Firewatch

Apologies for sailing straight into Hot Take territory immediately, but Firewatch begins with a brief text-only, quasi-choose your own adventure segment that sets up the life and history of Henry, the game's protagonist. It takes you through meeting your wife in a bar, getting a dog, agreeing to have kids, having arguments over her late nights and over her taking a job in another state, before she succumbs to early onset dementia at the age of 41 and you're forced into deciding whether or not to put her into a 24-hour care home. The subsequent fallout, both of your wife's family hating you and your wife gradually forgetting who you even are, leads Henry to take a job as a fire ranger in Shoshone National Park, which is where the game proper takes place. Honestly, I think that introduction is the best part of the entire game.

The problem, really, is that it feels like it's setting up a game that's more involving, moving, and interesting than it actually is. These are bold themes being slapped on the table right from the off, and aside from the abstract idea that the sheer emptiness of the Shoshone wilderness is reflecting Henry's desolation and loneliness (which is something you could say about every game I've played in this genre), it never really touches on any of them. Henry spends the game talking via radio to an unseen woman named Delilah, and the conversations they have about Henry's wife are weirdly disconnected to the entire experience; instead, the game, which decades of absorbing traditional storytelling have taught us all is obviously going to lead to some great revelation about Henry, his wife, or Delilah.....doesn't. They all end up being basically incidental to the plot.

I suppose it's brave for the story to cut away from all expectations and go for a mystery that's totally unconnected to Henry, but it can't help but all feel like a bit of an anti-climax, especially at its conclusion - the people who are central to the story aren't even really mentioned all that much before all the pieces fall into place, and my first thought on reaching the ending was 'is that it?'. I mean, I typically like endings that leave more questions than answers, but for that to work on me, I have to actually care about the characters involved first. I found myself caring about Henry and his wife, and Delilah to an extent, but there just isn't enough of the characters that the plot ends up centreing on for me to be invested in what happens to them. This is probably the most illuminating thing about the comparison between Firewatch and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, the game I'm most compelled to compare it to; Everybody's Gone to the Rapture also sets up a couple as the main attraction and then diverts attention from them onto others, but does it much more artfully and at much greater length, and is all the better for it.

I don't want to be exclusively negative though - there's a lot to like here. There's some pretty nice moments in the story that build up the tension and mystery nicely; the very first thing you do is investigate some fireworks going off in the distance, only to discover that two girls skinny-dipping that promptly call you a pervert and then just as promptly disappear, leaving you the last person to see them alive and potentially a murder suspect. The dialogue between Henry and Delilah has a very high standard of both writing and voice acting throughout - this isn't particularly surprising, since it does all the heavy lifting in terms of world-building and plot explication, but it's undeniably a major positive nonetheless. There's also the Shoshone itself, which is very pretty in places - and although it feels like a bit of a chore to move around it at first, with so many paths blocked by trees and mountains (fair enough) and the kind of ledges that an able-bodied person should really be able to climb without too much trouble (not so fair enough), by the middle of the game I was finding myself really enjoying the truly navigational approach to it, constantly referring to the compass and map to mark out trails and detours I could take.

I enjoyed the time I spent on Firewatch, ultimately. I just don't think I'll remember much of it in a year's time, and given how much that intro sequence sucked me in, that rankles a little bit.

Firewatch is not quite a game, per se. It's a game, yeah, but it's not a game-game. There are no puzzles, there isn't really much challenge, and you can play the whole thing in a day or two. What it is is a testament to the concept of interactive storytelling, much in a way that begs for the participant in the piece to take direct control of the subject. And the result is something beautiful, compelling, and, in the end, quite simple.

You're Henry, a man who has taken a job under the forest service to hang out in a watchtower in an area nearish (?) Yosemite called Two Forks. You're not here just because you like nature and isolation; you're here because something tragic is happening to your wife and you don't know how to deal with it.

Yeah. It's one of those. I cried during the prologue. The 90% text-only prologue.

Throughout the game your only friend and confidant is Delilah, another lookout, who you only know by her voice. Part of the story is getting to know her, and you getting to know yourself through her getting to know you. If that sentence makes any sense whatsoever. What transpires in your area of Two Forks is something I won't even put in spoilers, but I can say that it is compelling, frightening, sad, and fascinating what you discover. Not only in your immediate surroundings, but in Henry and Delilah's lives.

The gameplay is almost purely of the immersive/pseudo-realistic bent. I say 'pseudo' because you're not delving into the fine movements of, say, rappelling down a rock face. This isn't QWOP: National Forest. This isn't even like that one moment in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 when you use one trigger to use one arm, and the other for your other arm, while climbing a rock. It's joystick movement and pressing A. Or X. Whatever. But an example of the realism is that you don't have a heads-up display. If you want to look at your map, you press the button to bring up your actual paper map in Henry's hand, and you have to move around the map like you're studying it with human eyes. Couple that with your compass, and maybe you'll head in the right direction.

Which brings me to the main drawback of the game: the linear tendencies of the map itself. Part of what made Red Dead Redemption and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim so immersive was the fact that you could go anywhere while hunting for stuff. You could get lost. Irreparably lost, sometimes. With Firewatch, the only way you get lost is if you take the wrong path, as opposed to heading in the wrong direction. For something dependent on organically figuring out where you need to go, I would have loved to have been able to cross vast meadows and climb over hills and stuff.

But I can see how that would have hurt the way the story unfolded. So I guess I'm on the fence about that.

I was also quite impressed with the voice-acting of Rich Somner (Henry) and Cissy Jones (Delilah). Their reads were very natural and very emotional. Everyone knows that voice-acting, even in the best games, can be spotty. Even when the voice-acting is pretty good, à la Far Cry 3, you can still get tired of it. This is not one of those times. I also love that these characters play with each other in less-tense moments, like they're humans or something. Weird, I know.

As mentioned, the story goes by quickly. I spread it out over three days, but if I didn't want to do my laundry or go be social or whatever, I could have hammered it out in one sitting. This, almost more than the gameplay style, lends itself to the interactive storytelling bit. It's like living a very stylized film of which you are an invariably necessary part. Also, I think if the game had another hour or two to it, I might have tired of it. A perfect length.

So if you like a good story, a beautiful environment, old-fashioned navigation, and some serious feels, definitely give this a go. And keep the developers on your radar. I have a feeling that they're going to put out some good stuff in the future.