Honestly, I like how Firewatch ends. It's kinda pedestrian and "boring" for a videogame, but its also depressingly real. It reminded me of when I'd go on camping trips as a kid and hike up mountain trails, and every odd, out of place thing I'd see would become some clue to a grand mystery going on out there. But, there never was, and it was all built up in my head. That's exactly what the game makes you do; it never promises anything out of left field, it just presents you with totally normal--if a little unsettling--things, and you build all that up for yourself. And then the ending comes, and its plain, and its sad, and you feel a little hollow. I wouldn't want too many games to go that route, but I think it worked for it.
Maybe, but what if I'm not as paranoid as Henry? I spent all the game thinking Henry was overeacting to random bits of unconnected information. Turns out I was right, but It also turns out, It was boring.
Here's how Firewatch should have played out. There's something "off" about Delilah, hinting she knows things about you that shouldn't be possible. Smoke constantly shrouds the forest, yet there is no fire. Your tower gradually becomes more and more dilapidated. You are hunted by a mysterious figure with a pyramid-shaped helmet and massive blade. The job ad you answered slowly deteriorates, and eventually vanishes from your inventory. Finally it's revealed you killed your suffering wife out of mercy, and fled into the wilderness. You hid in an abandoned watchtower. There was never any job ad. Delilah was a hallucination. You have a final choice to continue hiding, or return to civilization to face the truth and consequences.
"Fear Watch" is a very precarious phrase, because as soon as you think about it, it's probably just watching horror movies or LPs. Layers of Fire is rad to the bone, though.
+Oreally Yeah, it pretty much describes 99% of "horror" games, which, like he said, may as well be jump scare amusement park rides that you've been on for the 15th time.
Edison Trent For a little while, Spookies house of Jumpscares was doing really well. I liked that it presented itself as a lighthearted comedy and slowly lets the environment creep in on you. Before you knew what was good for you, you had an actual monster stabbing you in the back to organ music. The games technical limitations held it back, but it did what it wanted to do really well. Lure the player into a false sense of security, slowly build up some tension and suspense, and then go all out at the last second.
Edison Trent It's just a problem that horror games have. When you go into a game excepting to be scared, it's harder to scare you. I remember Half-Life 2's Ravenholm, the entire game up to that point was action oriented, the rebels just got attacked, you got separated from Alex in the confusion, and while you're pondering the situation you ha- uh, is that a pair of legs tied to a rope hanging from a street lamp? It just took a nose dive into holy shitsville. For a horror game, Ravenholm would had been rather tame, but it just casually shows up in Half-Life 2. You weren't prepared for it, you're mind set wasn't expecting this shit.
Edison Trent There's only been one exception for me. A game that got scarier the more I played it. Slender, now this was before Slender got that Pewdiepie touch. My friend randomly sent me a file in the middle of the night over skype and just said "Play it" Starting up the game, I saw the title Slender, I knew who the Slenderman was. So seeing him wasn't all that shocking. It was a horror game where I was playing with the monster... at first. I got 6 pages on my first try, I was so close, so I tried again, got 4 pages, so on and so fourth. Eventually, I started to understand more and more how Slenderman moved, but the more I understood, the more I started to fear him. Simply because I didn't know what to do, or how to deal with it. On my 5th attempt, I noticed my hand was shaking out of control. A sensation I had never experienced before. I gave the game 8 attempts, each worst then the last. When I looked at the clock, it was 4am in the morning and I had to call it quits. So I went to bed, but I was terrified. I couldn't fall asleep. All I could think about was the game, it didn't try to scare with cheap tricks and illusions. It MADE me fear it through it's difficulty, but victory was so close that I couldn't just put it to the side as bullshit. I couldn't go to sleep, so instead I started to review the fucking information I had. How Slender moves faster the more pages I have, the layout of the map, max sprint lowers over time. Eventually I thought of a plan. My problem was, between 5-8 pages, Slenderman just moves too fast for me to keep my barrings straight, I just can't outrun the guy. So my goal was to limit the time spent between those pages by keeping the last three pages as close to each other as possible. So I would go to ALL the landmarks, find the pages, but not pick them up. I keep a mental note of where they are and formulate a path to collect one after another, ensuring the last three where as close to each other as possible. Beat it at 8am the same day. I had never felt so victorious. Passed out immediately with a smile on my face.
At 5:11, it's very true. I'm not a huge Amnesia fan, but Amnesia knew that you can't have scare after scare after scare. You need to have areas of relative safety, and allow tension to build up naturally, and have a scare that is set-up in a classy way.
It cracks you up because it cuts to the core of the problem with Early Access games in a single brilliant metaphor- people are paying to play an unfinished game, then defending it from any criticisms on the basis that being unfinished (and consequently pretty crap) is a pivotal part of the whole EA experience that they're paying for, regardless of the fact that this line of reasoning is _fucking stupid._
I originally saw this before I played Firewatch, and now seeing it again, I remembered something I wanted to say right after playing. Thank you for suggesting that I turn off the map markers for my first playthrough. Because I'd seen this first, I knew to do that before I even started the game, and I think it added a lot to the game compared to the playthroughs I've seen that use it.
On a lonely planet spinning its way toward damnation amid the fear and despair of a broken human race, who is left to fight for all that is good and pure and gets you smashed for under a fiver?
