The story of Firewatch is odd. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it, but my gut feeling is that it suffers from trying to be two things, or trying to frame itself as one thing when really it's another. Of course I don't know what the developers were thinking when they made it, but I get the feeling they wanted to tell an entirely mundane and realistic story, but were afraid (perhaps rightfully so) that it would sound boring as hell to a large swath of the "gamer" demographic, so they spiced it up a bit. And, you know, hey. Not a bad idea from the point of view of trying to make a buck, and games ain't cheap. But I'm not sure it pays off artistically. Firewatch is basically the story of a lonely sad dude trying to escape his problems in the woods—and imo that's all it needed to be, gamers get rekt. But because the creators lacked confidence in that story, or felt it was insufficiently grabby, or whatever, Firewatch ends up being something weirder than that, and not in a super good way, I fear—but, you know what, at the end of the day, tree prety

"michel ultimate wife guy" - a friend

The big flaw in Fata Morgana is that it is unfortunately waaaaay longer than it needs to be—you could probably trim ten hours and leave the story intact. The only other flaw is that the story, while mysterious at first, by the end leaves nothing to suggestion: everything is explained (both figuratively and at times literally) to death.

Those caveats aside, this is a real banger of a VN that made me cry :'( Without giving anything away, the story handles its subject matter with such empathy and sensitivity that it makes other stories with similar plots look shoddy af. I'm not super well-versed in VNs and their tropes, but I did play the first Danganronpa forever ago, and it almost feels at times like the FM creators are casting mocking "behold fools, now THIS is how it's done" glances over their shoulders at their pathetic sadsack colleagues in the VN industry—except they also seem way too nice and thoughtful to be doing that lol.

In short, a killer love story, a heck of a soundtrack, and a metric ton of mfin words lmaoooo

Paradise Killer is the "not like other girls" of games but in, like, the cool trans girl way, not the internalized-misogyny way? I can truly say I have never played a game like it and I don't know why any of it works. Why is every single character name so cool? (Lady Love Dies! Lydia Day Break!! Carmelina Silence!!!) Why does Doctor Doom Jazz live on a yacht? Why is the soundtrack such a banger, with the most satisfying end credits music I have ever heard in my life? Why does a Phoenix Wright investigation-slash-courtroom sim have fun 3D platforming and exploration in it? I don't even know why cruising around this brutalist vaporwave death cult island is so enjoyable, the collectables are mostly pointless, but there are just so MANY of them (an absolutely bonkers profusion) that no matter where you go, you always feel like you are uncovering something.

That the gameplay works is something of a miracle, but then there's the fact that the story is good. Don't ask me how the developers pulled this off. Writing a good mystery is hard enough, but setting your mystery on a transdimensional island ruled by a cult of immortals dedicated to resurrecting Lovecraftian horrors with names like "Silent Goat" through human sacrifice...presents, uh, another set of challenges, I imagine. In most games, a world this wild would be the mystery, and the whole game would be a boring lore hunt. There is lore in Paradise Killer, but none of it really matters, and once you acclimate to the general weirdness of everything (which is admittedly a pretty steep hurdle at first), the mystery itself is surprisingly easy to follow, although there are lots of layers to it, and even some intriguing ethical dimensions, which are not deeply explored but make the story more thought-provoking than you might expect from a game that initially seems to not be about anything more than its own bizarre dedication to an aesthetic.

I am convinced Paradise Killer must have been made under the auspice of some capricious but temporarily benevolent alien deity, because a game this audacious at every level should not work. I kept waiting for some overreach or misstep to bring the whole thing tumbling down—the quirk that broke the camel's back—but it never came. Playing this game is like watching Icarus gleefully flip off the sun and fly acrobatic circles around it because it turns out actually he's a psychic vampire possessed by a demon trapeze artist or something. It is miraculous and delightful and kind of freaks me out and I'm glad there's only one of them.

The Forgotten City gets off to a slightly rocky start imo, with the explanation of the time-loop premise feeling like one of those ridiculous Danganronpa-esque scenarios where the characters painfully overexplain what are clearly just a bunch of gameplay contrivances that wouldn't need to be explained in excruciating detail if the game didn't go to such great lengths to draw attention to them, but once the story finds its footing and the mystery draws you in, everything clicks. I have no real complaints except that I was more impressed by the clever construction of the plot than I was attached to the characters, so the attempts to tug on the heartstrings in the true ending left me a little cold. Still very much worth a play if you like narrative games with lots of conversation and some puzzle-solving.