LinustheBold: I answered stg83 separately, so perhaps you'll see that post. The uncle thing is important because (for me at least) it is the key to understanding what the game is doing: telling stories by accretion, hinting at secrets that will not, in the end, be revealed. It's history, and we're walking through it, and it's always just beyond our grasp.

Gone Home subverts the medium, and junks all the expectations we bring to a computer game. There's not a single revelation, until the very final moment. The Sam thing that is often mistaken for a plot revelation is actually incidental, just as important as the reason the mother's drive to work is a factor in the family's happiness, just as important as the reason the parents aren't home on the night the game takes place. It's all there in the house, in the small corners and in the diary memories, all vague, all unformed. The locked doors and lock combinations are conventions of the genre that they use to tell a small, human story, rather than a grand glorious one.

It's fine, of course, if that wasn't there for you, or if you aren't interested in it. But I found real power in the quiet stories left in fragments through the dark empty house.