I actually must admit that I really enjoyed Layers of fear. I really like walking sims because I can‘t get through horror games that get me chased or that make you play hide and seek quite yet but I also don‘t want a good story to be wasted because I can‘t get over panicking after some weird monster starts chasing after me. Layers of fear was to me a story told through interaction that I really liked. I liked the visual effects, the variation and how creatively the characters trauma was portrayed by his delusions and how much it made me feel for the painter going through what he went through. What I also really enjoyed was that the story was really interpretation friendly. It doesn‘t just throw everything at you. Instead, It only gives you some pieces of the puzzle and let‘s you decide how they fit together and form a finished piece. I personally also felt really bad for the main character to be honest because he was clearly suffering from horrific paranoid schizophrenia and his symptoms only worsened the longer his illness was left untreated and he began to desperately selfmedicate with alcohol. What also kinda hit me hard was how his wife was so incapable of doing anything to help her husband because at the time not even doctors really knew how to properly treat the mentally ill let alone a woman that didn‘t specify in psychology herself. The poor woman understandably was suffering just as much as her husband as she was actively witnessing his decent into madness and how he began to see her as an antagonist after she had been disfigured by the fire. Schizophrenic people that also have paranoia symptoms often think really conspiritorial under a delusional episode so his mind was really to blame for the most part but in this story each member of the family was a victim. The painter because of his mental illness and the lack of support and help, his wife who was unable to cope with it all and who thanks to the time period was expected to basically be her husbands therapist and wife simultaneously without any proper knowledge of how to help him at all and their daughter who obviously was victimized by her fathers decent into madness and her mothers desperation and death. Layers of fear is a good portrayal of the horror of living through severe mentall illness while trying to live a normal successful life in a world that didn‘t yet understand what mental illness really was and how to properly treat it so I‘d suggest that the villian in this game wasn‘t the father (although he isn‘t innocent. Am not implying he is.) bur rather the mental illness he carried that spread through his family like a cancer because of the lack of proper treatment. Schizophrenia can cripple a persons life and the life of their loved ones as well. Often people wich frequent delusions live through nightmares day after day that we never have to live through so while layers of fear might be a little bit cliche and perhaps even a bit sensationalized, we can still apprechiate it for letting us experience how hard the life of a mentally ill person can be and how debilitating and horrifying delusions are especially when they live in a time where nobody was able to help them get better.
I see Yhatzee writing a book about a guy stuck in a horror castle who's been there for so long he's accepted it all after this. Including the monsters that have gotten sick of trying to scare him and not being allowed to actually touch him, so they just begrudgingly sneer at him while chewing on foxes or something. Every time he tries to leave the really big scary not-so-subtle wife metaphor comes out and drags him back in, only now instead of being creepy about it she just nags him to go into the room he keeps not going in because he knows it's where the ending is at, and it's one of those "even worse than before" endings.
@@inquisitorbenediktanders3142 Well. I've been doing the stay-at-home dad thing for quite a while now, and my kiddo doesn't give me much time to write. :/ He starts pre-K in the fall though! Looking forward to having some time to myself at last... Thanks for asking. I need these occasional reminders. :D
I quite liked Firewatch. I thought the game was relaxing and the story was interesting enough to keep me interested. I do agree though that the end reveal was a bit lame especially after the massive amount of build up it had.
+Raymond Williams You want a walking simulator? I'll give you a walking simulator!!! www.amazon.ca/Konami-40082-Walk-Out-Standard/dp/B002CZ7P04/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457569247&sr=8-1&keywords=Walk+it+Out
Hilariously, you actually AREN'T supposed to. Looking back results in a jump scare that kills you instantly; proceeding forward is the only way to finish the section, plus it gets you an achievement. lol
Firewatch feels like an unfinished screenplay to me. Like, with some more development it could have made an engrossing character study movie, kind of like Moon where it's basically just one guy wandering around growing progressively more paranoid. But as a game? Eh.
*Spoiler* At the part where it says "don't look back" on the wall, exactly what you think will happen happens... Wow why did I even bother writing this?
4:03 I always took that famous photo of the Loch Ness monster for a hoax, but I just realised for the first time it's very obviously just a tiny model floating in a pond
Honestly, Firewatch ultimately suffered from negatively subverting expectations to the point making the climax feel kind of uneventful. 40% of the story hints at what could have been a secret government plot, something possibly extraterrestrial, and they dance around some hidden killer on the land... only to find out it was none of those things and everything is alright, except for a boy who accidentally died. It’s anti-climactic and is the sole reason so few people are talking about the game today, despite it being well-received at launch.
Same here. By the time Henry and Delilah caught on that their conversations were being eavesdropped on and a Henry was being followed, I actually felt kinda tense, and the forest setting helped that immensely too, but at the end, when the revelations dropped, it was just so uneventful and weak I rushed to reach the end for the little bit of closure we got between the two.
And again Yahtzee perfectly describes what makes good horror. I am tempted to run a horror writing workshop at my university which are just showing clips from Zero Punctuation then explaining them and assigning examples.
I loved Layers of Fear, personally! There really aren't a ton of jump scares; most of the creepiness comes from the atmosphere, and not knowing just where the hell the next door is going to lead to. There are a couple places I got frustrated - there isn't much backtracking in the game, so it really threw me off when I was in a continuous loop and didn't realize I needed to go back the way I came. Also, near the end, you have to pick up checkerboard pieces and inspect the checkerboard regularly. Those pieces are hard to find, and why should I have to inspect the same object repeatedly? But other than a couple minor annoyances, I really love the game. And having bought it as part of the XB1 preview program, I got a great deal on it.
"Bid us to sit down, and pull the chair away as we do so but don't keep doing it; do it once and apologize, let us sit down and wait until it gets calm and throw spiders at our face and burn the house down." ~Yahtzee on how to make a good horror game.
The thing with Firewatches' ending was the fact that a lot of people expected this huge mystery or aliens or whatever and people got upset when they weren't met with that. This is a really good thing because everyone expected something out of the ordinary and completely irrational and were met with the most realistic and rational thing (a dead kid and a scared father being all secretive to scare you). It's sort of like in real life, people expect some giant mystery or something paranormal when the actual answer is just something normal when it comes to a mysterious event.
+Matthew Lindfield "It's sort of like in real life" That's the problem with the game.Most people don't play games for real life bullshit.They deal with real life bullshit all the time.
