Firewatch

Its alright

Not a very good game in my opinion for the asking price. I am very glad that I had bought this for like 3 euros when it was on sale. Firewatch is a shockingly buggy and unpolished game. They have these wooden logs in the level that you can walk up to, press the spacebar and your character will play an animation of him climbing over it. It's cute but you can break it extremely easily. In most cases, there is nothing stopping you from walking up to the log from the side, getting on top of it, looking down and triggering the prompt to climb it while you are standing on top of it which will result in your character grabbing onto thin air and climbing over nothing, resulting in your flying in the air over the log in this very strange state where gravity only pushes you down when moving, meaning you can stay flying there as long as you want. You can also trigger this bug when you attempt to climb a log that is half sunk into the ground and you start climbing it from the elevated point. Maybe the programmers had assumed that the logs would always be placed on a perfectly flat ground and that the level designer(s) would place them in tight passages that wouldn't allow you to walk up onto them from the side. The reason why I'm making such a big deal out of this is because this is a 20 euro game and any playtester would have been able to catch this immediately. That's not all the bugs though, for example, when you interact with the door in your tower, the game will play an animation of the character opening the door and walking through it. The issue is that if you are looking slightly upwards or slightly downwards, your camera will snap up for couple of frames and then snap back into the correct place. It's absolutely nauseating! Or another example: Since there is no jump button, there is a mechanic where you look at the place where you want to jump to, press a button and the character will play a jump animation and automatically move to the desired location. The issue is that the camera just snaps into the position and can snap upwards or downwards for a couple frames like with the door animatons. Maybe the game knows how unpleasant and motion sickness inducing this is so sometimes you get spared and get no jumping animation and your character just unceremoniously flies to the jumping destination with his idle animation still playing. Thanks game! Or yet another example: Walking and moving around is extremely janky and unpolished which is kind of an issue for a walking simulator. They have this mechanic where you cannot walk off of edges and your character will get automatically stopped. Why? Well it's so that they can have pre-set places where you get a janky and jerky animation of the character walking off of a ledge and dropping down. I'm assuming they implemented it like this as they didn't want to spend an eternity placing and aligning millions of invisible walls around edges, so they added an automatic system for it instead. The issue is that the "prevent the player walking over an edge and dropping down" system is poorly implemented and you often end up getting stuck on top of rocks or small little bushses and have to spend like a minute, fiddling around the controls to get off. I don't think I have ever played a game where you can nearly get stuck by just walking on top of a small protruding rock in the ground. And The first person animation are way too snappy and walking into a wall at an angle (or attempting to walk over an edge at an angle) will result in the walk animation completely spazzing out and blinking between the idle animation and move animation. Again, this is a 20 euro game and a playtester would have caught this instantly. I found the gameplay loop itself to be deeply unsatisfactory and disjointed. Navigating the world is very disorientating, everything looks the same so you have to constantly use the janky map which is bafflingly mapped to the "m" key which forced me to always take my hand off of the mouse and go hunting for it on my keyboard which is not what I would call seamless. The story itself is also pretty uninteresting [spoiler]and the big reveal in the the cave is not very shocking or sad in any way[/spoiler]. Maybe it's because the first time I attempted to [spoiler]walk over the dead kid to progress, my player character instead snapped into the idle animation, started flying away from the kid and then teleported infront of it, the camera snapped down and the game crashed, forcing me to replay that entire section again.[/spoiler]