Gone Home is an upcoming game that involves exploring a house to uncover secrets and a hidden history. There is no violence, no deaths, no murder simulation. Gone Home represents a different sort of game from the typical triple-A shootathon. Exploration games are gaining popularity as studios experiment with gaming’s potential to tell a story through a changing world. Gaming has a power to put you in a place; an empty home, a drifting desert, a lonely street. A new generation of games are wielding that power with quiet authority to draw gamers in without random violence. Check out this article about Gone Home and other exploration games. IGN has the story.
About midway through Mass Effect 2, I tired of the combat. It simply wasn’t necessary. I just wanted to get through the annoying action scenes so I could go back to talking with people, learning about Mass Effect universe, solving mysteries, exploring alien worlds, hunting for salvage in the wreckage of crashed spaceships, helping people with their problems, causing people problems, and more, all while working through a dating game.
I wonder what Mass Effect 2 would have been if the combat was all cutscene and interacting with the world had taken center stage.