Subverting expectations isn't inherently a good thing at all; no one expects the "it was all a dream" ending in it's most hackish uses, but everyone rightfully hates it.
suq: It was totally setup. The whole conspiracy idea really didn't make sense at all if you weren't programmed to expect the story to go that way: * What was the purpose of the study? * Why a soil grid? * You can find one of the tracking devices attached to an actual deer * Why hadn't they fixed the bridge to their camp? * Why did they fence off such a huge area? * Why did they leave the clipboard with your dialogue just lying around for you to find? * Why did they terrorize the girls? Etc... None of these questions have sensical answers in the conspiracy theory.
Layers of Fear has a very interesting distinction of being good fun to play but ultimately not actually being all that great. It's fun to see what the next room will hold in the "mind bending insanity" department, but once you're done with it, it all feels very hollow.
+knerf999 It's not like, taco spicy. It's for like, Spaghetti and Stir Fry. (mostly stir fry for me, but my mom uses bell peppers, onions and mushrooms in her spaghetti)
Their scientific name is Capsicum annuum, so I think they must have a little. EDIT: Actually they produce the non-pungent variety of the Capsaicin, that's why it doesn't evoke the same sort of spiciness as its fellow peppers.
That's pretty interesting. I personally have a passion for storytelling and liked both of these games I think because of that. I think maybe 'walking simulators' with decent story are a way to express that, where certain mechanics may put too much attention or may invest too much of it's audience where it's not be necessary or may run such a risk of contradicting the main focus of the game. In the past I'm sure we have all seen examples of games that compliment itself as a whole, contradict itself or fall completely flat on its face. So, there's a formulated way to go about it, but what gives it it's weight is HOW it's executed. I like to think of them as just a different medium to tell a story and for the audience to feel immersed in a specific way, not so much a video game with limited mechanics. But that's me.
dude i just found this channel & this is the first video ive seen & i gotta say this dude is fucking hilarious lmao his commentary & jokes are so original & actually funny unlike 99% of other youtubers. im glad i found this guy honestly. keep making awesome content man, you're very talented homie!
'Excuse me while I eat this handful of dried spaghetti' And that's my personality too! The funny part is that people who shoot spaghetti out of their pockets think they have it bad.
Jaraxxus Krakthang VII mmmm thank yoo- I mean, um, thank you, kind sir, for telling me this. I will certainly not AT ALL try to fap to an- *Proceeds to fap* NOTHING GOING ON HERE
Not wanting to be too picky but 'the village green preservation society' is the song, the album is called 'the kinks are the village green preservation society'. They're both excellent though
Drifting back here after news of the Layers of Fear crew getting their mitts on a Silent Hill 2 remake. This is not the horror I wanted you to provide, Bloober Team. Please bugger off and go back home.
just played Firewatch, I liked it. The ending was anticlimactic, but I feel it works for the story its trying to tell, like Moss being killed off screen in No Country For Old Men. And boy am I glad I heard about the "turn off map marker option" before playing it cause man was it fun using the map and compass to figure out the path (not that it was ever that hard, the world is pretty well designed for navigation without ever coming off as unreal and diorama like). It just seems baffling that they utterly remove that fun by default! If it was like an "assist mode" you would turn on if you were stuck/accessibility concerns then fair enough but otherwise I just cant believe they would kneecap the experience that hard.
Manard Don't know about that one, I have TWD 1&2, Wolf Among Us, Life is Strange, D4, Game of Thrones, Tales from Borderlands, Kings Quest, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Stanley's Parable, Blues&Bullets, Firewatch I also have a fence named : Indieshit and hipstershit for all the artsy fartsy games that try to be deep or visually appealing to the 90's crowd.
I honestly did like Layers of Fear because it highlighted more on the idea of madness when you think about it. What I also liked is that they didn't actually give everything away about what was going on. I think the whole point was to be that, something you were left to keep guessing about. I don't know, I know I like the atmosphere of it, especially because unlike Dead Space, it doesn't rely on the traditional jumpscare. I was kept guessing, and I enjoyed that it tries to mindfuck you a bit.
Have you played spec ops: the line? Because that game did it much better with having the player have legitimate control over the character. Yahtzee did a review on Spec Ops
I disagree that it didn't give everything away and I disagree that it didn't rely on jumpscares. I think it did both of those things. 'Rely' might be a bit strong but overused at least. I sort of like that they used which direction you were looking to trigger certain events, but that doesn't save it, not in my book. By the end of Ch3 I just wanted it to be over. Some good visual design ideas on certain spots though. Horror tropes though, blugh.
4:32 I feel like I should counter-argue here, but a) I wouldn't want to give a TH-camr the satisfaction of being right, and b) through z) I certianly had that feeling with games like Cuphead, Hotline Miami and Dark Souls; I don't like them because of their brutal difficulty, and fans will tell me, the brutal difficulty is the whole point. Let me assure you that when I make that argument I by no means try to imply there's something wrong with enjoying games where the appeal is resisting the urge to smash your computer in frustration. I actually think they are excellent games, they look awesome, they have great atmosphere and style . . . If anything, I'm a firm believer of "each to their preference", and personally I never found any enjoyment in playing games that guarantee restarting over and over and over and over and over again. I'm sure to some the satisfaction of beating a challenge that you've spent hours trying to beat is worth it, but when I do that, all I'm left feeling is shame because of how much time I poured into this game, and I'm left feeling like I'm advocating the gamer stereotype that we do nothing but play games all day and never spend a second doing something productive
I felt like the end of firewatch could have worked better if you actually had a bit more time to figure out the mystery. Instead of that, right at the peak of the intrigue, he starts a fire for some reason and then the game has to wrap up because the map is burning down. So he just leads you to all the remaining mystery locations and explains everything else on a tape recorder. They should've let us find the cave key at the research site, and let it feel more like we were actually catching up to whoever was listening to us, and have him start the fire while we are in his hideout listening to a similar recording, but more crazy, begging us to leave him alone etc. Then escape from his hideout, and evacuate the next day when the forest is burning down.
i can see the point yahtzee has about firewatch to me it was amazing because of all the negative things he talked about in the end but i an see why some people do not like it and if you do not like it for that reason i completely understand it it is a shame thou that the thing that will make the intire game for some people is almost impossible to explain without runinig it
Firewatch was alright. I played it all in one evening, livestreamed the whole thing and put it on my channel. It's fun but so many things that didn't make any sense. *SPOILERS AHEAD* The two teen girls were missing for over 2 months and then apparently showed up fine and it was because they stole their grandfathers truck or some weird thing, I don't know, it didn't make any sense. I was sure they were going to be found dead or something but no, they could have even said that they were still missing and that would have been better.
