Note: The following blog contains major spoilers for Firewatch.
Firewatch is a game that eludes easy classification. Some reviews call it a "First-Person Adventure Game" but in its goals and structure, it bears little resemblance to most other adventure games. A phrase people more often brand it with is "Walking Simulator", but that's a couple of words with a lot of baggage. Especially popular on Steam, the term "Walking Simulator" was originally a derogatory one, an almost willfully reductionist description of games like Dear Esther and Gone Home. The term implies that these games are boring and shallow because where other interactive entertainment has mechanics that simulate gunfights or high-speed car chases, these products have mechanics that simulate moving from place to place. The reality is that the games themselves are not shallow, just the logic that leads you to terms like "Walking Simulator". Most games, we can define by their mechanics, because the mechanics have traditionally been the focus or at least a primary focus of video games. That's why it's fine to call a flight sim a flight sim or a shooter a shooter. However, with "Walking Simulators" the mechanics are not the central focus, they are the interface for the real draws of the game, which are the environment and story. For this reason, we cannot see the mechanics as the defining features of these games.
Today, the phrase "Walking Simulator" has been partly retaken, used by people who are genuinely interested in games that feature movement around environments with little or no gameplay. Even with the best intentions in the world, however, it's hard to believe this term which was initially pounced on for its reductionist value is the best for describing these titles. Taking umbrage with a genre name might seem to be a purely semantic argument, but semantics reflect and shape our thinking. Language shows and informs how we view the things it describes, what expectations we have of those things, and which things we think are similar. I'm sure most of us using "Walking Simulator" in a non-derogatory way understand it's not a term that cuts to the heart of what these games are about. Still, I worry that the phrase's continued use encourages us to look at narratively or environmentally-focused games in a way that ignores what makes them tick and what sets them apart from their neighbours.
When you chuck anything that looks vaguely "Walking Simulator" into the same pot, you end up with a situation where games like Proteus and Gone Home, which are about entirely different things and want to evoke completely different emotions, get lumped together. Proteus is a game with no explicit narrative that uses a minimalist art style and lets you observe how four different seasons can wholly change flora, fauna, and atmosphere of a natural place. Gone Home, on the other hand, has an explicit narrative, tries to fit as much detail into its environment as possible, is set in a clearly human-made place, and is about exploring the people who live there with a vague horror element behind it. Examples like these show that the "Walking Simulator" umbrella tells us none of the essential details about the games placed under it and that it is only useful for identifying a few often surface-level similarities. If taken to its logical conclusion, the "Walking Simulator" state of mind would amass horror, romance, drama, and all other storytelling genres into one big grey blob. We wouldn't think of novels or films this way, and we shouldn't think of story-centric games this way.
While we're used to genre names being excessively broad, there's a particular reason to be concerned about generalising "Walking Simulators" like this. We might understand the world of difference between Portal and Lumines even though we could label them both as "Puzzle Games", but titles like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and The Stanley Parable are coming from emerging fields in video games. We don't have years of shared understanding of these games and how they function which makes it easy for us to misinterpret them or gloss over essential features, and that leads me to Firewatch. We can see mechanical overlap between games like The Beginner's Guide or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Firewatch, but that doesn't mean Firewatch is borrowing from those games the same way Doom borrows from Wolfenstein 3D or Chrono Trigger borrows from Final Fantasy. To describe Firewatch as another "Walking Simulator" is to under-appreciate its uniqueness. While we can see familiar mechanics in it, its meat, the narrative and setting, are like nothing you'll find in other "Walking Simulators".
I'll tell you now that you're going to get more out of this article if you're someone who's played through the full game already, but to quickly recap, Firewatch has you strap on the boots of forest watchman Henry. Henry is the husband of Julia, a woman who is succumbing to early-onset dementia and who was taken from Henry's care by her parents. He tries to take a break from life and air out his stressed mind with a summer job watching for fires in Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming where he befriends his superior Delilah, and soon enough the two realise that something suspicious is going on in the forest. Some sleuthing brings the two to the discovery that Brian, the son of a former watchman, perished in Shoshone and that his death was covered up by his neglectful father Ned, who has since been spying on Henry and Delilah.
