Memory House: Thoughts on Gone Home’s Narrative and Time

Since replaying Gone Home last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about just when the game takes place. Of course, in a sense it takes place at 1:15 AM on June 7th, 1995, as the game indicates at the beginning. But there is another sense in which it’s relationship to time is hardly so straightforward.

When I first played Gone Home, I felt like it was a sort of minor, necessary flaw that, as you journeyed through the house on Arbor Hill and pieced together the story of the Greenbriars, parts of the house were implausibly stuck in the past. The way the living room, for instance, still had a couch fort in it, which suggests the earlier stages of Sam and Lonnie’s relationship. I accepted this as something the game had to do so that the story had the necessary structure, guiding us through a beginning, middle, and end.

But as I’ve returned to the game time and time again, both in reality and in my memory, I’ve grown increasingly fascinated with the house’s relationship to time, and come to see it not as some kind of necessary flaw, but as something that contributes to its psychological power and resonance. Gone Home is a game that is very concerned with how the past can be alive in the present; things that happened in the house thirty years ago haunt Terrence, but also the much more immediate past is alive and present throughout the entire house. And there’s a psychological aspect to the house’s architecture–the way the dark secrets are buried under the surface, the way that Terrence’s new workspace is in an area where life is blooming and light can flood in.

But what I find especially fascinating lately is the fact that it isn’t just Sam’s memories of the past year or Terrence’s memories of things that happened long ago in that house that the game is interested in. What often gets ignored in thinking about Gone Home’s structure is that it isn’t just their memories we’re engaging with here; it’s Kaitlin’s, too. When does the game take place, really? Immediately when Kaitlin gets home and starts exploring the house? The answer is both yes and no. 

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As we play the game, we hear Sam’s journal entries at specific moments when they are appropriate, and yet Kaitlin doesn’t yet know what’s in these journal entries. She hasn’t found them yet. It is only at the very end of the game that she finds Sam’s journals addressed to her. So, it seems to me that the game actually begins at the very moment at which it ends. It’s a kind of loop, as if the entire game is a flashback that occurs when Kaitlin finds the journal entries, with the knowledge in those entries helping her make sense of the things she saw while she was exploring the house. So, yes, the house full of memories, but the entire game is also itself made up of Kaitlin’s memories.

It’s Kaitlin’s memory house. And our memories are often more concerned with a kind of emotional truth than with the actual facts of how things were. So why shouldn’t the house reflect the emotional truths of what happened? Why shouldn’t Sam and Lonnie’s couch fort still be erected in the living room, their presence so immediate in that room that you can almost hear them laughing, can almost see them huddling together and watching The X-Files?

I mean, I know there are moments from my own past that I still live in, sometimes.