Honestly, I like how Firewatch ends. It's kinda pedestrian and "boring" for a videogame, but its also depressingly real. It reminded me of when I'd go on camping trips as a kid and hike up mountain trails, and every odd, out of place thing I'd see would become some clue to a grand mystery going on out there. But, there never was, and it was all built up in my head. That's exactly what the game makes you do; it never promises anything out of left field, it just presents you with totally normal--if a little unsettling--things, and you build all that up for yourself. And then the ending comes, and its plain, and its sad, and you feel a little hollow. I wouldn't want too many games to go that route, but I think it worked for it.
Maybe, but what if I'm not as paranoid as Henry? I spent all the game thinking Henry was overeacting to random bits of unconnected information. Turns out I was right, but It also turns out, It was boring.
Here's how Firewatch should have played out.
There's something "off" about Delilah, hinting she knows things about you that shouldn't be possible. Smoke constantly shrouds the forest, yet there is no fire. Your tower gradually becomes more and more dilapidated. You are hunted by a mysterious figure with a pyramid-shaped helmet and massive blade. The job ad you answered slowly deteriorates, and eventually vanishes from your inventory.
Finally it's revealed you killed your suffering wife out of mercy, and fled into the wilderness. You hid in an abandoned watchtower. There was never any job ad. Delilah was a hallucination. You have a final choice to continue hiding, or return to civilization to face the truth and consequences.
The one thing I learned from this video is that "Fear Watch" and Layers of Fire" are way cooler sounding names.
+Osaka117 I actually thought Layers of Fear was a pretty silly, cliche name, lol. That said, I really enjoyed the game.
+Osaka117 You suddenly turned two boring walking simulator titles into two really awesome band names!
"Fear Watch" is a very precarious phrase, because as soon as you think about it, it's probably just watching horror movies or LPs.
Layers of Fire is rad to the bone, though.
"WELCOME TO FEARWATCH 66.6 FM, CALLER, YOU'RE ON THE AIIIRR!"
"Fear Watch" sounds incredibly tryhard (like "Death Skull" or whatever).
When I played firewatch, sometimes I was so scared I didn't even want to turn around. That's more than layers of fear can say!
Firewatch was unironically scarier
That bit about the "Never ending nightmare that never lets up and becomes the norm" was perfect and I feel the same way.
+Oreally
Yeah, it pretty much describes 99% of "horror" games, which, like he said, may as well be jump scare amusement park rides that you've been on for the 15th time.
Edison Trent
For a little while, Spookies house of Jumpscares was doing really well. I liked that it presented itself as a lighthearted comedy and slowly lets the environment creep in on you. Before you knew what was good for you, you had an actual monster stabbing you in the back to organ music. The games technical limitations held it back, but it did what it wanted to do really well.
Lure the player into a false sense of security, slowly build up some tension and suspense, and then go all out at the last second.
*****
Sounds like how Yahtzee described the beginning of Half-Life, but in a scary build up rather than an action-y build up, so that sounds nice.
Edison Trent
It's just a problem that horror games have. When you go into a game excepting to be scared, it's harder to scare you.
I remember Half-Life 2's Ravenholm, the entire game up to that point was action oriented, the rebels just got attacked, you got separated from Alex in the confusion, and while you're pondering the situation you ha- uh, is that a pair of legs tied to a rope hanging from a street lamp?
It just took a nose dive into holy shitsville. For a horror game, Ravenholm would had been rather tame, but it just casually shows up in Half-Life 2. You weren't prepared for it, you're mind set wasn't expecting this shit.
Edison Trent There's only been one exception for me. A game that got scarier the more I played it. Slender, now this was before Slender got that Pewdiepie touch. My friend randomly sent me a file in the middle of the night over skype and just said "Play it"
Starting up the game, I saw the title Slender, I knew who the Slenderman was. So seeing him wasn't all that shocking. It was a horror game where I was playing with the monster... at first. I got 6 pages on my first try, I was so close, so I tried again, got 4 pages, so on and so fourth.
Eventually, I started to understand more and more how Slenderman moved, but the more I understood, the more I started to fear him. Simply because I didn't know what to do, or how to deal with it. On my 5th attempt, I noticed my hand was shaking out of control. A sensation I had never experienced before. I gave the game 8 attempts, each worst then the last. When I looked at the clock, it was 4am in the morning and I had to call it quits.
So I went to bed, but I was terrified. I couldn't fall asleep. All I could think about was the game, it didn't try to scare with cheap tricks and illusions. It MADE me fear it through it's difficulty, but victory was so close that I couldn't just put it to the side as bullshit.
I couldn't go to sleep, so instead I started to review the fucking information I had. How Slender moves faster the more pages I have, the layout of the map, max sprint lowers over time.
Eventually I thought of a plan. My problem was, between 5-8 pages, Slenderman just moves too fast for me to keep my barrings straight, I just can't outrun the guy. So my goal was to limit the time spent between those pages by keeping the last three pages as close to each other as possible. So I would go to ALL the landmarks, find the pages, but not pick them up. I keep a mental note of where they are and formulate a path to collect one after another, ensuring the last three where as close to each other as possible.
Beat it at 8am the same day. I had never felt so victorious. Passed out immediately with a smile on my face.
At 5:11, it's very true. I'm not a huge Amnesia fan, but Amnesia knew that you can't have scare after scare after scare. You need to have areas of relative safety, and allow tension to build up naturally, and have a scare that is set-up in a classy way.
All together now!