While "Walking Simulator" is an inadequate term to describe Firewatch, and this isn't a title operating on a formal or technical level, that doesn't mean Firewatch is not aiming to simulate something. The game wants to emulate the experience of being in a forest with another person. Video games have mostly used woods as hunting grounds in fantasy RPGs, places to collect resources in crafting titles, or sometimes scary, cut-off locations in horror games, but they have more potential than that. Forests are one of those environments which are foreign to most of our everyday lives and yet which we all find familiar. Firewatch recreates recognisable emotions like the paranoia, vulnerability, reflection, and awe we might feel when finding ourselves in a beautiful but isolated location. What makes Firewatch subversive, however, is that we share this experience with another character. All the emotions I mentioned above are transformed by the two-character dynamic. Henry and Delilah aren't just paranoid alone, they feed each other's paranoia, they're vulnerable, but they make each other more comfortable. Henry's reflection turns into discussion of his life, and Henry and Delilah share in the majesty of the forest. As weird as it may sound, it's a defining characteristic for Firewatch that it has two interacting characters in it. Imagine a Firewatch with just Henry or a Firewatch with three main characters and think about how different it would be. There would be threats to making that pure, singular connection with another person, one that Firewatch constructs not just narratively, but also mechanically.
If the window to people in Dear Esther is the poetic monologue and the window to people in Gone Home is being able to inspect their belongings, then the window to people in Firewatch is the walkie-talkie and the dialogue menus associated with it. Individually, these two things would appear to be aspects we've seen in video games before. Characters radio communicating with the player is a widespread video game trope. It typically doesn't link the characters in any particularly heartfelt way, but it often enables exposition and prepares the player for coming areas and activities without interrupting gameplay and without the burden of the writers needing to make sure the characters are in the same place for every one of these interactions. You're also probably no stranger to dialogue trees in video games; they're simply the method of making character speech interactive, although usually for face-to-face dialogue where characters can more visually emote.
Firewatch's walkie-talkie is a combination of these two tropes, allowing you to verbally express yourself, while also keeping you physically investigating the game's mysteries and placed in its world. You are not entirely alone, but by the same token, there's not someone there to watch your back. You have company, but there's no physical person to distract from your tasks or your view. You might criticise Firewatch for not letting you see all the expression that you would with a flesh and blood Delilah there in front of you, but the game smartly manipulates the distance the radio can create. Early on in the story, you can choose whether you want to use it to maintain an emotional gulf between yourself and Delilah or whether you want to use it to bridge that gulf. This object is seemingly functional and mundane, but anything that humans can use to communicate can give rise to warm and memorable relationships.
The map and compass are also very video gamey items that the game twists into something more real. Most single-player games contain one or both of these objects in some form because most games ask us to navigate an environment. However, Firewatch limits their accessibility and designs its environment to be a slight challenge to navigate. You learn your way through these woods over time, but there's no minimap, and one clump of bushes often looks like another clump of bushes. It makes Shoshone feel convincing, a place that just is rather than one that someone designed for you. The side-effect of this design is that it's easy to get lost on your way from A to B and in another game this would be unnecessarily frustrating. Here, however, it not only puts you more realistically in the place of a forest ranger, having to display some navigation skills instead of just following flowing level layouts or breadcrumb trails, it also provides one of the game's metaphors. Henry doesn't know where he's going in life. He's hit a crossroads, and now he's just meandering about. He needs to put effort into getting back on the right path, and this design puts you in a more literal version of that position.
