Gone Home is a game about revisiting a past you can’t really revisit. It feels like when you’re all grown up and you’re standing in the same yard you grew up in and you reach out and almost, but not quite, reach yourself, decades ago.

Gone Home is a game where you arrive home from a year abroad, only to find your house empty. Where is your family? What’s going on? You can’t really talk about the game beyond this without spoiling the experience. It’s only around one hundred minutes long and if you’re at all intrigued, you should play it instead of read about it. I usually consider videogames immune to spoilers as their stories are so often simply not worth caring about, but in this case: spoilers from here on.

Gone Home’s most superficial success lies in its environmental, or world, storytelling. You do not engage in dialogue nor make dramatic choices in the heat of a tense moment. It’s all in the details. What you’re doing is exploring the house and uncovering details, and all that you’re witnessing tells the story. Or stories, plural.

Gone Home’s environmental storytelling is leagues beyond what we’ve become to mean by it. Half-Life 2 was a giant in this playground for a long time, but its splashes of blood and scrawled graffiti now seem trivial in comparison. (That Lambda symbol is still genius, though.) Simply by witnessing their everyday environment, you put together a dramatic, compelling picture of this (your) family and the people involved.

This sort of storytelling means audio recordings. I hate audio recordings. They never work in the fiction and it’s tedious to wait through the “color” bits to get the clues to open the safes and doors. They’re lazy. Gone Home is audio recordings done right. There’s two kinds. One is your sister, Sam, talking to you as if in a letter, at key points during the story. They’re not explained, they just sort of overlay the narrative, much like a movie narrator. It doesn’t make sense, initially, but it’s all brought together beautifully in the end. The second kind is tapes (C-cassettes!) in the game world. Whereas you have to stretch your sense of disbelief a lot in most games to accept the audio messages, unlikely as they are, here they are mixtapes left by one teenager to another. If you ever were a teenager in the 90s, you very likely did this yourself. They don’t contain nonsensical messages, they contain music, reinforcing the story and the time and the place. When you find one, it’s useless before you find a cassette player (which are always at hand). Just this act of taking the object to the player and playing it back grounds it. You’ve done this countless times in the real life, turned a cassette around in your hand to deduce what might be on it and playing it back by pressing a satisfyingly clunky mechanical button on a deck.

To be fair, all the written material, moody and scene-setting as it is, is a bit of a crutch. It’s too conveniently laid out and chronologically ordered, and while the mid-90s explains why they’re writing things down in the first place (instead of typing it on Facebook), this dysfunctional family is really bad at leaving evidence of their doubts and transgressions lying around for anyone to see. But you accept it all for it is a game, after all.

Gone Home has exceptional characters. The family feels like your own and the characters, especially Sam, the protagonist (not you), becomes someone you want to hang out with. Much like a good movie or book, then, but that never happens in games! As the story races to its completion, you start to really care for them and want the best for them. There is genuine worry about their fate, far transcending the horror game tropes the game – misleadingly – starts you on. It is character building without ever meeting the characters. Any game writer should study this as a case of building characters and player interest in them.

Speaking of characters, there is an escalating, deeply personal drama here, without any character interaction or conflict in place. None. Yet it wouldn’t really work as non-interactive fiction, either – the player’s presence and agency is required for the story to work, but puzzlingly his input isn’t required. On paper it doesn’t sound like it should work at all, but it does. The story is completely reliant on the player caring and letting the story take place between the lines, in his own head. That’s a massive leap of faith, really, but one Gone Home works on building up to, all of the way.

The game is essentially only playable once. Its reliance on playing with the player’s expectations veers close to being a gimmick, but arguably just avoids it. They’re trading on the gothic horror cliches and videogame vocabulary to make the player except ghosts and demons – and monsters of a more mundane kind, as well. At the very least you expect a sad outcome – I know I had a suicide in mind at the end – but the emotion they’ve built up in you carries it through. You’re so relieved at the conclusion that you don’t mind the smoke and mirrors. It was all for a good cause, after all – that smile on your lips.

