More and more it feels like games are oscillating between two different extremes, with twee comforts on one end and challenging, gritty-or-else pretense at the other. Or maybe I’ve just been playing too much Animal Crossing and Doom.
Still, at the very least it feels refreshing to play a game like The Almost Gone, a cutesy, pastel-pink diorama with a venom-green sting in the tail. Your mind will jump straight to Gone Home, when you first play it, which would be understandable but not entirely a justice. The Almost Gone is more subtle than that, more refined and more restrained.
You wake up, disembodied, in a strange facsimile of your bedroom, and the task is more or less to just escape, tying together threads of a family mystery – and presumed tragedy – as you go. You’ll prod and poke at your surroundings, spinning the little rooms like dollhouses in your hands, opening drawers and doors and secret hiding places as you go.