One of the reasons that you can find so much comfort in your chats with Delilah is that she gives you direction and instruction in a place where navigation is difficult and where you are a new and uncertain employee. You can also imagine how this must be a relief for Henry after being saddled with so much responsibility when he was taking care of Julia. In fact, the game as a whole hands Delilah the kind of responsibilities and agency that traditional games would reserve for only the player character. Even when trying to be sympathetic to supporting characters, many action, puzzle, and sports games make those characters little more than fuel for your agency. For example, in shooters, the primary way you express your agency is through shooting things so the role of the person on the other end of any radio is to direct you to the things that need to be shot while they just hang back.
In Firewatch, you're the one who can climb ridges, investigate campsites, and scare off teenagers while Delilah instructs and watches, however, the game balances Henry's abilities and challenges against Delilah's to make them both feel like equally fully-formed people. While only you can go out into the field, Delilah is further up the command chain and knows more about the forest. She is even allowed to get into her own trouble, possibly facing career or legal danger at the end of the game because she didn't inform her higher-ups that Ned had brought his kid with him. A typical AAA game might look at that circumstance and wonder what the point of Delilah's crisis is if it's not something that affects you, the player character. It doesn't directly hurt you, and it doesn't provide you with an opportunity to flaunt your power by going and rescuing her. Fortunately, Firewatch understands that if you and Delilah are to be equally represented in the game as people, then just as you have wounds that you need to tend to and that no one else can take away, Delilah must have her own.
Another reason you're drawn close to Delilah is that despite there being potential barriers between the both of you, such as her being your boss, the game bends these obstacles to create less distance, not more. Firstly, it shows Delilah quickly reaching across that boss/employee divide and trying to talk to you in a friendly and relaxed way from early on, which makes her a likeable character and shows that she's not uptight and by the book (which will be important for later in the plot). Secondly, as the game goes, your concerns turn from taking care of the forest to investigating what turns out to be Ned's cover-up of Brian's death. In the investigation, there is no hierarchy, and there are no rules to follow, Henry and Delilah are both just working out what's best to do between themselves. It allows the game to smoothly dissolve the formal barriers between the two as the plot builds and the two characters are drawn ever-increasingly to co-operate and empathise with each other as they both become threatened by and involved with the same things.
Of course, none of this would work if Delilah didn't have a compelling personality. Notice that when you first meet her, she is very comfortable poking fun at you. It never feels like she's trying to be hurtful, but from your perspective, it may be because it's coming right after you've just had your dementia-stricken wife whisked away from you. Video games almost universally set up a character hurting you as motivation to beat them later on, and even in games like The Walking Dead it often results in you begrudgingly co-operating with them, but it speaks to a maturity in Firewatch that this can just be an unfortunate communication between two people. It's similarly mature that, unlike a lot of media, Firewatch acknowledges that a man and woman can be alone in the same place for extended periods without becoming romantically involved. These are choices the developers make that are enhanced by Henry entering the game with a lot of baggage weighing him down, baggage that they reveal from the outset. While video games have often left protagonist backgrounds vague or used the old amnesia trope to start us with characters that we can supposedly slip into easily, it's not a way to give us an understanding of a character. Everyone has a history that shapes who they are and what they do today.
Quickly conveying a rich character background while retaining a smooth story progression and player agency might seem nigh on impossible, but Firewatch makes an ingenious use of the Twine format to do so. Twine has long been used as a cheap and quick way of telling stories which can still incorporate player input, but Twine games have always existed as experiences unto themselves. Firewatch nests this whole other genre of game inside itself to achieve its goals. It's not a technique just any game could use, but it's a match for Firewatch's mechanics because the dialogue system in Twine games is so close to the dialogue trees a game like Firewatch uses. What we end up with is not just a story told over two formats but a character with a history we can internalise and a story which feels like a reaction to that history. It leaves the game exploring an unusual time in Henry's life.