Gone Home does the micro meaning better than any game before it. When Heavy Rain proved that you could make a Hollywood thriller work without all the gunplay and fantasy cliches in a videogame, it was still relying on serial killers and weird dreams. It took you far out of the ordinary. Here the power of the mundane proves far more effective. The sense of place and time are meaningful. You are in this house, inhabited by this family, and it’s taking place in 1995. The world is not filled with incidental details – all the details are there to support the story. It’s a case of game – or rather narrative – design dictating visual design. They evoke the time with powerful details you had no idea you recall anymore, things like how the tape box hinges work and what’s the packaging of various items like. Nirvana and the X-Files on the walls of a teenager’s room.

I was born in 1978 and Gone Home often feels like visiting the houses of my friends in the late 80s and early 90s – and sometimes also like revisiting home. I didn’t know many girls at the time, and the feeling of trespassing on a teenage girl’s territory and thoughts in the game makes a powerful connection to my younger self. I shouldn’t be here, but it’s very interesting. What is Sam thinking about? What drives her? What does she want?

It’s easy to liken Gone Home to a movie, with its grown-up, mundane story with scarce videogame trappings and its length of barely two hours. But this is a game experience and like the best games, it only works as a game. Even though you engage in very few mechanics and you could argue that there are no meaningful choices in the game, it’s all a big meaningful choice. The game doesn’t exist without interacting with you – your youth, your childhood, your teenage hopes, dreams and struggles. If you start to take apart the story or the mechanics, it all unravels. But if you’ve connected with it, like any art, it proves impregnable to corruption or doubt.

I’ve been playing Papers, Please. It’s a very intriguing game.

It makes you roleplay a border inspector who mostly worries about his own dreary life. By processing people, stamping them with an “approved” or “denied” stamp on their passport – or by detaining them if they’ve broken the law – you make money. You have to process about ten people per day or your family starts to suffer because you can’t afford rent, heat, food or medicine.

Inspecting papers is a matter of spotting discrepancies in the documents. Just as you master the previous set and become quick enough doing it to feed your family without making mistakes (you’re fined for mistakes), the bureaucracy adds complications. You need to remember what citizen IDs, work permits, visit tickets and so forth look like, and how their official stamps should look like. Doing all that, you also need to cross-reference the passports numbers and names, where it’s not rare to find a single letter that’s a little bit off, or an expiry date long gone by. You’re so immersed in the details that sometimes the obvious pulls one over you; I’ve often forgotten to check gender, height and weight, not to mention the mugshot.

The interface can drive you crazy, but that’s very much the point. You never have enough room to lay everything open conveniently, and that adds to your stress level. But you become better at it. If only it wasn’t for those damn foreigners from that one country that are always subject to “random searches”, which slow you down, you could be a great father. Or all the criminals trying to get in… You normally wouldn’t bother to detain them (as that takes more time and is more stressful to you), but you really need the kickbacks from the guards who are also paid by people processed.

You flip between efficient bureaucrat, desperate father, hopeless citizen and a human being just trying to do his best in a bad situation. Maybe you think you can afford that one citation, because you really feel like this one guy should be let through despite his documents having expired yesterday.

The people coming through your inspection post are not faceless. All of them tell some story, and even as you’re inspecting their papers you have to listen – for one part they may be criminals who might make mistakes in their story, and on the other hand your work is boring and it’s nice to feel like you’re dealing with people. Sometimes, when you’re denying every other applicant and detaining everyone you don’t let through, you pretend they’re not people.

Papers, Please is a great example of telling a story through gameplay, setting, interface and your own feelings. The couple of shortly worded splash screens that set the scene are not cutscenes and you’re not bombarded with dialogue. This is one of the very few games in which you can’t skip the dialogue, because it’s so integral to what you’re doing – all the while telling the story.

It isn’t a fun game, even though you are likely to laugh out loud at some of the characters and interactions. Mostly it feels stressful and somewaht disappointing. But at the same time you do get better at it and you do take pride in being a super efficient official and a dependable father, until something new comes along to spoil everything. Again. It is a very powerful emotional rollercoaster, all without voice acting or screens of text or outwardly emotional content. You are just inspecting papers.

There are a lot of similarities to Cart Life, but Papers, Please is much more approachable and accessible. It doesn’t make you guess as much, and the whole is just more polished. Cart Life is wider in its handling of the human condition, but it asks a lot more of you to get to it.

