Firewatch is a first person adventure set in 1989 where the player takes the role of a fire lookout in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. The game starts off in an incredibly strong fashion, setting up a narrative that is very emotionally gripping in just a few text lines - the wife of the main character, Julia, has early-onset dementia and this has taken a massive toll in their relationship. Henry, the main character, eventually comes to Shoshone, in a way, to escape from his marriage's issues after not being able to take care of Julia anymore.

When arriving to the park, he meets a woman - Delilah - with whom we speak for the entire game via a small, pocket radio, but never see. Delilah is our only company for the vast majority of the game. Throughout the game, the relationship between Delilah and Henry is developed as Henry takes on small tasks and hikes around Shoshone accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack and some gorgeous views - I took a lot of screenshots.

The game jitters a bit and has quite a bit of frame drops which should not happen since the game isn't technically impressive at all, even if very beautiful, and while that signals a bit of lack of polish, it was not a deal breaker for me. As the game progresses, the voice lines exchanged between Delilah and Henry are an absolute delight, and I often found myself walking around in-game just DESESPERATE for them to start talking again (that's how enjoyable they were). But soon enough the focus stops being on the inner troubles of the characters and starts being on some strange occurrencies happening in the park.

I will admit, the game had me on the edge of my seat for the majority of the time, and I was so focused and immersed that I was jumpscared twice with things that weren't that scary (LOL) but after the mystery unrolled I missed the more introspective, contemplative voice lines of the beginning of the game. The ending felt a bit rushed and not even seeing Delilah at the end honestly felt a little bit more like they didn't want to make a 3D model for her than anything else, it was really underwhelming. In spite of this, I never felt like the quality of the dialogue dropped, just that the focus of it changed and some plot lines were left unopened or were closed too quickly contrasting with the early game's more slow and calculated pace (for example, the teen's disappearing outcome is revealed to us in a single interaction from Delilah).

All in all, Firewatch is quite an experience, with an extremely strong visual identity (ranging from the beautiful designed posters to the varying canyon landscapes), solid soundtrack, brilliant voice acting and a very unique premise. But its execution ranges from brilliant to okay, it's technically a little rough around the corners, and the ending could've been more worked on. For a game with such a strong focus on escapism, with Henry running away from his wife's illness, Delilah avoiding her broken relationship, Ned trying to stay away from the consequences of his sins, and perhaps you, the player, trying to escape from reality while playing the videogame, Firewatch unfortunately feels like it's avoiding itself in its last legs.

Perhaps a little too topical for me right now...

Great experience, good use of interactive storytelling and symbolism, pretty art and music – but its minimalistic approach to storytelling and its very short runtime (about 30 minutes) I think will fail to cause a strong, lasting impression on me. However, everything Florence does, it does just about right.

As for the ending... I'll tell you what I think of it in about five or ten years, I suppose...

(Review originally written in Aug 2019 when I was 17 as a Twitter thread, reposting here in Sep 2022 for archival purposes. Not at all how I would write today, but I still like it!)

I finished Metal Gear Solid! It's a very good game that aged quite well, although some of its aspects are somewhat outdated, of course. The voice acting is commendable to this day. I really, really liked the game design, full of interesting ideas, no two parts of the game were the same.

It's really interesting how today's "cinematic" games are a synonym of lack of uniqueness and interactive gameplay but Metal Gear Solid goes totally against that - while presenting an amazing narrative with a new plot twist at every Codec call, it's always a game that's fun to play as a GAME, and you never feel like you're the spectator to a movie.

Every boss battle was quite memorable and so were the characters that oozed charm. My favorites were:

- Otacon, a very charming and likeable sidekick, with good comic relief points, always helpful, with a great redemption arc at the end
- Gray Fox, a great warrior that gave me the most challenging battle of all bosses, with an interesting backstory and motives, and above all, charm
- Naomi Hunter, not only because she's very pretty and her voice is SO CUTE, but she is a very interesting character overall. I liked her monologue at the end, even if it was a bit cryptic
- Mei Ling for being adorable, reliable, and always providing good advice, even if she wasn't the most important character in the story
And Ocelot and Sniper Wolf. I really enjoyed the torture scene as ironic as it may sound, and the GAME OVER screen where Liquid says "Ocelot... you DID IT AGAIN." and Ocelot answers with "Haha... Sorry, Boss." is really nice for a change, instead of the usual taunting where your allies scream in agony. As for Sniper Wolf, she probably has my favorite quote in the game.

