These 17 Minutes Of Firewatch Look And Sound Great
Gone Fishin'
Firewatch [official site] looks increasingly exciting to me. It's the first game from Campo Santo, the studio formed of former Telltale, Double Fine and 2K Marin developers, and casts you in the role of a park ranger attempting to protect a forest from fires, partying teenagers, and maybe sasquatch I dunno. There are 17 new minutes of the game being played by developers Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin below.
These 17 minutes are a follow-up to the previous 17 minutes Campo Santo shared via IGN, and picks up exactly where that last video ended. Obviously there are some spoilers, by dint of showing the game and your potential interactions within it, but there are things they're careful not to show - including certain dialogue options that are marked as "Hidden for IGN" so as not to give too much away.
Me? I skimmed through it, watching parts but not all of it. I already know I'm going to play it and part of the fun of this kind of Gone Home-style adventure game is poking and prodding at the environment and characters and seeing exactly where the boundaries lie.
If you're not yet so convinced, lucky John has already had his hands on the section from the previous video, and said, among other things:
The reason so many options exist is because Campo Santo are spending a lot of time putting the unfinished game in front of people, and watching how they play. People kept throwing the stereo in the lake, so now that’s a thing. But others think Henry is far more likely to politely place it back on the rock, and calmly scold the distant figures. I did both, after a rather fortunate bug in this early build allowed me a chance to restart and behave far more how I thought Henry might. In fact, you apparently could even pick up their litter, bring it down to the lake, and just start throwing it toward them. There’s a reaction for that too.
Which sounds promising. I'm particularly fond of the first-person animations whenever you pick up and throw items or clamber over scenery. Your character seems to have big, cartoony sausage-hands, and every action is exaggerated in a way that I initially thought would be distracting but which turns out to be simply fun. The game is due for release on February 9th 2016.