~The Game Pass Thread~

Well, it might be my favorite video game of all time, for what that’s worth.

It ranks right up there with Firewatch on my list of “games I found ridiculously annoying that other people love”. Glad you liked it, though!

I love doing the same shit over and over again!

/s

Outer Wilds is the most over-praised game ever.

Thanks, now I know to skip Firewatch. I feel the same about Outer Wilds.

Firewatch and The Outer Wilds are utterly different games with almost no common features. Not liking one doesn’t mean you won’t like the other.

There’s was hardly any game to Firewatch, it was more like an interactive novel. There is absolutely a “game” in Outer Wilds but its similarity with Firewatch is that they’re both a non-combat exploration thing. Firewatch is probably more “emotionally resonant” just because its framing is so on the nose.

I’ll say that I liked Firewatch enough to play through it to the end. It’s pretty short and doesn’t overstay its welcome. But I’m predisposed to like thoughtful walking simulators.

The Outer Wilds is a game that I keep thinking I should like because I love time-loops and space games with actual orbits and exploration, but just doesn’t ever get traction when I try to play it. And I keep forcing myself back to it and keep sliding off of it and have basically come to the conclusion that it won’t stick either due to my atrophied attention span or due to some fundamental property the game is missing (which I don’t know what that could be, because it seems great.)

That’s me as well, tbh. I think it’s just an age / lifestyle thing at this point (although the weird cartoon people doesn’t help). It’s hard to keep all the plates spinning in Outer Wilds unless you sit down and finish it in a short period of time; it’s hard to jump back in weeks or months later. In fact post COVID i don’t really have time for deep emotional experiences either in game form, so i’m kind of out of Firewatch like games as well, despite having several in queue i really ought to be playing. I feel like that Outer Wilds is so amazingly creative and uses that low-poly world to actually do something interesting (the worlds, the physics, ect) that it elevates it far above most other games.

Firewatch otoh had this core “millennial” ethos (pardon the slight) where the internal emotional experience supersedes the consequences in the real world. Firewatch kind of made me mad, like a guy who signed up to be a night watchmen on a cruise ship, but fails in his duty and in effect made decisions that actually sank the ship, but it’s all ok, because he figured out his core emotional problems and is now ready to move on. In the end the designers of Firewatch don’t actually subscribe to the idea that the people doing that job actually, you know, care about that job, because the lifestyle is so isolating and foreign and eclectically unique from the external point of view.

Note to Self: Don’t get Covid.

I “finished” Tinykin yesterday, at least the main story, I think about 50 hours played so far. Most of the areas still need me to find more stuff though.

My son didn’t want me to finish, of course. I tried to talk to him about how it’s okay to finish things, even if it makes you happy or sad that you finished them. But I don’t know if he absorbed any of that. He immediately wanted to go back to his favorite level, the one with the kitchen sink that looks like our kitchen sink. So that’s what we did.

Fwiw, my main issue with Firewatch was camera movement, especially climbing animations. It made me really nauseous.

Put me in the ‘Firewatch is overrated, Outer Wild isn’t’ camp.

I liked Firewatch a lot despite my comments above. I did finish it where i’m still chewing through Outer Wilds.

It did help that i was once serenaded by an actual woman who lived in a Firetower unexpectedly while ATVing through a national forest, invited up, and given the whole history of her raising a family while living in fire towers (her husband was stationed 8 miles or so away).

Same here, and had similar issues that kept me from getting far into Outer Wilds.

Firewatch and Outer Wilds literally could not be more different from one another unless one of them was a book.

Outer Wilds is one of my favorite games of all time. Utterly brilliant design. Exemplifies self-directed discovery without any handholding. And it tells a great, surprising story too!

Everyone reading this should try out Potion Craft. It’s such an ingenuous way to design a crafting system and the shopkeep part of it is addictive fun as well.

I played the demo during one of the Steam demo fests earlier this year and I loved the look of it and thought the exploratory crafting system was ingenious… but I didn’t find it a lot of fun? I’ll definitely have to see what might have been tweaked, though.

I’ve been playing the hell out of it for the last few days. I think I’ve hit a point in the progression, though, where it feels like just too much to do to make the next crystal thing. I like the game, just not sure I like it enough to plow through all that.