Gone Home - Is it a game? [No Spoilers Please]

[2000AD]

PLEASE DON'T POST ANY SPOILERS!

Is Gone Home a walk through story (Like say Dear Esther) or is there actual gameplay in there?

I've been seeing everyone and their dog praise Gone Home to high heaven yet the brief bits of 'gameplay' I've watched to get a feel of it just seem to be walking around a house having a story told to you. So for the people that have played it is there any actual game in there or is it just walk around, click on things, have audio diary tell you a nice story?

[tezunegari]

I only spent half an hour on it but as far as I have "played" it's a walk through story.
At some parts you need information gained from the story pieces found throughout the mansion, like 4-digit combination locks, or keys to unlock new parts of the mansion.

[TheFeniX]

It's an interactive story with about 4 hours of content from what I've seen. There's no difficulty in the general sense of the word. For what it is, it seems to be exceptionally well done, but it's also not really a video "game."

It's more in the vein of "Myst" with a much narrower scope. The genre has been kind of dead for a while which is strange because Myst was extremely popular among gamers and non-gamers alike. I can only assume the sheer amount of terrible clones release in the mid-90s destroyed the genre.

I don't care enough to really look into it, but I'm wondering if this is accounting for it's reviews and blowback from the community: you just don't see any games like this released anymore, so there's nothing to compare them to.

Spoilered because it concerns the length of the game, but contains no story spoilers: I will say it's strange: Spoiler

that you can speedrun the game in under 60 seconds.