Firewatch

The voice acting here is incredible. The actors who played Henry and Delilah get six out of five stars. It's probably worth playing the game just to listen to their interactions while walking through a beautiful national park. The mystery that develops is also very intriguing, but just as it's reaching a climax...you find out what has really been happening, and it is so lame and uninteresting that you almost feel cheated of your last few hours. When I came across this, I thought to myself "I've heard such great things about this game that I'm sure there is another twist waiting to happen after this", but there wasn't. The game was over and I was left unsatisfied by the ending. The true answer to the mystery 1. was boring, 2. didn't make any sense, and 3. has no follow-up. If the game were one hour longer with a cooler explanation of why everything was happening, then it would have been five stars. I agree with the other review that says it looks like they were building up to something amazing, then they ran out of time or money and had to wrap it up, so they just threw something together last second.

To keep it short: Quite nice game i thought. Then: Very quickly played through (4hrs). Choices dont matter! Story nice until end where its a total letdown! Same end every time! Totally disappointed! Guys, dont buy it! or at least not above 3 or 4$.

I wanted to like this game. It has a few things going for it. It does a good job of building an atmosphere of paranoia where you start to question yourself and what you are doing. Unfortuanely, that's the end of the good stuff. If you've played any modern RPGs with lots of dialogue you know how small choices can have a big impact. Not so with this game. Its all a lie. The contempt the game producers have for the audience is hinted at in the beginning background choices but really shines at the end of the game when EVERYTHING you did or said is rendered moot. There is only 1 ending. Did you like how Mass Effect 3 neutered your decisions? This is worse than that. There is a message that you will learn and they are going to club you over the head with it. If they included a few different endings based on your game choices that would have made a huge difference but this game was not written for you, it was written for them. Aside from the ending there is a few things throughout the story that took me out of the game as it progressed. Some of the things said or referenced were a little off for the story being set in 1989. The dialogue was cringe inducing as it comes across as being written by people whose only male/female interactions are learned from the movies and not with real people. If you can grab this game while its on sale its okay for killing a couple hours of your time but don't think that you have any control over the events because you don't. They will tell you how things are and your opinion doesn't matter.

I really wanted so much to give 5 stars to this game. Seriously, it has all the ingredients of a epic hit: a great story, great graphics, an emotional story arc, superb voice acting with witty dialogue... what's not to like? Well... the ending. Whatever the scriptwriters thought of as an ending of this game is utter, absolute crap. Devastatingly bamboozingly bad. Beating-your-mom-and-killing-your-firstborn bad. The ending is anticlimactic, and thus lacks any closure for the player. And also is sloppily done. Don't believe the promotional blurbs telling you that this is a thrilling story, hinting that this is something of a thriller, a murder-mystery or something. It's not. It's utter and absolute disappointment. You WILL be cheated. The action is situated in some Wyoming national park back in 1989, and the environment is beautiful. The art direction in this game should win the award of the decade. The soundtrack, while minimalistic, is beautiful and well adapted to the story and the environment. This is a first-person walking simulator. Controls are okay. But you can't get killed, and this means that there are invisible walls. So, it is mostly open world, but the terrain forces you into one specific direction. Nowcall me a prude but something I found distracting and detracting is the excessive amount of gratuitous and unnecessary profanity and swearing. Besides unnecessary, this is not how two adults of 1989 interacted between each other, much less when they were of different sexes. It's so crude it breaks immersion. They sound like two teenage boys of today engaging in locker room talk. The game ran flawlessly on GNU/Linux. Even though I have an Intel onboard GPU, the framerate and quality were very good when running at Standard HD definition. So, beware. Purchase this game and it will be a great experience... but the ending will ruin it. Guaranteed. It's not often that one see such gigantic defeat snatched from the jaws of (almost) certain victory.

The good: the setting is absolutely gorgeous, and a joy to explore. The dialogue is well-written and interesting. The bad: the solution to the central mystery makes no sense at all - that is, the antagonist's actions go way beyond merely irrational into the nonsensical, to the point where I assumed that his goal was the exact opposite of his goal turned out to be. Also, there are glitches in the dialogue. Not audio glitches, but places where the characters' words do not logically follow what previously happened in the game.