Did anyone pick this one up yet?
*VERY MILD SPOILERS*
I just finished it (it's fairly short) and loved it. It's at once beautiful, heartbreaking, nostalgic, melancholy, frightening, funny, subversive, immersive, romantic and sobering. It just gets so much right. You play as Hank, a dood running from the heavy shit going on in his life, and taking a job as a fire lookout in this huge, sprawling, gorgeous national park in 1989. You're essentially cut off from human contact, save for the voice at the other end of your walkie-talkie. When something needs investigating, it's your job to investigate. When something goes bump in the dead of night, it's your job to pull on your big boy pants and deal with it.
Most of the game consists of walking from Point A to B with only a compass and map to guide you. Most of the story and characterisation is fleshed out through brilliantly scripted and acted conversations between Hank and Delilah (the voice at the other end of the walkie-talkie). You get to choose how to respond to Delilah - you can be open and honest, you can deflect with humour, you can be an asshole - but you don't get to shape the story past that. There are no enemies in the traditional gaming sense. There is no combat to speak of. There is no challenge. The only way to fail is to stop playing. And yet this is a game that left me feeling immersed in its world like few others ever have.
The game does such a good job of ably holding your attention throughout even seemingly mundane tasks - hiking through picturesque, sun-drenched woodland to tell off a couple of teenagers for letting off fireworks or collecting wood panels to cover a broken window - that being pulled out of that newly established comfort zone by something out of the ordinary, even remotely so, feels pant-wettingly ominous in the moment.
In one sense, the ending of the game is an anti-climax (albeit purposefully so), but in another, it's one of the better gaming conclusions I can recall. It's not just the resolution of a story; it's a very relatable moment in a series of them, some fleeting and some not so, that trade on universal themes so much bigger than the particulars of any one narrative. And if you don't get misty-eyed as the credits roll and Etta James plays over that slide-show of photographs, you might be bereft of a soul.
*VERY MILD SPOILERS*
I just finished it (it's fairly short) and loved it. It's at once beautiful, heartbreaking, nostalgic, melancholy, frightening, funny, subversive, immersive, romantic and sobering. It just gets so much right. You play as Hank, a dood running from the heavy shit going on in his life, and taking a job as a fire lookout in this huge, sprawling, gorgeous national park in 1989. You're essentially cut off from human contact, save for the voice at the other end of your walkie-talkie. When something needs investigating, it's your job to investigate. When something goes bump in the dead of night, it's your job to pull on your big boy pants and deal with it.
Most of the game consists of walking from Point A to B with only a compass and map to guide you. Most of the story and characterisation is fleshed out through brilliantly scripted and acted conversations between Hank and Delilah (the voice at the other end of the walkie-talkie). You get to choose how to respond to Delilah - you can be open and honest, you can deflect with humour, you can be an asshole - but you don't get to shape the story past that. There are no enemies in the traditional gaming sense. There is no combat to speak of. There is no challenge. The only way to fail is to stop playing. And yet this is a game that left me feeling immersed in its world like few others ever have.
The game does such a good job of ably holding your attention throughout even seemingly mundane tasks - hiking through picturesque, sun-drenched woodland to tell off a couple of teenagers for letting off fireworks or collecting wood panels to cover a broken window - that being pulled out of that newly established comfort zone by something out of the ordinary, even remotely so, feels pant-wettingly ominous in the moment.
In one sense, the ending of the game is an anti-climax (albeit purposefully so), but in another, it's one of the better gaming conclusions I can recall. It's not just the resolution of a story; it's a very relatable moment in a series of them, some fleeting and some not so, that trade on universal themes so much bigger than the particulars of any one narrative. And if you don't get misty-eyed as the credits roll and Etta James plays over that slide-show of photographs, you might be bereft of a soul.
