
It won three, including Best Music for Jessica Curry’s breathtaking choral and orchestral score. Revolving around the eerie events and intimate personal details of a deserted Cotswold village, the title received ten nominations at the 2016 BAFTA Game Awards. Last year the team’s second story-driven experience, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, hit the PlayStation 4 to landmark sales success.
#FIREWATCH GAME DRAWING FULL#
Their cult breakout creation Dear Esther – in which the player treks through a remote, picturesque island – proved hugely influential on its initial emergence in 2008, prior to a full commercial release in 2012. The studio often credited with kick-starting this new wave of atmospheric narrative adventures is Brighton-based team The Chinese Room. Firewatch: a ‘heartfelt character study’ The British team leading this movement In short, the interactive nature of games is a fantastic tool for engendering an even greater degree of empathy in storytelling, and raw emotional power, than other entertainment mediums.
#FIREWATCH GAME DRAWING TV#
This sense of loneliness, crucially, is something that the player themselves is moved to feel – and simply could not be adequately replicated by a film, novel or TV mini-series. Though a sense of moody suspense and intrigue quickly builds, the title’s critical and commercial success has been driven by its excellence as a heartfelt character study, and rumination on loneliness. One of 2016’s most acclaimed games to date is Firewatch an 80s-set adventure about a middle-aged man who takes a job as a lookout in a remote American national park. And when the mounting paranoia and panic starts to hit, you definitely feel it. But as a game, The Bunker is genuinely compelling.Įarly repetition of the protagonist’s routine really drives home the sad monotony and bleak isolation of his daily existence. Shot in an abandoned nuclear shelter in Essex, the story focuses on the lone survivor of an underground facility 30 years after atomic war struck Britain.ĭue to its relatively low production values, it may have struggled to hold the attention as a simple film. The Bunker, also released last week, is a form of interactive movie composed of live-action film clips, which are triggered at regular intervals by player actions. This is largely thanks to its compelling sense of style, and a beautiful, spellbinding soundtrack, composed by Lyndon Holland and performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
