The Virtues Of Going Into A Game Blind

Gone Home is a fascinating game, but I don’t want to tell you anything about it. I just want you to play it, experience it, and discover what it is on your own.
    
This is the advice I was given from my coworkers I asked if Gone Home was worth my time. The game seemingly came out of nowhere, and before I knew it, everyone was gushing about it. The praise was ambiguous though, and any probing I did into their admiration of the tile was met with silence and smiles. I was told to stop asking questions for fear of having the entire game ruined for me. I was dumbfounded by this response.

Common sense dictates that we learn as much as we can about a game, movie, or book before committing time to it. I want to know what I’m getting into, but more and more I’m being told that part of what makes an experience fun is not knowing next to nothing about it.

For Gone Home specifically, this level of secrecy extended to a coworker saying they wouldn’t tell me what genre it fell into. That obviously piqued my interest. My mind was swimming with ideas of what it could be. I convinced myself it would be similar to BioShock in some capacity, given the talent behind it. Mock me if you will, but I thought Gone Home would deliver combat and a crazy narrative twist along the way. That’s how little I knew about it.

I booted Gone Home up that night, knowing only that it was a first-person experience that begins in a house. The game’s opening moments hinted at horror, and I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I was certain the journey ahead would be unnerving and suspenseful. I played the entire game on the edge of my seat, waiting for jump scares, or some ghostly being to complicate my search for answers. The storm, pentagram, and the dread of having to go into the attic convinced me something horrible would happen. Nothing did. I loved every second of it.

A day later, I found myself questioning why I enjoyed it so much, and realized most of the fun was tied to the discovery aspect of not knowing what I was getting into. That’s not to discredit Fullbright’s excellently penned script in any way, but the biggest hook for me was the unknown quantity of the journey.

I immediately wanted another game like it, and the industry didn’t disappoint in delivering more experiences with similar hooks. If you love these types of games, there’s a deluge of them on the market. Soma, Her Story, The Stanley Parable, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Undertale, and Life is Strange all fit the billing. Two of the most interesting games of the year so far, Firewatch and Oxenfree, were recommended to me with the caveat of going into them as blindly as possible.

For a game like Firewatch, which carries the dreadfully boring billing of a “mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness,” I’ve had to hold back from diving into forums to figure out what its big hook is. Given the setting, I want the twist to be supernatural or alien – it screams of something I would see on The X-Files. I know I’m probably setting myself up for disappointment, but that’s part of what makes games of this variety interesting.

In fact, when you distill them to their most basic parts, there isn’t much to them outside of the mystery itself. In Gone Home you walk around a house and look at stuff. Oxenfree is mostly about teenagers walking around, talking to each other. Firewatch is a man walking through the woods discussing life with a person on a handheld radio. These games are jokingly called “walking simulators,” but that's a pretty accurate descriptor. When I recommend them to friends, I simply call them mysteries.

The gameplay almost always takes a backseat to the narrative. The element of discovery is the driving force. Once that magic is gone, there often isn’t a pull to go back to them. I doubt I’ll venture into most of these worlds again. Gone Home was one of my favorite games of 2013, but I have no desire to play it again. If Firewatch’s big revelation was spoiled for me, I doubt I would continue playing it.

I recently voiced frustration in season passes not delivering enough information prior to purchase, and oddly find myself blindly throwing money at these types of games. Am I being hypocritical? A little, I suppose, but these games all come as recommendations from critics or friends. The guidance I am getting is under the merit that they think the game of note is good and worth my time. I know that much going in. It isn’t so much a blind box purchase.

Whether I enjoy the game or find it fascinating, well, that’s a different story altogether. My interests don’t always align with my friends', and I may find a twist they genuinely love to be completely idiotic. It's a time-consuming risk to dive into these games. So far, the trusted voices I rely on haven’t steered me wrong. Gone Home, Soma, Her Story, and Life is Strange were all amazing adventures, and thankfully I went into them with just a general idea of what they might offer.

My latest leap of faith is into Firewatch. Right now, with roughly half of the game complete, I’m nervous about where it’s going. I don’t like my character, the walking and talking isn't that interesting, and I’m mostly continuing on to see if something shocking happens. 

I’m entertaining these types of games more than I thought I would. I love seeing developers find new ways to innovate and entertain with storytelling. Not every game needs strong gameplay hooks. I like that we can just walk away from a game saying “that was a great story.”

If you enjoy these types of games, do your friends a favor and recommend them with as little information as possible. Sure, they may hate it if they don’t like the subject matter you lauded, but it’s worth the risk. Some surprises are best left undiscovered, even if it means that surprise is an entire game.