Gone Home
Skip · Narrative · 2013
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $7.49.
- Length
- 2h
- Value
- $3.75/hr
- Reviews
- 77% positive
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Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
June 7th, 1995. 1:15 AM. You arrive home after a year abroad. You expect your family to greet you, but the house is empty. Something's not right. Where is everyone? And what's happened here? Unravel the mystery for yourself in Gone Home, a story exploration game from The Fullbright Company.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
November 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $1.49. It has been discounted 115 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 66 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today's $7.49 at 50 percent off still sits 403 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
This sale is doing real work. 39 at list, 46 today.
On value it sits in the top 26 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 82 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Tacoma ($2.99, scores 73) beats it on value, while it beats Thirty Flights of Loving ($4.99, scores 8).
Critics scored it 86, but players land 9 points lower at 77 percent. The reviews were kinder than the room.
Steam's global achievement data says about 17 percent of players ever finish it. On a 2-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 6 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2021 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 68 percent of the 4,896 reviews written there were positive, against 77 percent overall, and those are 36 percent of everything written about it.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 2 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
17% start to 17% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
3 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
loved it, loved it, loved it. I actually downloaded it without knowing much, thinking at the beginning it was a scary game haha. Oh, what a surprise I got. I actually have so much love for the narrative, how bit by bit I found out more about everyone in the family and what was going on. It really is cool cause you have ideas of what's going on, but then it's not how you thought. Loved the secret passages, the art...
"Where's the puzzles? Where's the mystery? There's no dead bodies or psychic premonitions or harsh orchestral stings as I turn a corner and a door closes on its own! There's nothing here but great voice acting and atmosphere and wistful remembrances of what I thought the world was like when I was a young person!" -- Direct quote from me, an idiot
i'm sorry but this was mid, it was a flat journey with a disappointing ending... I can't recommend it
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Gone Home scores 46/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/232430/gone-homeThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 16, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.