By the time the game ends, this conspiracy amounts to something quite insignificant. You are put in the shoes of Henry, a fire lookout in the Shoshone National Forest who’s on the verge of stumbling upon an evil conspiracy in the woods. Most of the events that have a significant bearing on the events of the game happen off-screen and outside the entirety of the game’s plot.

There are no prizes for guessing that the game is rare, and in more ways than one. (Needless to say, spoilers follow from here onwards) Anticlimax the Antihero

Of being in a better position to answer that tantalising question: Perhaps, by making us aware of the futility of what we do, it helps us become more aware of what we want from life. In doing so, perhaps the game does more than it was ever expected to accomplish. That the result seems nothing more than an ordinary man’s attempt to escape the drudgery. That none of those fantastic things came to being. But it all comes crashing down at the end, only for you to seethe in rage, and when calmer, to be disappointed at how it all came to be. It intrigues you at the beginning, then takes you on a journey full of stunning sights and flights of fancy. We wouldn’t like them to remind us of how deeply flawed our worlds are, nor would we like to know even more about the issues that trouble us.īut maybe sometimes, a game comes along that does precisely those things. By definition, we wouldn’t like our games to hit too close to reality. We play video games as an act of escape from a widespread drudgery that surrounds us to no end. Life is a journey of nightmares and anticlimaxes, but thankfully interspersed with some moments of genuine happiness. Instead, life is mostly made up of a few joys, some more heartbreaks, and a whole lot of sniffles. Storybook happy endings in life happen rarely. In those differences lie who we are, and although we take separate paths and experience disparate consequences for our actions, life invariably finds a way to screw us over anyway. We try to understand what we want, and we behave differently in trying to get to the place we want to go to. But how we would like our lives to be and how our lives actually are, are never the same. In a world where everyone is in a conscious or subconscious flux about how they interpret happiness, we would all like to be happy in some way. Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine Divinity: Original Sin 2 Resident Evil 2 Remake God of War (2018) Red Dead Redemption 2 Uncharted 4: A Thief's End Hollow Knight Ori and The Blind Forest: Definitive Edition Prey (2017) Factorio Tyranny DOOM Dark Souls III Detroit: Become Human VA-11 HALL-A Inside Super Seducer 2 Finding Paradise What Remains of Edith Finch Subnautica Horizon: Zero Dawn Pyre Crash Bandicoot N.Of course you would.

The firewatch game