Gone Home. The best short video games for a single evening

Gone Home is not about saving the world or surviving in a post-apocalyptic reality. It's an ordinary story of a 21-year-old American woman who returns to her family home after a year in Europe. In the meantime, she finds out that there is no one there - only her, the place where she grew up, and the things left behind by the rest of her family members. What happened here? Is everything OK with her parents and sister? This is what the player along with the protagonist must figure out.

Exploration involving a visit to a former house doesn't sound very exciting, but the game was once talked about because of this non-standard setting. Reading letters or looking at magazine covers reveals more pieces of the puzzle. While in other games this is just a plot outline that we don't really have to be interested in, here it turns out to be the essence of the game. It is certainly not for everyone, especially those tired of angst-ridden teenagers, but sometimes a quiet peek into someone's house through the window can be a great break from the more dynamic action.

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What Remains of Edith Finch

We are the last surviving member of the Finch family. Our relatives have mysteriously died over the past 100 years, although a good portion of these stories seem improbable. Exploring a large family mansion, we discover various memories of the dead, with only one thing certain - in the end, everyone dies.

The strength of What Remains of Edith Finch is its uniquely diverse stories, in which not only the protagonist, but also the art style, controls, and gameplay rules change. The author lists among his inspirations such iconic authors as Lovecraft and Poe, and due to the great diversity of these memoirs, they can be seen as a kind of poetry volume - a collection of short pieces about death.

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