The creator also has some other intriguing games that I have yet to check out.

EA set to reboot their military shooter series with Medal Of Honor (2010). It didn’t work out to their satisfaction as they’ve now (sensibly) decided to focus on Battlefield as their shooter franchise. As its name implies, Medal Of Honor was always about the heroes of American wars. After its origins in the relatively black and white world of World War II (1999, with Steven Spielberg on board), the wars of today are fought on mountains and in valleys most people would struggle to place on a map, against foes most of us don’t really identify with at all.

I recently re-watched Rambo III (1988) and for all its blatant anti-USSR propaganda, it actually paints the people of Afghanistan and the surrounding regions in a sympathetic, relatable fashion. I haven’t seen Western protagonists having fun with these little understood tribal peoples in any other major movie since.

I’ve shot virtual tribesmen in the hundreds and thousands, though, and I’ve come to associate their language with war grunts and screams of pain, all through our disturbingly warped media about the wars of today. I don’t know if it’s all that different to othering WWII era Germans, really, but it strikes me as much more dangerous because this isn’t history we’re dealing with. This is largely the reason I’ve stopped playing modern military shooters.

Where Call Of Duty is about making as big an action movie out of an imagined war as they can get away with, Medal Of Honor attempts to stay true to its inspiration. On the cover, that inspiration is the so called “Tier 1” special forces units of the United States military, including the household names of “SEAL Team Six” and “Delta”, who operate very deep in hostile territory with little in way of support from their mighty military machine. Later on the game branches out to the Rangers, but the mystique of Tier 1 is very much present all through.

It’s a breed of soldier popular in fiction and non-fiction, operatives who value being able to work alone and sidestep all rules to get the job done, whether it has to do with appropriate clothing and facial hair, official tools or rules of engagement. They are the modern ninja, shadow warriors of which very little is known and much imagined. Ideal videogame subject matter, in other words.

Medal Of Honor (2010) manages to stand apart to a degree by keeping the action small and inconsequential. You’re chasing informants in confusing, poor villages and seizing barely functional airfields, none of which counts towards stopping a major world-threatening plot. You are merely surviving and doing your part in a war. This side of the game is refreshing in its focus.

They could’ve done a much better job of it, though. You don’t get to know these operatives beyond their callsigns, whereas the most impressive and relatable depictions of these men are always in contrast to other soldiers and civilian lives. Instead, you’re given a wholly uninteresting and throwaway story of the operatives Getting The Job Done when men in Washington don’t know better. I guess the problem was that the somewhat believable scenarios didn’t amount to much and the developer, Danger Close, felt that there had to be a bigger story.

The problem isn’t just on the level of themes and storytelling. The gameplay would’ve been better off abandoning the corridor shooter formula, which only really works when you keep thinking of increasingly implausible scenarios, and opting for something a little more open – allowing you to stay more grounded. To date, the best portrayal of special forces operations is the original Ghost Recon (2001).

Medal Of Honor had the opportunity to be a big budget story about people in war. Instead it opts to be a slightly differently flavored, less polished version of Call Of Duty. There is a genuine respect that comes through, but I still feel like it’s doing a disservice to the men it’s depicting.

The operations and all the trappings feel authentic in their banality. The drama is about getting the job done, even if you have no idea how the job matters in any way beyond yourself not dying. This is honest, in a way, but it leads to scenes where you just don’t plain care about the drama they’re pretending to be weaving.

The illusion falls apart because the other operatives treat you as a kid – like the gamer pretending to be one of them. “Rabbit, come here!” “Rabbit, take the shot! Take it! Come on, Rabbit!” And you’re the only one ever hit. You’re refreshingly fragile, but you see the death scene a lot during the campaign. “Rabbit’s down!” is something you’ll grow very used to.

It’s hard to understand the callout graphics for headshots that you’re seeing all the time – it’s the most often seen piece of HUD feedback you’re getting during gameplay. Where everything else is doing its best to bring a coherent, somber mood to the proceedings, this detail completely undermines the effort. The lazy PC port doesn’t help things as the HUD elements are ridiculously oversized for PC resolutions.

