Firewatch

Started good, interesting buildup and characters.

But in the last mission of the game, the writers rushed the ending and messed up everything in the story which leads to absolutely nothing.

Firewatch is the first independent game by the writer of TT's Walking Dead S01 and part of the ever growing "walking simulator" genre. The sub-genre name feels very fitting as first person adventures from the 90s actually bothered to feature real puzzles... Nah, i'm kidding. I kinda like these gameplay free new adventures and Firewatch is one of the better so far. The developers squeezed a mighty fine looking and beautifully over-saturated forest out of the Unity engine and my personal highlight is the clever VN section that forms the prologue. It's a bit like the flashback novels from the highly overlooked Lost Odyssey. The game may lack a certain appeal to younger gamers due to the themes and the rushed ending is frankly a head scratcher but the journey is still worth it even if i don´t think that the game´s female lead is all that great due to the very forced romance. The actual controls are fairly flawed too. The soundtrack and sound design can lastly put most industry leaders to shame. 6,5/10

This game is a rare beauty. Although not offering much in terms of gameplay, the game completely makes up for it in graphics, characters, immersion and not to mention the amazing voice acting.

The game was a great surprise for me. The graphics and the voice acting was very good. The world had a lot of details in it. When you start your job as a firefighter, you can have some time to acquaint yourself with the new living place, new places and so on, and it felt very refreshing. Everyone can connect the place with their own experience. It will definitely feel like taking a break in wilderness.

When the game started, it showed a lot of promise to provide many mind-wrecking puzzles. There were books, funny maps, there were letters, many objects in peculiar places, which gave a nice touch to make the world believable, but those things did not create anything like a grand puzzle. In such an exploration based game, you would hope to crack many secrets, find many hidden places with the history, invest time to solve a difficult puzzle, but there was no such thing. I believe that initially developers had a lot of in their minds, but later on they left their all nifty ideas and somehow finished the game with an anti-climatic finish with no layers of mystery.

It is not a conventional "good game". One should take the game to experience the wilderness of the Park. Dialogues were nice too, sometimes funny, sometimes deep, but I craved for more. Anyway, this game will be memorable one for me, I would remember running in that place for a long time I guess. Story, gameplay, this may disappoint you, but excellent graphics and nice sound will soothe your mind. Giving it 7 for its pleasing environment.

The voice acting carries the entire thing.

It's not often that you see such a mature approach to storytelling in video games. This game does a great job at diving into some "adult" issues while keeping it lively and bright, and I love that aspect of it.

That said, the gameplay is by far its weakest point. The amount of things you can do is very bare, and I would even go so far as to say that it's barely a game. A very compelling experience nonetheless.