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.