3/9/2024 0 Comments Firewatch true endingThe teens of Oxenfree will almost certainly make it to the end of the story in some fashion, and the astronauts of Tharsis almost certainly won’t. Your zero-gravity, zero-luck astronauts can’t roll the dice to progress without food between turns, so a choice may exhibit as such: Do we eat the medic? Is it ok if she was dead anyway? Is it ok to KILL her if it means everyone else will survive? ![]() The fun is not so much about overcoming the odds ( because you won’t) so much as finding best practices in the face of imminent catastrophe. As the captain of one of the most fragile and unbelievably awful, horrid, fucking awful spaceships ever made, it’s your job to get your wide-eyed crew to Mars safely through a series of jaw-clenching dice rolls. Tharsis resembles a ruthless board game that runs on numbers - and the numbers are coming to kill you. Oxenfree is a game about who Alex is or could be, not what happens in the plot (although that’s pretty cool too). And none of those are words that just float around on the screen. Oxenfree’s multiple outcomes roll out from the numerous discussions you have with them throughout the game, in which you choose totally organic responses to frame Alex as someone who is understanding, forgiving, skeptical, or spiteful. The elegant adventure is driven not only by the unsettling sounds emanating from your radio, but by the tension growing between Alex and her chatty teen friends: the new step-brother, the earnest airhead, the spiteful drama queen, etc. In Oxenfree, you co-inhabit the head of Alex, a teenage girl marooned in mystery on an eerie, antique island - seemingly one state over from Twin Peaks. Players have been trained to wait and look for the outlines to appear, blind to the coloring inside. ![]() The outcomes have gotten so big, divergent, extravagant and in-your-face that a singular endpoint in a game claiming to be about choice is seen as a betrayal, even if a billion permutations precede it. Go left to make it rain prozac-infused puppies, go right for the reign of eternal eldritch horror from which none shall ever escape. Epic games have made galactic commodities of choices, planting them in the road like neon signs that can be seen from space. If these choices strike you as weightless and insignificant, it’s probably because you’re peering at them through the lens of video games - some telescope on a far-off planet pointed back here at our teensy little decisions on Earth. You interject only at key moments as a god-like guest author, chiming in on important subjects like how Henry deals with an attempted mugging, and what kind of dog he gets with his wife, Julia. Without so much as a photograph in mind you spend just a few minutes learning about Henry, the man you’re about to play as a fire lookout in a Wyoming forest. ![]() You flip through the opening moments of Firewatch, a new first-person thriller from developer Campo Santo, like you’re speed-reading through someone’s biography.
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