You navigate with a map, compass, and trail markers. Firewatch, therefore, is like a nostalgic virtual vacation, and it's absolutely delightful to find games like Final Fantasy XV and Firewatch that put such tremendous effort into representing these activities that were a foundational pillar of my childhood. It's something that I would very much like to do with my new family, if we could find the time to do it some year. I have vivid and fond memories of camping and hiking with my family, and I've always had a fondness and reverence for nature and national parks. As I mentioned in my Final Fantasy XV review, my dad used to take the family on annual road trips to national parks around the country when I was a kid. Nature walkįirewatch also resonates with me in another way: its core gameplay and setting. I still would have been 30 had I played it when it released, but I certainly feel a lot older in these last two years than the two years themselves would seem to suggest. In some ways, I wonder if the two-year delay in playing the game might actually have made it more resonant for me. I told her that he's a "kind of pudgy, balding, middle-aged man with a beard, named Henry." To which she responded, "like you?". My 7-year-old proxy daughter, by the way, asked me who my character in the game is and what he looks like. Fortunately, she has a child from a previous relationship, so we did both have the opportunity to raise at least one child together. The pressure to have children soon or accept that we never will weighs on my girlfriend an I. I'm becoming very much aware of the ticking clock as well. I'm in my early 30's (a good decade younger than Henry), but I'm starting to get to the age when this sort of thing really hits me hard as well. The game that follows is an exploration of choice, and how a person copes with the consequences of their choices. He's stuck with the life choices that he's made, and he doesn't want to have to face that. Not only can he not have the life with Julia that they both want, but he's not young enough to really start over either. And now Henry and Julia are suddenly out of time. His own selfish desires and apathy meant that they kept putting off having kids, Julia never got to live where she wanted to live and have the job that she wanted to have, and so forth. Not only is he losing his wife, but he's also dealing with the guilt and grief of not ever having really given her the life that she wanted. Julia is actually still alive, but the illness means that she isn't the same person, and Henry is struggling with whether he can even stand to visit her anymore, and whether she's effectively "dead to him". He's trying to escape from the very real trauma of losing his wife, Julia. In this case, Henry takes a job as a fire look-out at a national park in order to escape the very real life crisis of dealing with his wife suffering from early-onset Alzheimers. Except that it isn't the stereotypical "mid-life crisis" in which a 40-year-old man goes out and buys a sports car to feel young and "cool" again. The life you left behindīasically, the game is about a middle-aged man dealing with a mid-life crisis. Two years isn't that bad, right? I'm not too late to this party, am I?įirewatch is a summer job to just. I was half afraid that I'd find the game had been sitting around since like 2012 or something like that. I was actually surprised that it had only been two years. Oh, sure, I have some big games that I'm still playing off and on, like Monster Hunter: World and the 2.0 update of Stellaris, and those reviews will come in time.įirewatch was released in February 2016, and has been sitting in my Steam library since the summer sale of that same year. This has left me free to finally dive into my Steam back-log once again and try to finally cross off some of the games that have been sitting there for a year or longer. I made it through the big winter game releases, my play-time with Civilization VI's first expansion has slowed down, and the lackluster Green Cities expansion means that I'm not sinking tons of time into Cities: Skylines anymore. ( < indicates platform I played for review)ĭrug and Alcohol Reference, Strong Language XBox One (via XBox Live digital download), PlayStation 4 (via PSN digital download), Sudden hard-cuts between days can be jarring.Exceptionally-written dialogue and voice performances.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |