Posted October 02, 2025 by SkyShard
Hi all,
At the time of writing everything hurts after getting my flu/covid booster. Things could be worse. I've been playing way too much Silksong over the past 3 weeks ago which is probably expected given how I was also playing way too much Hollow Knight ~6 years now. I quite like it.
Let's talk about a different game.
Gone Home came out in 2013, a whole 12 (!) years ago now. In Gone Home, you play as a character returning to their family home to find it entirely empty. On paper, figuring out exactly where everyone is sounds like it'd be the main narrative thrust of the game, but that question quickly starts to not matter very much. I think it'd be more accurate to call Gone Home a game where the central propelling force is you, the player, being nosey. You are not here to figure out what happened, you are here to understand why.
I like to bring up Gone Home because I think it's an interesting cultural touchpoint to understand how games have changed over the past several years. I remember Gone Home being talked about a lot when it came out in the years following. It was a successful game in the sense that it got quite popular and was pretty well acclaimed critically. This success became noteworthy because of some aspects of the game that would become the subject of discourse. The game places on queerness and was also a walking sim, a term I don't think I've heard someone use in several years now. There are no physical characters in Gone Home, nor was there "gameplay" in the sense that word was understood in gaming discourse in 2013 (although, to its credit, there were puzzles!) None of this was especially novel, but Gone Home was more successful than many of its contemporaries.
Quite a lot of things have changed since then and some things have stayed utterly the same. We don't talk about walking simulators anymore. I think a part of this likely comes from the backlash to the language itself. The term is, let's be honest, a little bit cringe. I don't think people who really loved walking simulators liked calling them "walking simulators." For the crowd of people who would use this term derogatively, I still think it fell out of favor a little bit. It has a kind of early 2010s ick to it that just isn't cool in the big 2025. At the same time, I don't think this change is entirely linguistic, as I am generally unaware of many walking simulators being released in the past few years, even under different names. I have a handful of theories. First, I think indie games have gotten better at including animated 3D characters at low budgets by getting a bit more creative with their presentation. If this sounds vague go search through the top "New and Popular" horror games on itch and you'll see what I mean I promise. From the perspective of more established titles with a marketing budget, I think the shift away from walking sims may be downstream of all sorts of factors in the games industry. I could also be wrong (if so, please let me know, I like these games!)
When I go revisit Gone Home now, the way you interact with the story feels almost unrecognizable from the discourse around it in 2013. It feels less like a work that breaks away from gaming conventions to do something daring and more like a piece that is trying very hard to be a game. Gone Home revolves around voice notes, diary entries, that kind of thing to pretty directly outline what a character was thinking at a given point in time. This method of interaction is used all over the place in games. The house gives you what you want. You are able to find the answers to all of the story's major questions by looking around and finding something that tells you an answer. When something is left open ended, it's done very purposefully. I think this is satisfying narratively. I really do like this game. I also don't think it's realistic. This is simply not how the world works.
My main goal with Garden was to tell a story about a setting that could not give the answers the characters were looking for. The main subjects of the story are Carmen and the main character's mom. Carmen is dead, and so the only way Mom can interact with Carmen is by going through her stuff. Mom is not able to find what she is looking for, instead only finding more questions and dead ends. Not once in the story does Mom learn anything tangible about Carmen, even if their relationship has changed by the end of the story.
I think the main character is really two characters. One exists in the present of the story. This character is young and has no relationship to Carmen. They are at times curious, but they have trouble really understanding their mom. The other main character is one that exists in the future and is retelling the story with more empathy for their mom than they would have given in the moment. In some ways this makes for a slightly more reliable narration. The frustrations and fears of the main character exist, but don't overwhelm the point of view. I guess the distinction between a past and present perspective defines the whole thing, doesn't it?
Let's talk about some technical things.
