Posted on: June 27, 2020
chlop
Bestätigter BesitzerSpiele: 2575 Rezensionen: 106
Lacks choice
Firewatch is a game that pretends to give you choices, while leading you down a rigid path. Your choices don't really matter, and each day in the game is filled with tasks chosen for you by your boss. You can roam the map and ignore those tasks, at least for a while, but the map is small, filled with invisible walls, and forces you to go down specific paths. You can only scale specific hills and only in specific places, and you can only jump over specific obstacles. In addition, the environment doesn't seem to affect the main character. Whether there's a fire nearby, whether the air is filled with smoke and he can barely breath, or if he just finished a tough climb, his reactions are the same - as if nothing fazes him. Frankly, he's a blank slate, as well as any other character in the game. We do get to know him at the start of the game, by the game dropping a big block of text on us, which serves as his biography. Occasionally the text stops and you're tasked with choosing his reaction to events that happen to him, but the choice is between a bad one and a worse one, and there's no incentive to actually pay attention to what you are choosing. Go past that block of text, and his biography stops being important, and is only referenced a few times. It somewhat feels like cheating - give us a well written, albeit cliched, origin story to make us sympathize with a character that the gameplay itself tells us isn't very bright, nor very relatable. Not that any character in this game is very bright. They all act as if they were born yesterday, and everything is new to them. There is the promise of a mystery, but that eventually fizzles out, and we're left with a plot where nothing much happens. Partly because of this game's weird decision to fast forward itself. Instead of letting you get to know the main character intimately, as he starts his job, we see a few days as a new recruit, and then jump to several months later. It makes the game last only 3-4 hours.
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