Firewatch

The most beautiful, artifully done game that makes me never want to camp in the woods.

There has been interesting trend in the adventure game genre that’s been evolving the last few years, games have been focusing less on traditional gameplay and more trying to be an interactive story experience; You may know them, and probably have played them, and may have even heard them been called by the slightly pejorative term “walking simulator”.

Games like these have varied in success. With Gone Home being hailed a critical darling and a must own for any self-proclaimed gamer. While Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture being well liked by some and considered fairly bland by others. Firewatch shares traits with these games, but, I can honestly say it raises the bar in this new genre while also being one the best gaming experiences I’ve had in a long while.

The story is your are Henry, a man who has decided to leave civilization and take up job as fire lookout in a Wyoming national park. The reason he has chosen this life of solitude I’m not going to spoil here, but I will say it’s probably the best implementation of this particular story idea I have ever seen in a game. On his job as a fire lookout Henry’s only companion is Delilah, his co-worker who is never seen only heard through a walkie talkie.

After some tutorials and an incident involving some rude skinny dipping teenagers the game finally finds its pace and begins its cycle of something is wrong in the park, Henry investigates it, and then him and Delilah pontificate on what could have caused the previous stated something wrong. As events start taking a strange turn the main characters begin to start feeling a sense of paranoia, a feeling that later begins to rub off on you the player.

I was never sure what was going to happen next in Firewatch, a sense of unease that I rarely get with the exception of horror games. This is not a horror game, or at least not one that can be classically defined as such; However the tension in this almost makes me want to disway those faint of heart. I hate to use the cliche I was on the edge of my seat but I was honestly on the edge on seat for most of the game.

Claustrophobia is often thought of only as a fear of someone being trapped in a small confined space. But playing Firewatch that is how I felt, like I was trapped, and the only thing I can do was continue the path the game has set in front of me. Never has a open area felt so large but also so encasing at the same time. I felt like whatever turn the story took next I couldn’t prepare for, with my only solace being that it would look fantastic.

Firewatch is a beautiful game. It’s a gorgeous game. A cornucopia of illuminating ethereal colours grace my ocular senses and will inhabit my dreams to come. Firewatch is damn pretty. That’s not to say Firewatch is graphical powerhouse, no, its beauty comes from a art style that I think rivals any AAA game on the market right now.

Campo Santo’s art team does an outstanding job to make you feel like you're not playing a game but instead walking through a painting come to life. The color pallette has a bright but muted tone to it all, making you feel like you're in someplace not real but still grounded in a reality that is familiar. Different areas and time of days also affect how the game looks; with the forest being deep green, the afternoon making everything a reddish-orange, and night being darkened in a blue-purplish hue.

Art isn’t the only place Firewatch excels at with the creative minds behind the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead in charge it’s not surprising that the writing is so well done. While the actual gameplay is almost non existence, it’s the dialogue choices you make that actually drives the story that is the relationship between these two people forward. Dialogue between Henry and Delilah feels incredibly naturalistic, which may be off putting to some but I’ve found to be refreshing in comparisons to other games that have tried and mostly failed before it. The fact that they feel like real people is amazing in spite of, or because of, the fact they only have their voices to express themselves.

Delilah especially doesn’t just feel like just another NPC companion that’s there to exposit important information or make quippy one-liners; She's a actual person with her own fears and insecurities affecting the story. It’s almost like in your game of Firewatch there is a completely different game running with someone else playing as Delilah, making another set of choices that also changes how the story unfolds, and you’re the one feeling it’s repercussions.

While I said I enjoyed the writing, which I do, it is ultimately the writing of the actual plot where the game begins to lose me. I was intrigued of where the story was the going to go, what possible avenue could the plot drive down thru that can make sense and be enjoyable.

The short answer is it’s not. That is not to say it doesn’t make any sense, heavens no, the developers made damn sure that every question is answered, every dangling thread is sewn tight, every single plot hole is filled just to make sure you know this is why this happened.

But it’s just not satisfying. After spending five hours of misdirections and red herrings being thrown at our face that seem to take possibly fantastical turns for it to go only for it to turn out to be the simplest solution, it just made the ending feel so undeserved. The biggest problem with writing in video games today is the fear to embrace ambiguity. This may be because so many games have missed used it but that doesn’t mean it can’t work in this medium. We have been spoiled as gamers to expect answers and developers have been all too kind to give them to us. But not every mystery needs to be solved, or at least not one to be solved and explained so thoroughly that it feels the answers were gift-wrapped with a pretty bow and served on a silver platter. There are events in life that we can’t explain; Events that the reasons for happening to us we can’t comprehend, but we survive, we continue, we move on.

This is a game about a man trying to deal with such an event, one that could happen to any of us. But the ending has him no longer be one of us trying to deal with something personal, he just becomes another video game protagonist looking for his princess.

Firewatch will go down as one of my favorite games this year, an honor I think it completely deserves. It’s a beautiful piece of art that touches on notions and themes that no other game can say it has done better. I will sing it’s praises from now till forever that it should played by everyone, with the caveat that it will not deliver the promises it shows for most the game. But even it’s flawed ending couldn’t stop it from being one of the most impactful games I’ve ever played.