It would all work a lot better if there was less characterization – not that there’s a lot – and a more of laser focus on the missions. Look at the original Ghost Recon to see how this could’ve been done. Of course that had a much more open structure, but really nothing in Medal Of Honor would be in contradiction with that. They often present things like they weren’t a corridor shoot, but in reality they are. You can see the Frostbite engine chomping at the bit to be let loose when looking over the expansive mountain vistas.

I have fired off millions of rounds in games over my gaming life. I have killed some number of virtual people that’s perhaps in the region of one tenth of that.

I have gone to a real life shooting range twice and discovered I’m a pretty good shot with a pistol. I also discovered that the gun is a tool that you need to learn how to safely opeate.

Receiver is a game that brings these two separate things together. Astonishingly, as far as I know it’s the first game to take this approach. It’s simple, more a toy or an experiment than a game, really: you’re given a random gun out of a couple of different models and tasked with finding a set of randomly hidden tapes in a randomly created building. A group of robots are on watch, out to kill you on sight. A single hit kills you and resets your progress. This game part of the whole is not very interesting nor good – the game was created in seven days and this is where it shows.

The point of Receiver isn’t that game. The point is what you’re doing in the game, which is operating a gun. The developer, Wolfire, has gone to unprecedented detail in how the gun is handled and in doing so discovered something profound about our relationship with virtual tools – and, yes, especially our virtual guns.

Instead of hitting “R” to reload a gun, you need to eject the magazine, hold it out, holster your weapon and insert bullets into the magazine one by one. Once done, you manually insert the magazine.

There is a separate button for all of these operations. On your first attempt you’re likely going to just drop the magazine on the floor. The game doesn’t tell you how it all works, you’re supposed to work it out on your own. (It does highlight the sensible options at any moment.)

After minutes of fumbling, you get pretty good at this. You’re going to be unnaturally fast, a virtual gunman, in no time, but it still feels like the real thing – like manipulating a magazine and preparing a gun for firing really feels like. They’ve managed to make a meaningful experience out of that most banal of all videogame activities; the reloading of the gun. Under stress, it’s very difficult indeed to recall how it was all done.

Instead of pointing a cursor at a guy and clicking to kill it, your mouse moves your gun hand (if holding the gun in ready position). You align the target using the gun’s sights and pull the trigger, perhaps hitting your target. It’s often hard to tell if you’ve even hit as there’s a loud report and your gun is jerked upwards and you need to re-orient before firing again. Sometimes a bullet misfires and you have to clear it by pulling back the slide and checking the chamber. All this, too, gets fast with practice.

Interesting things happen when so much attention is paid to operating the gun.

It becomes a meaningful skill. You get enjoyment out of operating the firearm, much like you do in real life. You might argue this is a perverse enjoyment and I wouldn’t object, but it feels profoundly good to get good at something so core to many videogames, but on a much deeper level. Encountering a new gun is interesting as you want to see how it feels to operate it.

The act of shooting becomes deliberate, not automatic. Even after you get good at the act, just because there’s so many steps to it and so much skill involved, you have an understanding of what you’re doing.

The gun itself gains weight. You stop think about it in terms of gameplay value or statistics. Exactly as in real life, you start to think about it as a lethal tool designed to destroy whatever is in front of the barrel. Having the gun makes you feel powerful, but also somewhat scared of that power in your hands.

Receiver makes you think about what else is so automatic in games, yet could be laden with meaning if more attention was paid to it. Receiver actually goes further than just the gun – running is simulated by pressing buttons alternatingly to pound the ground. It feels somewhat like running, unlike just pressing “W” does. (You can’t operate the gun while running.) Might a brawl be somehow simulated in real time using a more involved system than what you see in fighting games? Could sneaking be made more active and skill-based? What about talking?

I would be very interested to see a more fully fleshed game made with this kind of gun manipulation. Learning to operate a gun in Receiver essentially prepares you for shooting a real gun and you could argue it would be a disturbing murder simulator and if they were humans you were shooting, I might agree. Regardless, something like Metro 2033, Stalker or Far Cry 2 would be very interesting with this logically extreme dedication to gun fetishism.