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Firewatch was a recent purchase for me which I mildly regret.
As a walking simulator it's wholly dependent on the quality of its story, and the quality just isn't there. It starts strong but the ending is rushed and without a coherent resolution. It does so much work to set up multiple dramatic mysteries and then haphazardly solves half of them out of nowhere and forgets the rest in the final scramble to finish.
Nice graphics. Great voice acting. Neat concept. Needed more time to cook and left me feeling like I wasted my time getting invested in the story.
A recent release? Diablo 4 I guess. I don't really regret it since I knew what I was in for. I bought it to play with my best friend, and we had fun together until he got bored and frustrated. My hopes were high but my expectations were minimal and it still barely managed to meet them.
Yes, I couldn't agree more. The first half of Firewatch is great, until you realize they've run out of budget and they're wrapping up the story already
Oh, I played that recently, too. I didn't have any high expectations for Firewatch, but liked the idea that it's a "true story" sent in by a player.
But the ending, well... it was like an "but then nothing happened" ending where the story teller artificially made up some wild climax in the mindset of the "satanic panic" hysteria that gripped the late 80s/90s. Still, if I see it as an indie game, it's okay.
It sucks because there's a lot about the ending (I'll be as spoiler free as possible) but the ending basically being "And then nothing happened" is kind of the point. It's meant to be bittersweet, because the story is about escapism but that ultimately you have to come back to reality eventually. The ending does the big lead up of oh man there's a big fantasy and heres the happy ever after. but throughout the whole game it repeats over and over that things aren't as magic and wild as you want it to be, that sometimes there's a simple, boring, and sometimes sad explanation, and at the end of the day reality is the only thing that stays.
Firewatch is definitely more of a "reflecting philosophy" game than a straight up "gamer story" game.
I was actually arguing from the opposite side and thought that the game's climax was too much :)
If it would have ended with that "present" left outside the tower door, that would have been a great ending and left me wondering what actually was going on or if there was anything going on at all.
But the whole
spoiler
coven of horned cultists conducting some sort of ritual and chasing you for no good reason
destroyed the magic and made me assume that the story teller just made up a silly, over-the-top ending in the context of the "satanic panic" some 30-40 years ago.
Firewatch has been on the periphery of my attention for a while. I've heard generally good things about it, but it didn't actually pique my interest until Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe
spoiler
swapped it in to replace Minecraft in the alternate games ending.
I figured if it was good enough for the Stanley Parable devs to feel it was worth referencing, it must have been an indie gem that I was sleeping on. I was wrong.
I feel like I got all I could get out of it by watching some videos on Firewatch.
Yeah, I'm with you. I still enjoyed it overall, so no remorse of buying and playing it. But the ending did feel like a mild letdown.