Gone Home also plays with player agency by subverting expectations about danger and complicity. The first moments of the game create a sense of mystery more frequently associated with survival horror: the abandoned house is cast as unnatural and threatening, with the player invited to explore it suspiciously, suspecting some external danger behind the apparent disappearance of the family. That danger, of course, turns out to be internal, not external. The player becomes the intruder in what should be a familiar environment

There isn’t a lot of, “Walk through a door, hit a trigger, and watch this thing happen.” Everything that changes your perception of what the game means is through you interacting with what’s there and having an effect on the state of the world that in turn affects you. (qtd. in Suel-lentrop 2017)

Walking through a rhizome one enacts a story of wandering, of being enticed in conflicting directions, of remaining always open to surprise, of feeling helpless to orient oneself or to find an exit, but the story is also oddly reassuring.