Why did the journos like it so much?

It had pretty great atmosphere and a novel idea (It looks like an horror game but surprise! It's not)

A way more salient question to me is why did /v/ care that the journos liked it?

>>389086209
>It looks like an horror game but surprise! It's not
Neat twist.
Has absolutely no value after knowing the twist.

They liked it because lesbos.

File: anger.jpg (51KB, 245x204px) Image search: [Google]

51KB, 245x204px

Game journalists don't actually like playing video games, and Gone Home is hardly a game in the traditional sense. Moreover, Gone Home tries to be a progressive work of art more than it tries to be a game. Game journalists, who are ashamed of their career choice, love games that seem to legitimize the otherwise unimportant subject about which they write. Finally, stereotypical "gamers" who like more traditional video games are less likely to enjoy Gone Home, and this gives game journalists yet another reason to love it. Game journalists hate gamers for the same reason they hate video games and their own careers. This is why they jumped at the chance to lash out at their own readership back in 2014.

Professional game reviewers, meanwhile, are likely to give high scores to a game like Gone Home. As people who review games for a living and often work for publications with many competitors, professional reviewers have an incentive to review games quickly. Games requiring a lot of skill, or a lot of time investment in general, will take longer to review. Easy games, and other interactive experiences which hardly qualify as games, are easy to review. In other words, these reviewers have a personal bias, and a review (being inherently subjective at least in part) is bound to show the author's personal bias. Furthermore, Gone Home is a somewhat non-traditional game, which makes it stand out among all the generic stuff which professional reviewers have to play. Whether the average gamer will like it, however, is an entirely different question. The opinions of professional film critics often fail to correlate with box office numbers, and the same is sometimes true of professional game critics' opinions.

It came out right when both the "narrative game" and "progressive" fads were hitting their peak, meaning more clicks.