Gone Home

Today  I played through a short game called Gone Home. It is story about the family and I need to solve why the house is empty. That game gave me a lot of to think about and I have to say it wasn't anything I thought it would be. It took me two hours to explore the game but it was worth playing it through.  I do not add screen shots to this posting so I am not accidentally reveal anything special about the game.

The truth is that I am bad when playing point and click games. I often get jammed somewhere and do not realise how to go forward. Now the story was meaningfull and puzzles made sense. It was only about exploring the story through to learn what had happened when my character was gone from home. 

The story was good and I believe many will see it in different lights. To me it was kind of comforting story after all even there are also darker shades on it. But honestly, if you haven't ried this, you should. It won't take long anyways to play it through despite all the exploring.

Check the trailer from below and enjoy the atmosphere of the game where you do not need to hurry at all. 

The cottage part 2, towards insanity

I wrote about my pwn rpg last autumn. It was about the Cottage and you can read first part from here.

What happened in the Cottage?

Basic idea was that characters lives through a tramatic weekend and they begin to fall. The truth about characters will be revealled when the layers are peeled from their minds. Fist they think that they're workers of the hospital. Slowly their own personalities will come out and there you will have  persons with mental issues. So eventually players realise that they were not workers in the hospital, they were the patients.

One of the characters was paranoid being suspicious about everything. Other character was imaginating that she lived in the fantasy world and third one was overly violent and aggressive. From these three first two offered best options to play. Playing aggressive is hard and it is only going into rage if things won't go the way character wants. If I would keep the rpg again I would change these mental disorders into different ones. I didn't use real diagnoses either since I thought I didn't have enough knowledge to do so.. So even the game was happening 1990´s, it was still some kind of fantasy world.

What triggered characters then?

The cottage wasn't empty. Actually characters had a bad luck that there were two robbers in the cottage at the same time. And these robbers had used drugs what made them aggressive so they even fight with each other. Characters didn't see the fight but they found corpse of the other robber from the lake. And at the same time they were facing sabotage so they couldn't escape from the place. Eventually polices arrived into to place but before that players were trying to survive alive what they did more or less.

This kind of surprisemoment can work only in the game what is meant to play during one evening.  Playing campaign with characters like these could be very tiring especially when the characters were written by DM not by players. But this was worth of trying and it was fun evening.