Recently I've found myself very inspired by children's stories, the ones aimed at audiences just learning to read. I find it really admirable how a lot of these stories focus on one idea or pattern and bend it around in all sorts of ways to tell a full story. I think it's very charming. I wonder if it came across that I was doing a slightly more complicated version of this here. Almost every scene and interaction is built on a very simple narrative foundation that I would describe as "Bait -> Switch -> Synthesis." First, I would introduce an idea that requires some kind of narrative resolution. I'd try to follow this up with a somewhat curious resolution, usually one that's a bit of a let down given the set up. Finally, I'd let the characters sit with the subtle contradictions between the bait and the switch. Consider these lines from the 2nd to last chapter:
And yet, even in hell there were surprises.
I saw a skeleton hanging from the trees.
It was a fair bit taller than me.
It was also made of plastic.
When I hit my knuckles against a femur, it made a hollow sound.
I could hear Carmen laughing at me.
If Mom were with me, she'd explain how Carmen would play pranks on her when they were kids.
She'd tell me about a time Carmen had pulled a prank on her as a kid.
The first two lines threaten a negative turn of events whereas the next three expose the skeleton as plastic. The set up is sudden and eerie, but the initial payoff is virtually nonexistent. It's in the following lines when the narrator synthesizes these ideas that we get at something entirely strange and honest and possibly even more uncomfortable than the original setup. A key reason I hope this format works here is that I tried to keep the payoffs very frequent and fast. Some ideas, such as answering the basic question of "Who was Carmen?" require the whole work to tackle, but many of these little narrative moments happen across a few lines. I hope this made the final work feel less like I was trying to hoodwink the viewer into believing one thing when another was true, and more like I'm taking your hand through one of those haunted houses where someone is around every corner ready to scream their lungs out at you, or something like that.
I tried to get the most out of this idea since I think the reasonably tight scope could keep it from becoming too obvious. Speaking of scope, I wanted to come up with ways of a bigger world than the words on screen could convey on their own. A part of this comes naturally from Carmen's position as a character that neither the narrator nor their mom fully understands. All of the things found throughout her home suggest a much larger story that the main characters do not understand. There are a few touches of this elsewhere. The narrator reluctantly brings up their father, for instance, and the emotions that exist in his absence, but the narrator's cards are held closely to their chest.
Talking briefly about art, despite my efforts to be economical there are some 60 image files packed into this project. Most of the backgrounds were collaged from my own photos and painted over. The exception is the title cards, which were lovingly stolen from this collection. The ost was composed of 7 tracks taken from 2 basic samples. The first was me, playing the kalimba, badly, in front of my kinda shitty orb-shaped computer microphone (this one plays during the eclipse and the maze scenes) and another which was me improving on the piano for about 20 minutes (this was chopped up and used everywhere else.)
I had a lot of fun putting together this project in Godot. I think I prefer having a visual editor for a very visual project. I like positioning things on a canvas more than moving things around in code and then seeing what happened to have happened with the canvas. Maybe that's just me. I hope we get to see more development in this area. I'd love to see a more prolific ecosystem of tools and templates.
I had a lot of fun putting together the sprites for the mom character. I wanted there to be visual differences in each of the scenes, making her feel like she's actually in different environments. The final presentation kind of comes back to the idea of being economical. I took one sprite and stretched its presentation basically as far as it would go.
Changing the subject, I find myself drawn to the imagery of body horror, which I find inconvenient due to the ways I think monstrous appearances get characterized in media. I think it's a bit boring that characters who get angry or evil also get ugly. Here the aim was to associate that visual progression with one of vulnerability. Tender is that flesh that lets mere feelings cut, or something like that. This visual choice ties back into that narrative pattern I was talking about earlier, too.
That's basically everything, I think.
Forgive my relative quietness during this round of Velox. Somewhere along the way I think I've lost the ability to post, whether that's to social media or in reply to comments. I feel hopelessly cringe whenever I thank people for playing, even if the sentiment really is there. Similarly I find everyone else's work very remarkable, even if I've been a bit too shy to comment. I can't wait to see what everyone makes next time.
Thanks,
Sky