So I've played through Firewatch today, and I have to say that I'm fairly disappointed. From the previews I'd seen the game looked rather interesting from a gameplay perspective in the sense that it gave the player freedom to do what they want with certain object and certain situations and have those choices affect the story in a meaningful way. However, from what I've gathered, no matter what you do or what dialogue options you pick, aside from a couple of future mentions, the story itself remains largely unchanged. Aside from that the gameplay is severely lacking - there are no puzzles or anything that would present any type of challenge. All the locked boxes in the game (aside from one) have the same password and contain "map details" that basically turn the player's map into just another video game minimap that clearly displays available paths and the player's current location. Moreover, the game's map is pretty small and empty - there's practically nothing interesting to explore, and the game more or less just guides you through the points of interest anyway. The game is also rather short and in my opinion the story itself is pretty weak.

Overall the game isn't offensively bad, and the trailers and previews aren't that misleading. What bothers me though is the critical reception the game has garnered. The review scores seem completely disproportionate for what's actually there. This reminds me of another game: Gone Home. Now, Firewatch at least has some gameplay value to it, but Gone Home on the other hand is basically just a 3D model of a house that you walk around and collect notes. If you look at Gone Home's Metacritic scores, it's currently rated 8.6 by professional game critics and only 5.4 by the users. Now, I know that the typical gamer generally lets more of their personal opinions seep into their reviews - especially concerning a controversial title like Gone Home - and they do often stick to one extreme or the other, but the difference between the two scores is impossible to ignore.

Personally, I think that the issue lies with the reviewers. People who get into this business tend to care more about games as a medium and the mainstream society's perception of gaming, while the average person cares more about the pure value and enjoyment they got from a product they purchased. So when a game like Gone Home or Firewatch comes out - a game that defies the typical standard of what a game ought to be, they tend to favor it in their reviews, especially when it contains touchy, "adult" subjects like the ones tackled in these two games.

Maybe I'm not totally right with this theory of mine, but it does feel that as video games grow as an artistic medium, more emphasis is put on the subject of the game rather than the game itself by the critics, and that causes a divergence between what people are looking for in reviews and what they actually provide.