Firewatch (Campo Santo) is a beautifully melancholy adventure game. After a short prelude about loosing connection with his wife to early onset dementia,  Henry takes up a post as a fire lookout in Shoshone National Forest with his only contact being with his supervisor Delilah via radio. As the player navigates the beautiful forrest settings, they learn about other lookouts who left notes in various drop boxes and uncover a mystery amid the trees. 

Beautiful vistas and some creepy moments are layered into a story of grief and our inability to face loss. Both Henry and Delilah have their own past regrets and traumas, their own poor choices, and their own forms of avoidance. Their connection is in part due to their isolation, and it is both sweet and distant, because they are never in the same place together. 

It’s a bit of a slow experience, as the player wanders the beautiful landscape alone, moving toward different points on the map to discover more about the past and what has happened in the park. The slow pace adds to the sense of isolation inherent in the story, though at times I wished I could have picked up the pace some. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful and tragic story, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

Storyteller (developed by Daniel Benmergui) is a delightful puzzle game in which storytelling is the mechanic. The player is greeted with an objective (essentially a story ending) and a comic book style grid. By placing the characters together in different settings, the player has to figure out how to complete the story according to the parameters given. Most of the puzzles are straightforward, but some are quite challenging (and one or two I even had to seek help to complete).  The process of dropping characters into various interactions results in some humorously overdramatic situations and some wonderfully comedic surprises. It’s a short game (just an hour or two, depending on how quickly you complete the puzzles), but such good fun.

I had an issue this month with starting two giant RPGs and then having issues with continuing to play them. The first is Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios), in which I managed to create my player and played for about an hour before my Playstation account got suspended due to a complicated situation that I don’t want to get into involving my account getting hacked. Anyway, I have enjoyed the tiny bit I’ve played thus far, though I was still getting used to the DND aspects (which I don’t know much about). The characters and world are also fantastic and I can’t wait to get to know them more as soon (as soon as I get my account situation figured out).

I also started in on Starfield (Bethesda), in which I also managed to create my character and play for about an hour. The only thing that stopped me from playing this one was attempting to log in through Xbox Cloud Streaming and encountering a 25 minute wait to get into the game — and I just haven’t been back to it since. I didn’t quite spend enough time in it yet to get a sense of how I felt about the gameplay, characters, or worlds, but I’m looking forward to getting into it more soon.

I’m also still stuck on Bennet Foddy’s Getting Over It. It’s become one of those games that I just come back to again and again when I’m in the right mood. I attempt to get up that mountain a few times, and when I’m tired of being frustrated by my failure to do so, I put it down and move on to something else. I’m going to get up that mountain someday. I am.

If you’d like to know about the rest of recent culture I consumed, including books, movies, and TV, you can check out my Culture Consumption for September.