbox One Nintendo Switch iOS
Release	Windows, OS X, Linux WW: 15 August 2013 PS4, Xbox One NA: 12 January 2016 PAL: 12 February 2016 Switch WW: 6 September 2018 iOS WW: 11 December 2018
Genre(s)	Exploration
Mode(s)	Single-player

Gone Home is a first-person exploration video game developed and published by The Fullbright Company. Gone Home was first released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux computers in August 2013, followed by console releases for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in January 2016, the Nintendo Switch in September 2018, and iOS in December 2018.

Set in the year 1995, Gone Home puts the player in the role of a young woman returning from overseas to her rural Oregon family home to find her family currently absent and the house empty, leaving her to piece together recent events. Gone Home does not feature much interactivity, but instead has the player explore the house at their own pace and determine what has transpired by examining items, journals, and other items left around the various rooms. The Fullbright team, having previously worked on BioShock 2: Minerva's Den, took concepts and ideas from that game to craft an exploration game to engage the player in uncovering the narration by non-linear progression by searching the house, while keeping the project manageable for their small team.

Gone Home was critically praised at release. Several outlets used the game as an example of video games as art, as its non-standard gameplay format demonstrates progression of the video game industry into more artistic forms. However, this also raised the question of whether Gone Home should be considered a game, and led to the derogatory term "walking simulators" to describe exploration games with little interactivity, though since then, the industry has come to embrace the term.