"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

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

Replaying this years later, the characters and story were even better than I remembered, while the puzzles were even WORSE :( A flawed gem with some of the best written (and best voiced!) characters in video game history stuck doing some of the most godforsaken nonsensical tasks. (Seriously tho the voice acting in AAA games these days cannot hold a candle to these fantastic performances, the actors completely bring these blocky characters to life.) As a fan of this game I implore you: just use a walkthrough and experience the story. Spare yourself the agony. But please do play the game because it's worth the hassle and the soundtrack is SO GOOD.