"I finally understand. I wasn't waiting to kill people... I was waiting for someone to kill me. A man like you..."

As for my least favorite characters in the game, they're probably the Twin Snakes, Liquid and Solid. Liquid Snake feels like a hollow, edgy villain with world domination motives sugarcoated by "inferior genetics" and his wish of revenge on... basically everyone? I didn't like him. And Solid Snake feels like a mindless government puppet, although Gray Fox tries to tell him he's not. Really, all he knows about is following orders and asking about [a specific something] immediately after [specific something] is mentioned: it can get somewhat boring, honestly.

Some final notes about my personal experience:
- I chose probably the worst way to play the game: MGS Integral for the PC with that one QoL patch. Truth is: the port is still kind of bad. It definitely looks great in 1080p, but the controls suck, your custom control settings reset randomly, FMVs NEVER play correctly, save games sometimes glitch... the list goes on. You really shouldn't play it like this, althought it's not the worst experience ever.
- This definitely had the potential to become one of my favorite games ever, but I played the game reeeally sloowly and the last part was somewhat frustrating, I definitely felt some fatigue and just wanted it all to end. Plus, the port wasn't the best, and finally, Solid and Liquid could be more interesting. Those factors keep it from being one of my all time favorite games ever.
- These are my favorite game tracks!
youtu.be/n1fWzyDVesc
youtu.be/mRSG5k86GFs
youtu.be/hnp_JgJSLoc
youtu.be/LqZVNzNc23w
youtu.be/OReM-Vm2vj4

In conclusion, the game is damn good at basically everything it tries to do, be it dialogue, level design, variety of gameplay mechanics, level of detail (for a PSX game, it's amazing!), characters, graphics, soundtrack, atmosphere, ah, I've ran out of things to compliment. I can really feel it was a revolutionary game and it deserves its place on all those "games you have to play before you die" lists. I'm super hyped for MGS2! Let's go!

Final score: 9,5/10

(I never played MGS2 lol)

Great videogame that somewhat resparked my interest in videogames with its simplicity. There is nothing about the traversal that hasn't been said yet, but I'd like to mention how good it is one more time before moving on to the rest.

Things I liked:
- Presentation is superb, with high production values. Beating this in my shiny new computer was glorious. NYC looks amazing especially in the afternoon and at night, the fights look awesome and colorful, and there are loads of pretty nice shots.
- Combat is very satisfying. Gadgets are fucking awesome, and I consider returning to this someday just to toy around with the trip mines in the bases I didn't clear. I loved the finishers and the dodging too.
- Variety of suits is really nice! I enjoyed playing various segments of the game with different suits
- Acting is quite good, the ending sequence is fantastic. Story is much more serviceable than I initially expected. Otto knowing about Peter after all actually caught me off guard, I thought he was just very naïve, but I was the naïve one after all, heheh. I enjoyed Parker's character a lot, particularly how Insomniac was not afraid to make him suffer. I think Spider-Man's overall tough life is the thing that makes him such a loveable and relatable character, and he is constantly taking an emotional beating for the most part of this game lol

Things I disliked:
- HUGE AMOUNTS OF COPAGANDA. JESUS
- Higher difficulty just drags out the game for no real reason - on the highest difficulty, I wasn't dying at all nor I had to rethink the way I was playing, but the enemies sure took their sweet time to die. This made me slightly demotivated to play the game. If you play it, set the difficulty to the lowest one and just enjoy the ride as a cinematic thing
- Mary Jane gameplay segments were somewhat boring
- Martin Li just kind of... fades out of the plot? No closure at all. Despite being decent, the story has this veil of... triple A blandness to it.

I enjoyed it overall, and I hadn't beat a videogame this long (although Spider-Man can be considered kind of short speaking in overall videogame standards lol) in quite a while. Here's to hoping I'll play more videogames in 2023 :)

It's easy to fool people into thinking you're a competent game when you have an engine with premade assets and flashy lighting doing most of the work for you. The only good things in this game are the cool sword animations and the marginally okay mechanics already executed far better in games that came before (play Titanfall 2!), but even those are not so polished at times. Comically awful, soulless writing that I probably could not have executed worse if I had tried, one of the (if not The) most generic takes on the cyberpunk aesthetic I've ever seen. The difficulty is nice, but the level design isn't too interesting, and it sure as hell isn't going to be the story that motivates me to play this. And what's with the random braindead puzzles? Before this, I had a resolution of finishing more games that I started, but I realized this really makes no sense when you're forcing yourself to play mediocrity. Avoid!