The Pleasant Surprise That is Fireawatch

So I've just played Firewatch by Campo Santo and god it was such a pleasant surprise. I didn't thought much of it when I first learned about it. Sounded like some hipster shit, like On the Road for millennials or whatever. But it was good, it was so good. For whatever reason it reminded me of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, another game that starts as something completely different and after you finish it, months can pass, and it's still there, haunting you.

The Way: Failed Way of Selling a Dream of Nostalgia

The only good part of this game by Puzzling Dream is the beautiful scenery. Otherwise it hops directly into the bin: from the bland hero and the absolutely boring lovey dovey plot motivation to the TvTropes and the kitchen sink ideas about the aliens plus music so bland I'd rather listen to elevator music. This game can't hold a candle to Another World or Flashback, two ingenious and original games that the devs desperately try to compare their game to.

Hyper Shit Flicker

Hyper Light Drifter... I've heard so many good things about this game. Heck I think I know of it since it was first announced and the Ballsucker, sorry I meant Kickstarter campaign was on.
But now that I played an hour or so of it it's really a huge disappointment.

The music from Fez and some generic vaporwave pixel graphics.
Wow, so innovative much originality.
We all know damn well what the reason for all the "10/10 play it now" IGN ratings are. Gamergate showed it all too clearly: friendships with the important brass in gaming media and the dev/artist/whatever being a woman into gay sex.
It's not that gamers are dead. Games are dead.

An Honest Review of the Witness (2016) or, as the Buddha said: When something tries too hard to be empty it ends up being full of manure

The Witness by Jonathan Blow. I had really big hopes for this, ever since I saw the first screenshots. A week has passed since I finished it and I can say that it is sadly mostly a forgettable experience.

The New Age hipster mystique is all the rage with Blow's new game.

Most of what gives a skeleton of narrativium to the whole thing is made up by New Age hipster bullshit. If that isn't bad enough, the narrativium is mostly offered via recordings scattered throughout the ludic environment, an abandoned island, many of which are so long, tedious and narrated by such a tiresome obnoxious female voice to make me actually want to stop it at some points. But you can't do that. Literally. There's no stop button, except for unplugging the whole computer. One of the recordings was, I reckon, a quarter of an hour or more. It felt like hell, even more as it was supposed to be a sort of a narrative apex to reaching an environmental and ludic apex.

Why couldn't the narrator be this nice stone lady that doesn't talk?!

The part that I do remember and will stay with me in a pleasant manner is the beginning as it was simply the single part of the game that didn't suck. You find a new in-universe, a calm, serene and mysterious Arcadian decor, unpopulated but filled with luxuriant flora and strange devices. Soon though the surprise naturally decreases and it isn't replaced by anything. In the end you feel cheated and it's precious little that the video (among others) of a dead-eyed New Age cultist woman imploring you to stop trying to find meaning manages to do.

Please. Please stop looking for meaning. You payed forty bucks for this crap. You have to be Zen and let it go. So please, I tell you once more, stahp lookin!!