Random Documents and Audio logs!
+Minarus Infernus
we find stuck to notice boards
we find them under dogs
+1800Hernandez
We're gonna put them in a file
And give it a review
+Angus Seydel
And we're bored of all the gameplay,
but we've nothing else to do!
+Simon Arnerich (falls on floor drunk)
I actually sung this
firewatch has the best voice acting i have ever seen, the caracthers actually sound like real people doing real people things
Naughty dog games are good for that too
@@CA-rg2wv this comment aged like sour milk
@@morganyu9128 the last of us 2 still had pretty good va
@@tommyvercetti5945 yeah, VA... and not much else
I don't know why but that dry spaghetti line just cracked me up.
IT'S FUCKING RAAAAW!
*insert undertale reference
I've seen this one twelve times ofc because all the real fans go on random binges. *adjusts glasses*
but that line got me good this morning xD
It cracks you up because it cuts to the core of the problem with Early Access games in a single brilliant metaphor- people are paying to play an unfinished game, then defending it from any criticisms on the basis that being unfinished (and consequently pretty crap) is a pivotal part of the whole EA experience that they're paying for, regardless of the fact that this line of reasoning is _fucking stupid._
superchief86 my boyfriend actually eats them dry
Hot take: Firewatch is one of the genuinely scariest games out there, without even being a horror game. Bit like Subnautica, really.
I originally saw this before I played Firewatch, and now seeing it again, I remembered something I wanted to say right after playing.
Thank you for suggesting that I turn off the map markers for my first playthrough. Because I'd seen this first, I knew to do that before I even started the game, and I think it added a lot to the game compared to the playthroughs I've seen that use it.
As a Henry, as long as that fire tower has Wifi I'm sold.
Just give me electricity and wifi and I will happily spend my summer doing what ever you want me to do.
Done. Anything else?
Yea... No, it wouldn't. Not in 1989, the place doesn't even have a WIRED telephone line.
+brainflash1 It doesn't; so fix it, dear Henry
+Qa'Rajh Creations Then again, in 1989 nobody was addicted to WiFi yet... so that's a plus! :P
So the Loch Ness Monster mystery as been solved!!!
+----)Hipster Walrus Gaming(---- Nah, he's just British
+Davis609
wasn't that an elephant?
+Granatæble Just no, it was a guy with a camera who wanted money and found a log
Can i get my tree fiddy back?
Or do i have to kidnap someone's father now?
3:15
Yeah fun fact, the game was actually applauding you. If you do in fact look back, you get an insta-kill jumpscare
LMAO 1:32 "thats a bad miss" Mitchell and Webb look
those sketches were class
On a lonely planet spinning its way toward damnation amid the fear and despair of a broken human race, who is left to fight for all that is good and pure and gets you smashed for under a fiver?
I actually must admit that I really enjoyed Layers of fear. I really like walking sims because I can‘t get through horror games that get me chased or that make you play hide and seek quite yet but I also don‘t want a good story to be wasted because I can‘t get over panicking after some weird monster starts chasing after me. Layers of fear was to me a story told through interaction that I really liked. I liked the visual effects, the variation and how creatively the characters trauma was portrayed by his delusions and how much it made me feel for the painter going through what he went through. What I also really enjoyed was that the story was really interpretation friendly. It doesn‘t just throw everything at you. Instead, It only gives you some pieces of the puzzle and let‘s you decide how they fit together and form a finished piece. I personally also felt really bad for the main character to be honest because he was clearly suffering from horrific paranoid schizophrenia and his symptoms only worsened the longer his illness was left untreated and he began to desperately selfmedicate with alcohol. What also kinda hit me hard was how his wife was so incapable of doing anything to help her husband because at the time not even doctors really knew how to properly treat the mentally ill let alone a woman that didn‘t specify in psychology herself. The poor woman understandably was suffering just as much as her husband as she was actively witnessing his decent into madness and how he began to see her as an antagonist after she had been disfigured by the fire. Schizophrenic people that also have paranoia symptoms often think really conspiritorial under a delusional episode so his mind was really to blame for the most part but in this story each member of the family was a victim. The painter because of his mental illness and the lack of support and help, his wife who was unable to cope with it all and who thanks to the time period was expected to basically be her husbands therapist and wife simultaneously without any proper knowledge of how to help him at all and their daughter who obviously was victimized by her fathers decent into madness and her mothers desperation and death. Layers of fear is a good portrayal of the horror of living through severe mentall illness while trying to live a normal successful life in a world that didn‘t yet understand what mental illness really was and how to properly treat it so I‘d suggest that the villian in this game wasn‘t the father (although he isn‘t innocent. Am not implying he is.) bur rather the mental illness he carried that spread through his family like a cancer because of the lack of proper treatment. Schizophrenia can cripple a persons life and the life of their loved ones as well. Often people wich frequent delusions live through nightmares day after day that we never have to live through so while layers of fear might be a little bit cliche and perhaps even a bit sensationalized, we can still apprechiate it for letting us experience how hard the life of a mentally ill person can be and how debilitating and horrifying delusions are especially when they live in a time where nobody was able to help them get better.
Pardon me for actually snacking on dry spaghetti sometimes.
You monster.
i like sauce on mine
BrokenSet I am extremely offended I identify as dry spaghetti. You killed my spiritual mother in law.
I prefer dried ramen noodles.
Huh, I never thought that was an uncommon thing to do
I see Yhatzee writing a book about a guy stuck in a horror castle who's been there for so long he's accepted it all after this. Including the monsters that have gotten sick of trying to scare him and not being allowed to actually touch him, so they just begrudgingly sneer at him while chewing on foxes or something. Every time he tries to leave the really big scary not-so-subtle wife metaphor comes out and drags him back in, only now instead of being creepy about it she just nags him to go into the room he keeps not going in because he knows it's where the ending is at, and it's one of those "even worse than before" endings.
I'd read that.
Hell, I'd WRITE that.
@@chrisjones5949 well? Have you?
