Emily Sowden

Firewatch

GameSpew

February 7, 2016

8/10

Firewatch may not be a game for everyone. If you’re a gamer who like nothing other than super-active games like Battlefront and Grand Theft Auto and… well… anything action oriented, this may not appeal to your personal tastes. Firewatch is something unique. It’s beautiful, engaging, and a little bit heart-wrenching at times. Ultimately, it gives us a wonderful experience that makes us want to climb through the screen, lie down in the grass and feel the serenity of that Wyoming wilderness, if only to escape life’s harsh realities for five hours.

Until Dawn

GameSpew

August 29, 2015

9/10

I know myself and many other gamers will consider this an “interactive experience”, but it needs nothing else to make this game great. It’s a well-designed, intelligent and polished piece of work that won’t disappear into the mass of other games coming out over the next year. Until Dawn will be hard to forget and is a must-play for all gamers… except those with heart conditions, perhaps.

This War of Mine

GameSpew

July 22, 2015

9/10

This game has carved a path for the next generation of survival games to venture down. As consumers, we hate making hard moral decisions but we love the freedom it gives us – to screw up because we screwed up, not because that was the way the game goes. When one of my protagonists dies it’s utterly devastating, sometimes to the point of which I’ll restart the game before it has a chance to save… but don’t tell anyone that. We’re bored of predictable, two-dimensial experiences and we’re bored of cheats that make “serious” games too easy. Every now and again we like losing because then when we win it’s the sweetest victory, though with This War of Mine it probably wouldn’t feel like a victory at all.