If what Unravel offers is indeed an experience of empathy (and that is debatable), this is a vision of empathy that is not about appropriating or instrumentalizing the feelings of others.It is also not about learning or becoming better people. This vision of empathy is about building precarious yet vital connections between points by following indirect paths constructed using one’s own body. It is about queer entanglements, a network of individuals connected by a series of knotted paths that is not straight and cannot be straightened. (Ruberg 67)

Ruberg argues that the experience in Unravel is unconventional in the sense that you aren't physically placed into a character's perspective of their experiences and told to experience empathy, and is instead developed through having a player-character that isn't meant to be relatable and physically represents the queer community through watching the yarn-like character unravel as it travels through the world of the story(67). In Gone Home, the player plays from a second-person perspective as the player plays as the sister of the main character. Thus the player is detached is from the marginalized experiences of Sam which allows for a more valuable teaching that is "not about learning or becoming better people" (Ruberg 67). The player does not experience Sam's issues with her, but can only look on and view as the story unfolds before them. 

This image shows an example of the remnants of Sam's experiences that the player has to discover.


This shows that empathy in games is not always related to being related, but more about viewing an experience from the second-hand perspective and learning about marginalized experiences in the queer community.