@@atom5469 Not yet. Still working on finishing my second novel. Thanks for the reminder, though, might need to come back to this...
@@chrisjones5949and how's the writing going nowadays?
@@inquisitorbenediktanders3142 Well. I've been doing the stay-at-home dad thing for quite a while now, and my kiddo doesn't give me much time to write. :/
He starts pre-K in the fall though! Looking forward to having some time to myself at last...
Thanks for asking. I need these occasional reminders. :D
...Yahtzee in a French maid outfit. Fanartists, make this now!
no
why thank you for the idea
I quite liked Firewatch. I thought the game was relaxing and the story was interesting enough to keep me interested. I do agree though that the end reveal was a bit lame especially after the massive amount of build up it had.
I'm amazed that Walking Simulation is what they're actually calling these things. Like, they don't even try to make them sound cool.
They tried, at first.
+Raymond Williams a good term i've heard being thrown around on occasion is "interactive drama"
+Raymond Williams I thought they were called first person exploration games.
Well that's because it's the critics of the genre who coined that term, not the developers.
+Raymond Williams You want a walking simulator? I'll give you a walking simulator!!! www.amazon.ca/Konami-40082-Walk-Out-Standard/dp/B002CZ7P04/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457569247&sr=8-1&keywords=Walk+it+Out
"Don't look back!" *doesn't look back * *surprised Pikachu face *
Hilariously, you actually AREN'T supposed to. Looking back results in a jump scare that kills you instantly; proceeding forward is the only way to finish the section, plus it gets you an achievement. lol
Layers of Fire and Fearwatch
Firewatch feels like an unfinished screenplay to me. Like, with some more development it could have made an engrossing character study movie, kind of like Moon where it's basically just one guy wandering around growing progressively more paranoid. But as a game? Eh.
*Spoiler*
At the part where it says "don't look back" on the wall, exactly what you think will happen happens... Wow why did I even bother writing this?
I like, accidentally looked to the side before seeing that message, and it killed me. I lost my crank item that I was proud of finding.
At the part where it says "don't look back" on the wall, exactly what you think will happen happens... Wow why did I even bother writing this?
Q
Oh, shit, just noticed the _That Mitchell and Webb Look_ reference in the forced snooker tournament joke.
Well done.
4:03 I always took that famous photo of the Loch Ness monster for a hoax, but I just realised for the first time it's very obviously just a tiny model floating in a pond
the dry spaghetti thing is golden. explains it perfectly
Honestly, Firewatch ultimately suffered from negatively subverting expectations to the point making the climax feel kind of uneventful.
40% of the story hints at what could have been a secret government plot, something possibly extraterrestrial, and they dance around some hidden killer on the land... only to find out it was none of those things and everything is alright, except for a boy who accidentally died.
It’s anti-climactic and is the sole reason so few people are talking about the game today, despite it being well-received at launch.
Same here. By the time Henry and Delilah caught on that their conversations were being eavesdropped on and a Henry was being followed, I actually felt kinda tense, and the forest setting helped that immensely too, but at the end, when the revelations dropped, it was just so uneventful and weak I rushed to reach the end for the little bit of closure we got between the two.
And again Yahtzee perfectly describes what makes good horror. I am tempted to run a horror writing workshop at my university which are just showing clips from Zero Punctuation then explaining them and assigning examples.
The most perfect description of " Layers of Fear " ever.
2:50 - Random documents and audio logs!
I loved Layers of Fear, personally! There really aren't a ton of jump scares; most of the creepiness comes from the atmosphere, and not knowing just where the hell the next door is going to lead to. There are a couple places I got frustrated - there isn't much backtracking in the game, so it really threw me off when I was in a continuous loop and didn't realize I needed to go back the way I came. Also, near the end, you have to pick up checkerboard pieces and inspect the checkerboard regularly. Those pieces are hard to find, and why should I have to inspect the same object repeatedly? But other than a couple minor annoyances, I really love the game. And having bought it as part of the XB1 preview program, I got a great deal on it.
"Bid us to sit down, and pull the chair away as we do so but don't keep doing it; do it once and apologize, let us sit down and wait until it gets calm and throw spiders at our face and burn the house down."
~Yahtzee on how to make a good horror game.
2:55 that's adorable.
4:13 - Blasphemy! The Kinks' best album was "Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)." ;)
Also wasn't 'the village green preservation society' the song, and the album is called 'the kinks are the village green preservation society'?
The thing with Firewatches' ending was the fact that a lot of people expected this huge mystery or aliens or whatever and people got upset when they weren't met with that. This is a really good thing because everyone expected something out of the ordinary and completely irrational and were met with the most realistic and rational thing (a dead kid and a scared father being all secretive to scare you).
It's sort of like in real life, people expect some giant mystery or something paranormal when the actual answer is just something normal when it comes to a mysterious event.
+Matthew Lindfield And I would have gotten away if it, too, it it weren't for you meddling kids.
+Matthew Lindfield "It's sort of like in real life" That's the problem with the game.Most people don't play games for real life bullshit.They deal with real life bullshit all the time.
he should have put a spoiler ye
Subverting expectations isn't inherently a good thing at all; no one expects the "it was all a dream" ending in it's most hackish uses, but everyone rightfully hates it.
suq: It was totally setup. The whole conspiracy idea really didn't make sense at all if you weren't programmed to expect the story to go that way:
* What was the purpose of the study?
* Why a soil grid?
* You can find one of the tracking devices attached to an actual deer
* Why hadn't they fixed the bridge to their camp?
* Why did they fence off such a huge area?
* Why did they leave the clipboard with your dialogue just lying around for you to find?
* Why did they terrorize the girls?
Etc... None of these questions have sensical answers in the conspiracy theory.
Oh, that Mitchell and Webb Look reference.
+waffleless What do you mean? I must have missed it.
+Joe Sullivan Bad miss dude
minch333 Aaaah, okay. Snooker commentators were never amongst my favourite sketches, to be honest.
Joe Sullivan Omg, so you accidentally made quite a coy joke? That's great, I thought you were in on it! They weren't the best though, no.
Layers of Fear has a very interesting distinction of being good fun to play but ultimately not actually being all that great. It's fun to see what the next room will hold in the "mind bending insanity" department, but once you're done with it, it all feels very hollow.
Best and Most Critical Reviewers
Video Games: Zero Punctuation
Movies: YMS
Internet Trends and Videos: I HATE EVERYTHING
+Gruj Lol no
Søren Markov Thanks for the positive feedback! :)
Gruj
wut
Søren Markov I was thanking you dude! For all your dank memes!
its my fav pepe :)
*Hunie...POP*
*Hunie...POP*
*Hunie...POP*
+Paradox Acres it fills you with determination?
BEST GAME OF E3 2014
"It's like Hatoful Boyfriend, but with hot anime chicks!" - IGN
Yahtzee, do it!
UnBR0k3enAngel The more you know.
Fire...Watch
I love how if you visit the store it is basically Yahtzee merch. Petition to rename Escapist to Zero Punctuation.
The ending was very funny.
1:32 what a subtle sneaky reference....
TheSkipjack95 i fucking love mitchell and webb
i have NEVER spiced something up with a bell pepper
+knerf999 I thought about that one as well.
+knerf999 It's not like, taco spicy. It's for like, Spaghetti and Stir Fry. (mostly stir fry for me, but my mom uses bell peppers, onions and mushrooms in her spaghetti)
sciencemile
I don't think regular bell peppers contain any Capsaicin. and thus none of the aforementioned spice
Their scientific name is Capsicum annuum, so I think they must have a little.
EDIT: Actually they produce the non-pungent variety of the Capsaicin, that's why it doesn't evoke the same sort of spiciness as its fellow peppers.
sciencemile
So it doesn't spice it up either way
Layers of fire and fearwatch sound waaaaaaaay better.
Review popcorn please
*grabs DAYZ Standalone*
+Connor Phelps
*_Cover me!_*_ I'm Hatchet'ing my Reload!_
Loving the brief Mitchell and Webb reference
That's pretty interesting. I personally have a passion for storytelling and liked both of these games I think because of that. I think maybe 'walking simulators' with decent story are a way to express that, where certain mechanics may put too much attention or may invest too much of it's audience where it's not be necessary or may run such a risk of contradicting the main focus of the game. In the past I'm sure we have all seen examples of games that compliment itself as a whole, contradict itself or fall completely flat on its face. So, there's a formulated way to go about it, but what gives it it's weight is HOW it's executed. I like to think of them as just a different medium to tell a story and for the audience to feel immersed in a specific way, not so much a video game with limited mechanics. But that's me.
Someone give this guy an award because these videos are golden.
I like televised snooker... :(
"Oh, that's a bad miss." I love your references.
This came just after I saw the Plazethroughs from Adam on these. Perfect.
ERMIGAHD IVE WANTED HIM TO REVIEW FIREFATCH FOR EARGES
please stop burning peopel's houses down Yhatzee
aw he's not hurting any one.
wait...
Aaaaaaand the fun in that iiiiiiiiiiis?
+Al Bhed ...
Grand Wizard Wakka what's wrong sir? I can probably make a machina to help you with whatever's wrong.
Some people ain't deserving of houses, if you get what I'm goin' at Brudda.
Especially people who break Yevons teachings.
dude i just found this channel & this is the first video ive seen & i gotta say this dude is fucking hilarious lmao his commentary & jokes are so original & actually funny unlike 99% of other youtubers. im glad i found this guy honestly. keep making awesome content man, you're very talented homie!
'Excuse me while I eat this handful of dried spaghetti'
And that's my personality too! The funny part is that people who shoot spaghetti out of their pockets think they have it bad.
I disagree Yahtzee, I think Arthur is a better Kinks album than Village Green Preservation.
+theSEANlegacy oml do I love that album to death
Just saw an ad for a mobile game. It was two anime girls fighting, but their chest and the bit under their skirts were censored..
WHAT?!
+I am a robot, blarp. Um, not to be a strange guy or anything... But what was the game called?
*Pulls out Google and readies thumbs*
+I am a robot, blarp.
You can find games like that all the time everywhere, or at least clues to find them. you're nothing special
+Skull Sniper (SkullSniper) Sword of Chaos. You're welcome.
Jaraxxus Krakthang VII mmmm thank yoo- I mean, um, thank you, kind sir, for telling me this. I will certainly not AT ALL try to fap to an- *Proceeds to fap* NOTHING GOING ON HERE
+Skull Sniper (SkullSniper) I know no guilt. An advantage of fapping to weird shit for far too long.
Layers of Paintless Jump Scares.
It took me 6 and a half years to realize that Yahtzee and Pikamee playing Layers of Fear together would result in something quite magnificent.
"oooh that's a bad miss" - Mitchell & Webb reference?
+TheNeurofluxation probably, altough its long been a meme in snooker by itself long before "memes" were classified
Just before the word "meme" was popularized as "overused tripe", at least.
0:18 Jeez. I remember playing Sim Copter. Those were the days.
Not wanting to be too picky but 'the village green preservation society' is the song, the album is called 'the kinks are the village green preservation society'. They're both excellent though
I really like this comparative style of critiquing, yahtzee
Far Cry: Primal is next week
Let's get savage!
no
Yes please.
+Password 123456 uh not everyone goes to his website
+drates Dragetes his website is fully ramblotic the escapist shows his videos early
Watch as someone who loves Firewatch has their spirit crushed
+Binary Sudoku (Izzy) That person is me, if that wasnt clear
5:21 The best thing to do on a Friday
Drifting back here after news of the Layers of Fear crew getting their mitts on a Silent Hill 2 remake.
This is not the horror I wanted you to provide, Bloober Team. Please bugger off and go back home.