Firewatch is a drama, and most stories of its kind would set themselves at a point either earlier or later in Henry's life than Firewatch does. Early in the game's chronology, you have Henry and Julia falling in love and Julia's hopeless mental collapse. Later, we presumably have Henry trying to reunite with his mentally ill wife around a family who think he's unfit to take care of her. Both of these chapters in Henry's existence are emotionally tumultuous and have so much going on in them, but Firewatch decides to set itself in Henry's in-between period, a narrow crevice in the cliffs of his and Julia's relationship. Firewatch is more interested in telling the tale of a quiet, brief time in a person's life very well than trying to over-stretch and presenting an okay depiction of a more dramatic or longer period, but it does more than even that. The game setting itself in this moment of calm between storms also allows us to look at relationships and life choices with eyes few other games give us.
In other narratively-focused dialogue tree games like Life is Strange or Telltale's recent adventure titles, characters can enter and exit the frame quickly, episodes are dense with choices, and choices have to be made quickly and under pressure. We might conclude that the relationships we have in these games can be so fleeting and that the decisions we have to make are so uncomfortable because they come at us hard and fast, but Firewatch has different thoughts. Over the course of hours, Firewatch studies only two speaking characters and contains only one life decision its protagonist needs to make: Whether he will fly back to be with his wife or not. It gives us no shortage of time to explore these story elements and gives Henry a whole in-game summer to get them straight in his head. It does us little good, though. Despite us spending all those hours with Delilah, our goodbye with her feels whiplash abrupt, and our friendship lacks hard closure. Despite having all that time before he needs to decide whether he's going to go back to Julia or not, Henry's still torn over it.
Firewatch suggests that there are experiences you will go through and decisions you will make that, no matter how much time you give them, will never be easy. In media and pop-culture, spending time alone in the forest is often depicted as an enlightening ritual, at its most extreme, one where the isolation and communion with nature will bring about zen-like revelations, but Firewatch feels too grounded in the real world to entertain this new age optimism. Henry's experience in the woods ends with him most likely returning to Julia, but not because he's taken some meditative pilgrimage. Henry, like real people, has a personality that remains consistent through the trials he finds himself enduring. He was Henry when he went into the forest, and he's Henry when he comes out. More than using the time in Shoshone for any radical introspection, it feels like he uses it to put off a responsibility that he should have been attending to all along. He's nudged back onto the right course by the end of the summer, but by external influences more than internal ones.
The tone of Firewatch and the activities it has us conduct match Henry's gradual come-down. Henry thinks he'll find escapism in the forest and so early on our experiences there feel mostly carefree and relaxing, but as reality crashes down on him, we discover a game that puts the theme of loss front and centre. Henry's relationship with Delilah isn't anything like his relationship with Julia, but you are friends, and that connection gets severed. We also see the incredible damage that was done by Ned never acting as a proper father to his son Brian, and Ned's consequential loss of him. There are even warnings about what happens to people who shirk their responsibilities or try to live in perpetual escapism. Delilah didn't tell the authorities about Brian and will now have to face discipline for it. The whole game is an attempt by Henry to escape his troubles, only for him to find that a new home and new job brings new troubles. Ned didn't ever want to go to the police with news of his son's death and is now living out a paranoid and lonely existence. It all forms one giant warning sign against Henry trying to keep his head in the clouds and walking away from someone that needs his care and that he could regret losing.
Discovering what happened to Brian, in particular, feels like it's meant to sway Henry and is one of the game's most sobering moments. During the build up to locating Ned's camp and Brian's body, there are waves of vulnerable thrill. When you find the clipboard logging your activities and when you poke about Watapi Peak, you feel like you could be encountering evidence of some shadowy high-tech conspiracy against you and Delilah. As it turns out, the truth is so much less glamorous than the realities you can imagine up. There is nothing wondrous about the state Brian is found in, he's just the body of a sad boy left in a grey tunnel. At the end of the game, as the forest burns around you, it seems like the world is ending, but despite everything Henry's lost there may be a silver lining. Forest fires are destructive, they incinerate vegetation, choke out animals, and can even kill people, but they also enrich the soil so that something new might grow there. As we board the helicopter at the end of Henry's adventure, we know that despite the fact that he has experienced tragedy in Shoshone, the sad facts he's discovered and the advice he's been given can lead to a fruitful new chapter in his life. Thanks for reading.
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