Inside, the details pile up. Things are dumped in corners, still boxed – is it because the family have just moved in, or for some more sinister reason? Most of the lights are out and there are faint, strange noises from further inside. The answering machine has an unsettling pair of messages on it: a woman's voice, calling for your sister Sam, at first impatient, finally collapsing into incoherent sobbing. What is going on here? How many bodies are there buried in the basement or pickled in the attic, what type of canonical cinematic nastiness killed them, and was Sam the perp or one of the victims? Showing the poverty of my imagination, I suppose, I immediately suspected zombies.

If you take this as a clue to whodunit, you've just been misdirected. Don't worry. It won't be the first time, or the last.

Others have suggested insane strangers or acquaintances, a possibility cleverly suggested by a note left on the table beside the telephone, from Sam to her mother, saying that the boy who had lived next to them in their former residence was a complete weirdo and strongly implying she doesn't want him to be invited to their new place.

In other words, Gone Home begins by trying hard to convince you that it is a boring, derivative waste of money, a game where the sole interest would lie in the exact means by which most or all of the family were wiped out, presumably followed by the hairbreadth escape, rescue, or self-salvation of plucky old Katie.

In other words, yawn. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.

But it isn't like that at all.

You play as Katie, wandering the dark house with the thunderstorm doing its thing about six feet above the roof, puzzled and disoriented. You've never even seen this house before – your father inherited it and the family moved in while you were on your European trip – and so you have to hunt for clues with little idea of what might be important and what isn't.

Sam's journal to her sister Katie is narrated at key points in your progress. The quality of the voice acting is unbelievably high, a major factor in drawing the player into the story.

Some of the evidence at hand is disconcerting. You discover that the house, which is enormous, has a local reputation as weird or haunted. As if to confirm this, in due course you find it equipped with a series of false panels and secret passages that your sister has adapted to her own purposes. What was to have been your room is stacked with boxes, and Sam has slipped an ominous note under the door, telling you to use her room since she won't be needing it any more. Still, the shadows of zombies and psychos dissolve as you flick on one light after another, and you find, ironically, that Sam has feared the place haunted as well and had even tried something of an exorcism. Despite the clutter, you can see the public space has already been divided into territories, those of the father, the mother, and Sam. After a while you relax, wandering into unlit rooms without too much fear of what might be inside, stringing together a story told through significant objects for everyone connected to the house, a tale whose main climax seems a bit like a back story for Melissa Etheridge's song “You Can Sleep While I Drive.”

There's no ghost there after all. Nor do you miss it. What takes shape instead out of the disconnected details are several interconnected stories of love, commitment, and loyalty. How persistently can you pursue a personal dream? What sacrifices should you make for others? What sacrifices are you justified in demanding they make for you? When do you just give up on a relationship in which both parties seem to be going different ways? All of the missing family members, in the end, have come to the same answer, and instead of contemplating their innards hung from the attic rafters with a mixture of horror and amusement, you find yourself desperately hoping that they did make the right choices and have a chance at happiness in the future.

Perhaps one minor example will show how relationships and their problems are conveyed without giving away too much. The house is a bequest from the husband's uncle. In one drawer, you find a scrap of paper with a map scribbled on it, the route from the house to another point which you might recognize as the wife's workplace (she has a very successful career with the local Forestry Service; the husband is a failed writer). At the bottom, in her handwriting, is an exasperated note, “Travel Time: 1 hour 10 minutes?!” In other words, the husband's insistence on moving into this rambling old barn of a house has greatly extended his wife's commute, and she is not pleased.

The younger daughter, Sam, is the main protagonist: her story is told in the fullest detail, often by voiceovers in her own voice talking about the significance of something her sister has found. (The voice acting here is one of the high points of the game, with the actor accomplishing an eerily accurate reproduction of the tone and mannerisms of a mid-1990s teenage girl.) The general outline of Sam's story is not hard to guess after a few clues have been discovered, though the narrator does a superb job of conveying the combined bewilderment, wonder, awe, and despair that she feels as events unfold. The only point left in doubt is how it will all end. And once again, the game has a surprising twist in store, one that goes back to a very early and ominous clue that you almost certainly misinterpreted. Details would spoil the climax if you plan to play the game; let's just say that if you're the type of person who is inclined to cry easily, have a handkerchief ready.

Technically, the game is well thought out. It handles interactivity with its objects, often a weak point, in a competent and easily understood way. You click on whatever it is you want to interact with, and if it is a small object, it will be picked up, if a text you will be able to read it, if a switch or a tap it will be turned on or off, and if a door or a drawer it will move the way that it would be expected to move. Particularly important objects such as keys go into your backpack, as do a couple of maps you find during the game. The game does not make the mistake of overloading the objects with hidden messages: most of them are just the sort of general clutter found in all homes: toothpaste tubes, toilet paper, magazines, pencils, odd pieces of paper or cardboard, and so on, all taken from the time the game is set in, the mid-1990s.

All over the house -- the mark of Sam.

Gone Home loves to play with horror movie cliches. Here's the old standby of the blood-spattered bathtub, but it's hair dye, not blood, and the trigger for a deeply moving narrative on the development of intimacy, not an attempt to gross you out.

Others are objects that evoke that period, such as magazines and grrl band cassette tapes. The cupboards are a bit empty, but that is easily explained by the family just having moved in. By the end, the family's absence is easily explained as well, but you will be looking at quite a few clues before you get to that point.Apart from picking up, examining, and putting down (the game, mercifully, has a “Put Back” prompt that enables you to select and return single objects from a group without creating chaos), you have the controls you will need and no more: the ability to move, squat and get up, and zoom in on details of the scene. You can neither jump nor run, a very early but telling clue that fleeing from Things That Go Bump In The Night is not going to be a factor here. And of course, you have no weapons, nor do you need any.

There are a few minor weaknesses. The first is common to all narratives of this type: if you play it like Call of Duty, you are going to be bitterly disappointed. Trying to go linear, much less speedrun in Gone Home is peculiarly pointless, though the optional developer commentary, not one of the game's stronger areas, seems to take a perverse pride in the fact that it can be finished in less than one minute. If you're not in the mood to pick things up, think about them, and relate them to other things, you won't understand or care about what the game is trying to say.

Sam writes and rewrites pirate stories with the same characters throughout her school career. This is the last version, which she hides in one of the compartments behind hidden panels that the house contains. It's not hard to guess why.

Moreover, the freedom designed into the game allows drastic accidental shortcuts. If you are an extremely meticulous searcher, you may find vital clues too early and so skip entire sections of the house. The developer was willing to lock off some areas until other ones had been traversed, but not very many, because this seems unnatural. It is, but it's also arguably necessary in a situation where completely free wandering can defeat its own purpose. Finally, the significance of some details and references might be lost on someone who doesn't remember the mid-1990s as well as one or two important developments that have occurred since then.

Gone Home might be compared with Dear Esther, but the two narratives have contradictory goals. Dear Esther is a voice from the grave, a man making his final journey to the spot where he knows his life will end and he will be reunited with his dead wife. With all of its major figures, Gone Home goes in precisely the opposite direction, from darkness to light. At least we hope.