If I'm honest I didn't really like the game. I think for one of the reasons that the op touched on and that was the marketing. I think the trailers I watched made it seem like it was going to be a spooky, scifi type game and I bought it and played about the first 10 or so minutes thinking that's what I was going to be in for
After about an hour with no horror, scifi or puzzles I just trudged my way to the very disappointing ending.
That said.... I don't think it was a bad game objectively. It was a wonderful little 80's 90's playground and I think I would have enjoyed if I had gone in with different expectations.
I'm glad the op enjoyed it.
I purely blame the bait and switch marketing lol.

Hahaha, I remember picking on the developing lesbian relationship thing after the diary entry you recall in the upstairs bathroom, which I first found about one-third of the way through my original playthrough. That one made it pretty obvious to me.

Anyway, yeah What Remains of Edith Finch is pretty exceptional (spoiler: look for it in my top 5 on this year's top 50 list) and Firewatch was pretty good too, I thought. But Edith Finch is also pretty linear and sometimes I like to have a little more freedom.

In the end, I guess some of what's relaxing to me might be boring to others. I struggle with anxiety though and sometimes a kind of open-ended game that doesn't put any real stress on me is just what I need.

Yeah, I can completely understand that, tbh. I think they wanted to like try and broaden the horizons of a certain type of gamer and it just wasn't going to happen.

One started the game up expecting a high-stress, frightening type of experience and instead got a totally stress-free game about relationships and family, lol. If you're like me, that wasn't an unwelcome surprise, but I think I can understand how it would be for many.

Played the game ready to hate it for it's lack of gameplay and short duration and instead ended up enjoying it. The voice acting is excellent and it was the first time a house in a videogame didn't feel fake. It actualy felt like a family lived there.

Sarah Grayson was excellent as Sam (and Mitten, for those who found the Easter egg ). They had her watch My So-Called Life as a guide for the right tone to aim for, and that felt like a perfect match for this type of story. And time frame.

And yeah, I agree with it feeling believable in terms of being like a place that felt lived in. The level of detail, the period-specific touches that are present in credible ways (like the dorky long carpets that everyone used to have in their hallways back then) but not so overdone that it feels like a parody (like...no bathroom carpeting, for example), the playable cassette tapes that really sound like tapes, not new recordings, all that sort of thing. (Not that that's a slight on Chris Remo's original soundtrack for the game by any means. He also did a pretty great OST for What Remains of Edith Finch, incidentally.) Also, Sam's room is hideous. I love it.

Some people like Gone Home and some people don't, but whether you think Gone Home was good or not doesn't really matter.

In absolutely no way did it impact gamer culture or the industry as a whole. It didn't sell a ton of units, didn't influence game design/story telling, and didn't have any praise or following outside of a dedicated few. Anyone who thinks this was an important game, much less the most important of the decade, is deluding themselves.

For what it's worth I'm glad you enjoyed it :) 

It was the bait and switch I disliked, not the representation which I thought was a good thing. I just wanted my alien abduction dammit hehe XD

I would say the impact of this game is close to zero, and seeing otherwise is just because for oneself it was important.

Some (...okay lots) of the cultural references in this game are to stuff that many people aren't familiar with. Being as my familiarity with so many of these oft-forgotten things is a big part of why I like Gone Home so much, I thought it might be helpful to contextualize some of its cultural references.

MY SO-CALLED LIFE: Gone Home draws heavily on both thematic and aesthetic elements from a short-lived TV program that aired on ABC channels from 1994 to '95 (uncoincidentally the general time frame in which the game's events of focus take place) in the U.S. called My So-Called Life, which was like my favorite show of that whole decade. The general tone and mannerisms of Sam's diary entries in Gone Home are recognizably inspired by the introspections of protagonist Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, for example, as is Sam's dress style similar to Angela's, and what's more so too in a number of respects does the relationship between Sam and Lonnie in Gone Home bear a striking resemblance to that between Angela and her best friend Rayanne in My So-Called Life despite the fact that the latter two are both heterosexual characters.

RIOT GRRRL: The riot grrrl subculture is heavily referenced throughout Gone Home and it meant a lot to me back in the early and mid-'90s when it was at its liveliest, but I find that it's a scene that many people are unfamiliar with today. Here's a brief primer on the history of the riot grrrl punk movement I thought I'd supply to contextualize the references thereto in the game.

SASSY MAGAZINE: You know that issue of Fresh magazine that you find on the table in the library? That's a reference to a real teen girls' magazine that I used to read back in the early and mid-'90s that was distinguished by its frankness and, occasionally, reader-produced content. There's nothing like it in circulation today. This news report on Sassy and its readers from the mag's heyday in 1992 captures its appeal to many tween and teenage girls and young women at the time pretty well. Pausing the video on the magazine covers will allow you to easily recognize the tone on the fictional Fresh magazine in Gone Home. (In case you're wondering what happened to the TV show also referenced in the linked report, that lasted for only a year. Sassy magazine was a thing for the better part of a decade though.)