prettyunsmart

For anyone who has played it, how difficult is this game? I could imagine a game like this being either really relaxing or incredibly stressful. Part of me wants to escape from my day to day problems with a happy farming game, but another part of me is scared that failing at a virtual career will only deepen my anxieties about my real life one.

Dress up really was my favorite part of the beta. Dark Zone loot was fine (guns and armor with better stats!). But nothing matched my excitement by finding a nifty hat. I wonder how reviews for this game will work. The online component seems so important that just a small group of people with review codes might not give the best indication of the final product.

I generally like meta-narrative stuff too, but the whole idea feels pretty played out to me. Like I said, the presentation was stylish and well done overall, but I just feel like the idea is something a certain kind of game has done to death in the last 5 years or so.

I've been playing it a bunch since yesterday and I'm really happy with how it turned out. The story is a bit underwhelming, but it's well presented. And the central mechanic is just so fun that I don't really care. Now I'm just running through "Katana Only Challenge Mode" which is the most insufferably video game-y thing I've heard in a while, but that sort of doesn't matter.

I made the mistake of reading a bunch of the Firewatch subreddit around the time the game come out and it seemed to be nothing but people complaining that the game wasn't what they expected. Grievances ranged from "I was able to speed run the game in X number of minutes, therefore the game is overpriced" to "this game is focused on story and dialog more than I expected therefore it is overpriced." It made me feel for anyone who makes a creative thing and send it out into the world only to have people complain that it isn't exactly the kind of thing that they usually like. EDIT: Which isn't to say I think Firewatch is above criticism or without flaws. I just don't think it's too helpful to complain that one genre of game isn't more like another.

I took pictures of nature for the most part, and then at the very end I took a picture of Brian's body and immediately felt terrible about it: https://firewatch.camera/LostLincolnHill

Like most of the people on here, I have mixed feeling about the Tom Chick review. Instead of making me think "this thing shouldn't be a game," it just made me think that if Sean were to write a novel I'd want to read it.

Now you've gone and made me want to go hiking, but it's very, very cold where I am at the moment.

I haven't had that "a game I want to play is out now, but school isn't over yet" feeling for a long time. Thanks for the nostalgia Campo Santo.

I've been playing Sunless Sea since it went on sale earlier in the week. It's pretty good! My first captain was an idealistic poet who only wanted to travel the underzee to collect stories to write an epic. Unfortunately, he/I thought it was a good idea to try to fight a giant crab and a pirate ship at the same time without reading up on the combat system first. I'm kind of un-enthused about the combat, but the story parts of the game are pretty great. I think Danielle compared it to The Yawgh which I think is pretty close, both in tone and overall style. What you think of the setting, the weird-fiction style, and the tendency to make silly changes like calling the see "the zee" might change how much you enjoy it. So, have other thumbs checked this thing out?

I'm not far far in at all, but the tutorial is in a place that kind of feels like it would be an end of game thing. When I first had my attention drawn towards it, I wondered if I should go there immediately, or if I should wait until I had done more puzzles. I'm glad I did, because wandering and just seeing how much there is going on in the game was great, but I could also understand the opposite reaction.

Sorry about that. I thought about trying to explain where it happened, but then I didn't know how to explain it. I edited my post and tried to offer a bit of explanation.

According to Steam, I'm a bit under two hours in, but I've mostly been wandering around taking screenshots. I did solve a set of puzzles that resulted in something surprising happening in the game world which I'll talk about in a spoiler tag. Spoilers are for a thing I saw on top of a mountain

Any art is pixel art if you look at it on a computer screen.

That's really great to hear. I know Blow bothers a lot of people, but I really admire what he's done with his involvement with the Indie Fund and moves like this. It seems like an important move for him (and other members of his team) to be willing to take extra time on the game and spend extra money in order to treat employees humanely. I hope it works out well for all of them.

Mostly, I just left the game thinking that it was a good teaser, and that I'd like to see what this team would do with a more fleshed out game. In addition to Amstell's performance, and Pugh's design (both of which I liked a lot), I was happy to see that Jack de Quidt wrote the game. He's on Friends at the Table with Austin Walker and seeing people who make things I enjoy make more things always makes me happy.

And even more recently, Oculus representatives (possibly Palmer) were saying that the CV1 would be in the "ballpark" of the dev kits, which would put them in the $300-400 range. I'm on the same page with you, thinking that the price is probably fair, but that their messaging could have been clearer.

I think more than anything, I'd be interested in seeing a GearVR-like device that works smoothly with other phones. It probably won't happen since there are so many different devices of so many different sizes that you'd need to account for. But I can dream.

Yeah, I feel the same way. I get that the tech is expensive, but I just can't justify it personally. I think a lot of people will probably feel the same way. It's a shame, since I've used the DK2 and I've seen what it can do. But at this price, and the price of the PC hardware needed to run it, I can't see the audience getting to be that large.

Not sure if this is a placeholder, but $599 seems to be the price.

I guess Palmer's been saying that the initial device will be subsidized to some extent, so I'm holding out hope for a slightly more reasonable price. But it will probably cost and we'll all be told to get a second job if we can't afford it.

You're probably right. Though for it to be a mainstream success (which is already a long shot given the PC hardware requirements), it probably needs to be around $400 or less. Charging more than the cost of a console for a peripheral, no matter how awesome that peripheral is, just seems like a hard sell.

Huh. OK. Maybe I misjudged it. I don't tend to replay games with branching stories since I like to let my choices stand rather than trying to get the "best" ending.

So I played Emily Is Away after seeing it on Nina Freeman's GOTY list at Giant Bomb. Formally, it really worked for me. I was a teenager at about the time the game is set, so the simulated desktop, IM client, and the profile pictures all worked well (I even used my old AIM screen name for old time's sake). I also really like the idea of having to pick your dialog choice and then hit keys on the keyboard to make it appear on screen. But as a story, I kind of hated it.