You didn't think I'd forget, did you? Even knee-deep in all the GOTY material I've unwisely given myself to craft, there's enough time left to review another fine Indie product. Campo Santo's Firewatch became something of a minor meme around these parts, but I suspect it was largely played up as a joke: it's very apparent what Firewatch is and what it's trying to do from the moment you start playing. As Henry, the middle-aged goofball who needed an extended leave of absence from his old life once his wife comes down with Alzheimer's and becomes too difficult to live with, the player is thrust into the thrilling world of sitting in a lookout post in the middle of a forest to watch for fires, hence the imaginative name. Accompanying him, if only in audio form, is his supervisor Delilah: a sardonic woman who is friendly enough, to whom Henry frequently reports his findings and musings and suffers her jokes in good humor. The game is built on the strength of the slightly quippy, slightly flirty rapport between them; though we soon discover that both are really only there for a Summer job that - while vitally important to the well-being of America's national parks - is simply a means to escape their complicated lives for a few months.

Beyond all that, Firewatch is your standard first-person adventure game. Hiking simulator would be a fair way to put it, as you spend your time traversing the woods near your lookout tower with a compass and map completing various objectives, from chasing away rowdy teens to investigating plumes of smoke. The game eventually takes on the cadence of a thriller towards its later chapters, but having played Gone Home I sort of figured there might've been a thematic bait-and-switch coming. Suffice it to say, when it's not indulging in 1980s secret conspiracy horror tropes, the core of the game is the burgeoning relationship between its two primary characters and the occasional mystery contained within Henry's corner of the park. I'm making it sound low-key, but there's drama and humor and suspense and everything you could want from a narrative-focused adventure game. Plus the writing's good and the world's fun to explore, at least for the few hours that the game lasts; it's not going to be like Far Cry or Assassin's Creed where there's something to do or kill or pick up around every corner, but there's a few scraps of incidental storytelling and curious sights for the duo to remark upon.

I guess I could say I enjoyed Firewatch. It's part of a wave of narrative-driven Indie games that lack the inventory and dialogue puzzles of their ancestors but still adopt a slightly more interactive and open form than a visual novel, where so much is railroaded from what you can choose to investigate and discuss with other characters to how the story pans out, and while I don't see how Firewatch could end too differently from how it did for me - certain awkward factors are always present, regardless of how you chose to answer Delilah's questions and respond to her messages - I at least got the sense that their tale had been personalized a little by what I chose to say. No big splash screen at the end to tell me what everyone else did whenever a decision presented itself; it's not the sort of game where big binary choices matter too much beyond the sake of your own role-playing, and that was plenty of story-weaving for me. I also thought the game looked great in an impressionist sort of sense where shapes and lighting and colors do far more of the heavy lifting in setting the scene than any sort of photorealistic textures (so, imagine something more like The Witness), and the game was scored adroitly in how it not only created a mood piece but a mood piece that might feasibly have existed as a movie in the late 1980s, when the game is set. I found the latter remarkable because I'm playing Prey at the same time, which also nails the 1970s sci-fi horror movie vibe it's going for. (Also: an odd coincidence that both games feature paraphernalia for a fake D&D game. I suspect Stranger Things has a lot to answer for in that regard, though I suppose Firewatch's September 2016 release predates it by a month. Maybe it's just a rule that if you make anything riffing on the 70s or 80s, you better make sure to include first-edition D&D references in it.)

As always, I appreciate these games for pushing the adventure genre in new directions and giving authors better and smarter opportunities to tell stories in ways exclusive to the video game format. And, if nothing else, at least I finally know what Firewatch is now. Solving that mystery was worth the price of admission alone.

Rating: 4 out of 5.