Author: Samsara

Watching it Burn: Firewatch Liveblog

For the next few hours/days, I will be liveblogging my experience playing Firewatch, a first-person adventure/mystery style game revolving around Henry, who is fire lookout volunteer from Boulder, Colorado. After completing the opening sequence, it seems that Firewatch is similar to Gone Home and Dear Esther in the way that they are all games that revolve around family “dramas.” Each storyline revolves around occurrences that any family could relate to. Like how Gone Home was based on a 90’s family not accepting homosexuality, and Dear Esther revolving around a drunk driving accident, Firewatch also seems to be based on the fact that Henry’s wife Julia has dementia, which could easily be another problem that millions of people around the world have to face. But, unlike the previous two, Firewatch doesn’t have a, literally, “scary” feel to it. There is no hint of horror, no rain, no thunder; rather, there is a sad tone to it. The music really sets up the stories emotional aspect. Even though it starts out happy at first, you can feel it progress to an unhappy climax and the slow music brings out the feeling of grief.

 

More to come!

 

Liveblogging Firewatch

Watching it Burn: Firewatch Liveblog

For the next few hours/days, I will be liveblogging my experience playing Firewatch, a first-person adventure/mystery style game revolving around Henry, who is fire lookout volunteer from Boulder, Colorado. After completing the opening sequence, it seems that Firewatch is similar to Gone Home and Dear Esther in the way that they are all games that revolve around family “dramas.” Each storyline revolves around occurrences that any family could relate to. Like how Gone Home was based on a 90’s family not accepting homosexuality, and Dear Esther revolving around a drunk driving accident, Firewatch also seems to be based on the fact that Henry’s wife Julia has dementia, which could easily be another problem that millions of people around the world have to face. But, unlike the previous two, Firewatch doesn’t have a, literally, “scary” feel to it. There is no hint of horror, no rain, no thunder; rather, there is a sad tone to it. The music really sets up the stories emotional aspect. Even though it starts out happy at first, you can feel it progress to an unhappy climax and the slow music brings out the feeling of grief.

 

More to come!

 

Liveblogging Firewatch

New-Form Literature

Richard Bell, in Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home, compares Dear Esther and Gone Home in the ways that they portray characters, narrate stories, and engage the player.

Dear Esther, in my opinion is clearly the more literary one, as Bell mentions. It isn’t as “engaging” in the sense that the player merely doesn’t have to do anything else except walk and listen. Gone Home, on the other hand, is far more captivating. We find ourselves solving puzzles, picking up every piece of the story (sometimes missing a few), and the story we get is directly related to our actions. But, for anyone who enjoys reading poetry, old novels, or any other work of literature, it is a great game to be exposed to a source that is considered an idiosyncratic source of literature.

Avatar

Samsara AVATAR-512x410I loved glasses. That was up until I had to start wearing them. I got my eyes checked in 7th grade hoping I would need them, but I didn’t. Three years later I noticed I couldn’t see the blackboard as well as I used to. I knew what I needed, and I thought I’d be happy, but I wasn’t.

How many glasses do you wear when you’re watching a 3D flick? How do you see clearly underwater without them on? Do you change them everything you walk out in the sun? Do you have to carry around two pairs? Why are they so expensive? Is there a dent in my nose?

But with all these questions still unanswered, I got used to them, I tolerated them. And now, I rely on them to help me figure out if the person coming my way has a familiar face or not (and whether I should wave back, so I can spare the embarrassment of waiving back to a stranger).

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Glasses are great.

picture from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/47393687@N08/5522941329/

Gone Home

As the thunder sounds and the rain pours, the developers of Gone Home have, very successfully, used pathetic fallacy to create a distraught environment. At first, it appears as though the game would be a horror game, with a few jump-scares here and there, indicated by, mostly, the weather and thunder, and also by the scattered references to the “insane” uncle Oscar as well as the Ouija board and some notes. But, as the story progresses it isn’t difficult to realize that there is nothing to fear at all. The story is about a not-so-perfect family and the troubles many families actually have to face every day.

 

We find ourselves as Katie Greenbriar in 1995 (shown by the various notes, letters, and tags scattered around) in a not-so-recently moved-into house. The story unfolds as we find clues and objects around the house. Each clue triggers a “Journal Entry” read aloud to us by our little sister Sam who is a 17-year-old high schooler. This read-aloud style is the reason it’s seemed so easy to connect with Sam. You can hear the emotion in her voice when she is talking about people she loves and her new experiences. She isn’t just a voice; she is a person with emotions very similar to ours.

 

What is also interesting about the game is that, even though we don’t get to interact with any of the other characters, we are made aware of their lives as well. The mother working for the state forestry service and being rather successful, possibly having an affair with a co-worker, the father being a mediocre author and obsessing over the assassination of JFK, and Lonnie being a rebellious teenager who did what she pleased, are all brought out by letters and notes left around the house.

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