When the credits roll, you’re left with the question “Could I have played that differently?” The answer is yes, and the way to explore that answer is to play again. The whole point of the game, told in both its play and its plot, is that no matter how much we would like to rewind time and fix our mistakes, eventually you are going to have to move forward with the best outcome you can think of from a flawed set of options. It doesn’t really matter in Life is Strange what you choose at the end, only THAT you choose, and that you feel the weight of that very hard choice. Even in intensely narrative-driven games like Life is Strange or Beyond: Two Souls, their endings are in and of themselves expressions of core game mechanics and how they are played. I’m a person who enjoys the rebooted Mortal Kombat franchise entirely for its storyline, not its play, and lots of games, like Ni no Kuni or The Last of Us, still embody the classic format of “now you play a game, now you watch a movie” very well.īut that progression of the game as a playable film is definitely starting to feel outdated and old-fashioned.
Does firewatch have multiple endings series#
You take a game like Bioshock Infinite, which let its core series game mechanics kind of rot while the game focused on setting up its mind-twisting payoff, and there’s little reason to value the act of playing it over the act of watching it. You explore the afterlife, or the wilderness, or a creepy old house, and it’s the unique gift of interactive medium that allows you to feel a set of contrived emotions that are outside the narrative being told. In all these cases and many more, what defines the experience is not how it ends, but how it plays. That last one is a particularly good example because the final act of Gone Home has the player character picking up the book of journal entries that you’ve been listening to throughout the game.
In Gone Home, you find out your sister ran off with her high school girlfriend rather than possibly killed herself as the game hints at until then. In Limbo, you end exactly where you began. In Firewatch, you discover that the mystery surrounding you was a mundane story of a lone, crazy hermit. You come to the end of the game, but not really the end of the story you have participated in bringing to life through your playing it. Games like Firewatch and Gone Home and Limbo simply stop. I’ve been playing and replaying a lot of titles that arguably don’t have endings. There’s definitely a progression in most titles, no matter how abstract they might be. Now, it’s all on demand from YouTube.īeyond that, though, I think it’s more that gaming has evolved to the point where games are less goal-oriented and more experience-oriented. Aside from a few games, like Legacy of Kain, that had a section to rewatch cut-scenes in the options screen, the idea that you could see the ending in any way other than going through the game entirely was unheard of. I used to have a TV/VCR combo, and would use it to make recordings of the endings in Twisted Metal 2.
When I was a kid, the only way you were going to see the multiple endings in a New Game + playthrough of Chrono Trigger was to actually play through the game and beat the final boss at different points in the time travel adventure. It’s just not the point that it used to be. As gaming has matured as an artistic medium and moved away from being a challenge to being an experience, it has sort of dealt its own deathblow when it comes to the concept of an ending. Does anyone even say “beating the game” anymore? You might beat a boss, or another player, or a level, but we’re long past the days of Nintendo hard where games universally felt like they hated us for playing them. Even if it was just a generic “thanks for playing,” the ending was your reward for the time you put into beating the game. When I was a kid, the ending of a video game mattered.
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