The Fullbright Company, a team founded by the folks who worked on the Minerva’s Den downloadable content for BioShock 2, announced today that they will be releasing their first game as an independent company called Gone Home – slated to be released on August 15th.
Gone Home is a first-person exploration game where you play as a young woman returning to her American Pacific Northwestern family home all the way back in the year 1995 – when Tupac was still alive, Bill Clinton had yet to win re-election, and MTV played copious amounts of alternative rock music made by plaid-clad Gen-Xers.
Upon arriving home, you discover the large home empty. Well, OK, not entirely – there’s some furniture and posters. It still looks lived in, it still resembles the house you grew up in, but something important is missing – your family. It’s up to you to search through the place, to find what happened and where they possibly could have gone. You read letters, raid closets, scour through drawers, listen to your teen sister’s alt-rock cassette tapes (they’re like chunky, plastic mp3 playlists that had to be bought from a physical store made of bricks and such) in an effort to piece things together.
The soundtrack features iconic mid-90s Riot Grrrl bands Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile, both of which were deliberately chosen, according to Fullbright’s Steve Gaynor, to lend the setting authenticity and to add flavor to the story we’re piecing together.
How well it all comes together remains to be seen, but I’m willing to award some preliminary points for originality – even if that means going back in time to get there. Gone Home arrives in two short weeks on PC, Mac, and Linux. It will be available for purchase through Steam or DRM-free through the Fullbright Company’s official website.
Here’s the trailer:
