Firewatch

... Or does it? Still not sure :/ The feeling for the nature and the secludedness is great, the voive acting ist brilliant. It is a very cinematic game that lets you feel with its characters and for that alone it is worth buying imo. I also liked the ending a lot! While others have complained that it may leave you unfulfilled, I think that is exactly the point. It shows you how much you have cared for these characters in the past few hours and how much you wanted a certain thing to happen. For me, the unexpected ending is a huge plus! On the negative side of things, certain aspects of the story make absolutely no sense in retrospect. Whether that is intentional and there is more to it than what we have seen or it is just bad writing ist up for debate, but it is certainly going to leave you scratching your head. Overall I can recommend this game

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.

Very riveting and exhilarating to play. The story is well done and the game is very beautiful to experience. The subject matter is very heavy and emotionally powerful. It's extremely nostalgic and definitely provokes feeling and a human response. Not perfect - the game felt like it could have been something larger and just... more. It fell a little short of the incredible mark, but it is still excellent.

One of the best games ever made, beautiful graphics, nice gameplay, beautiful scenery, good voice acting, interesting characters, what more could you want? it's a chill indie game, pretty much perfect.

Cool game. Great story.