In gameplay, Three-Fourths Home is very simple. You hold down the right trigger and the car goes "vroom" across the screen. If you take your finger off the trigger, the game effectively pauses until you start moving again.
Your character, Kelly, is on the phone with her family as she drives home. A storm (which gets steadily worse, until there are multiple tornadoes around) rolls in. You're in no danger from that; the game isn't throwing cows or silos in the road and making you swerve. Your focus is the conversations. They say something, and the game gives you options on how Kelly responds. No more than three options, sometimes only one (the dialogue trees inevitably lead to certain points.)
That's really it. This was the extended edition, so there's an epilogue where Kelly reflects on a day months earlier, when she was away at college and thought about calling her mother, but didn't. You can choose to make the call and have a conversation Kelly wishes she had, or not. If you do, you can walk on the sidewalk (by pushing the right or left trigger) as you talk, or just stand there. You don't really see a lot if you walk, the game has a very simple visual style, but it's there if you don't want to just watch buses pull up and leave.
The game's really more about the circumstances. Kelly went away to college, but now she's back at what feels like Square One, but everyone else is different. Kelly's still caught up in the fallout of what caused her retreat to her childhood home, the feeling it wasn't supposed to go like this, she isn't supposed to be back here, what's wrong with her. That is a feeling I'm well familiar with, for about a solid decade after college.
Kelly's apparently just now, while on the phone, twigging to a lot of what's been happening with her family. She hasn't realized her dad doesn't take any meds for the pain after he lost a leg in an accident at the factory (unless you count beer, at least he's not combining the two), or that her brother stopped playing the guitar after she left (he's into writing now.)
Given the specific points the conversations have to hit, I don't know how much of a difference it makes which dialogue options you pick. You can get more information about certain topics if you ask questions versus sticking to monosyllabic answers. The third time through (the game takes maybe 30 minutes to play), I tried to pick the response with the fewest words (in the event of a tie, the fewest letters.) Or you can be cryptic or even a jerk. Your brother gets irritated if you call him "Benji," and reminds you that you promised two weeks ago not to do that. Then the game gives you an option to do it again a few minutes later. I refrained, but maybe as an only child I don't understand the fun of needling at siblings.
Or maybe I saw my friends' siblings stab them with forks too often to want any part of that smoke.
The "conversation" with her mother at the bus stop adds an additional wrinkle that there will sometimes be dialogue options in brackets, which symbolize the moment Kelly breaks her own illusion. The moments where she knows she's lying to this imaginary version of her mother, or the moments where she thinks her mother wouldn't have reacted like that. The background also shifts during those moments, and so does the background music if you get far enough into the conversation.
It took me until the third time through to really get the hang of that. The first time, I just had Kelly stand there as a couple of buses stopped and departed, then finally had her get on one. Second time, I had her make the call, but I interpreted the bracket options as a sign I was messing up, like when you step on the wrong square in Dance Dance Revolution. Breaking the rhythm, dragging her back to the truth of the situation. The third time, I started like that, but partway through decided to see what would happen if I just pursued those threads.
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