Layer of Fear is the equivalent of Dr. Strange's house on a Halloween mood on it's first day of celebrating it.
just played Firewatch, I liked it. The ending was anticlimactic, but I feel it works for the story its trying to tell, like Moss being killed off screen in No Country For Old Men.
And boy am I glad I heard about the "turn off map marker option" before playing it cause man was it fun using the map and compass to figure out the path (not that it was ever that hard, the world is pretty well designed for navigation without ever coming off as unreal and diorama like). It just seems baffling that they utterly remove that fun by default! If it was like an "assist mode" you would turn on if you were stuck/accessibility concerns then fair enough but otherwise I just cant believe they would kneecap the experience that hard.
Love that Mitchell and Webb reference
1:34 nice snooker reference ya got there
I died on the loch Ness monster joke.
Am I the only one who recognized schrodinger's equations lurking in the thought bubble at 3:48?
Always funny coming across a ZP that you missed somehow. And on a game I'd heard about as well.
That last line got a real lol out of me
This was probably the funniest you have been in a while. Great vid Yahtzee
ye this one was a real homerun imo
I literally have a desktop fence named "walking simulators" with about 12 of the in there. Fun stories most of them, but not actually games.
+Cero Ashura Dear Esther was the biggest waste of money when it comes to walking simulators.
Manard
Don't know about that one, I have TWD 1&2, Wolf Among Us, Life is Strange, D4, Game of Thrones, Tales from Borderlands, Kings Quest, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Stanley's Parable, Blues&Bullets, Firewatch
I also have a fence named : Indieshit and hipstershit for all the artsy fartsy games that try to be deep or visually appealing to the 90's crowd.
Cero Ashura Wait, fence or folder?
Manard
Fence
They look like these:
ictlearning.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ScreenHunter_01-Dec.-22-15.21.jpg
Cero Ashura Ah, I see.
Very few TH-cam content creators consistently crack me up like Yahtzee.
True to that
lol Jeremy corbyn is at 03:13 saying I'm not touching you.
I honestly did like Layers of Fear because it highlighted more on the idea of madness when you think about it. What I also liked is that they didn't actually give everything away about what was going on. I think the whole point was to be that, something you were left to keep guessing about. I don't know, I know I like the atmosphere of it, especially because unlike Dead Space, it doesn't rely on the traditional jumpscare. I was kept guessing, and I enjoyed that it tries to mindfuck you a bit.
Have you played spec ops: the line? Because that game did it much better with having the player have legitimate control over the character. Yahtzee did a review on Spec Ops
I disagree that it didn't give everything away and I disagree that it didn't rely on jumpscares. I think it did both of those things. 'Rely' might be a bit strong but overused at least.
I sort of like that they used which direction you were looking to trigger certain events, but that doesn't save it, not in my book. By the end of Ch3 I just wanted it to be over. Some good visual design ideas on certain spots though. Horror tropes though, blugh.
I would not make a very good fire-watcher-person.
"Why weren't you watching for fire?!"
"I was! And then I saw one. It was beautiful."
4:32 I feel like I should counter-argue here, but a) I wouldn't want to give a TH-camr the satisfaction of being right, and b) through z) I certianly had that feeling with games like Cuphead, Hotline Miami and Dark Souls; I don't like them because of their brutal difficulty, and fans will tell me, the brutal difficulty is the whole point. Let me assure you that when I make that argument I by no means try to imply there's something wrong with enjoying games where the appeal is resisting the urge to smash your computer in frustration. I actually think they are excellent games, they look awesome, they have great atmosphere and style . . . If anything, I'm a firm believer of "each to their preference", and personally I never found any enjoyment in playing games that guarantee restarting over and over and over and over and over again. I'm sure to some the satisfaction of beating a challenge that you've spent hours trying to beat is worth it, but when I do that, all I'm left feeling is shame because of how much time I poured into this game, and I'm left feeling like I'm advocating the gamer stereotype that we do nothing but play games all day and never spend a second doing something productive
That last part would give current horror games a run for its money.
Was that a Mitchell and Webb reference at 1:33, Yahtzee?
best explanation for the lochness monster ive ever heard bravi yahtzee.
I felt like the end of firewatch could have worked better if you actually had a bit more time to figure out the mystery. Instead of that, right at the peak of the intrigue, he starts a fire for some reason and then the game has to wrap up because the map is burning down. So he just leads you to all the remaining mystery locations and explains everything else on a tape recorder.
They should've let us find the cave key at the research site, and let it feel more like we were actually catching up to whoever was listening to us, and have him start the fire while we are in his hideout listening to a similar recording, but more crazy, begging us to leave him alone etc.
Then escape from his hideout, and evacuate the next day when the forest is burning down.
i can see the point yahtzee has about firewatch to me it was amazing because of all the negative things he talked about in the end but i an see why some people do not like it and if you do not like it for that reason i completely understand it it is a shame thou that the thing that will make the intire game for some people is almost impossible to explain without runinig it
Layers of fear:Dont look back.
zero punctuation:ok
Layers of fear: WAIT COME BACK!
I love how u smacked haters in the face with that joke in the end.
Please God tell me 1:32 is a Mitchell and Webb Look reference!!
I was just about to comment to see if anyone else caught that.
1:32 That Mitchell and Webb Look reference there
I loved fire watch
Firewatch was alright. I played it all in one evening, livestreamed the whole thing and put it on my channel. It's fun but so many things that didn't make any sense.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
The two teen girls were missing for over 2 months and then apparently showed up fine and it was because they stole their grandfathers truck or some weird thing, I don't know, it didn't make any sense. I was sure they were going to be found dead or something but no, they could have even said that they were still missing and that would have been better.
5:11
Holy shit, that's amazing!
And an actual tip for making horror games.
5:10 - 5:21
So what you're saying is the game should have taken more notes from Lucy of Peanuts.
Nice that Mitchell and web look reference early on
Thumbs up for that Mitchell and Webb Look reference
That third cheap scare at 3:10 is actually quite scary.
1:30 mitchell and webb is not a snooker programme.