Firewatch Guide

Firewatch is a story of a lonely man in a big country, presented as a series of prettily frescoed spaces, strung together for the player to explore in exacting chronology. The player strolls along narrative paths in the first person, gazing at passing tableaux of gorgeous nature, while investigating a mystery parceled out in discrete, bite-sized chapters of the authors' devising. Inside its confining corridors of cottonwoods and aspens, boulders and ravines, Firewatch delivers a deft story about loneliness and paranoia in a world of deceptively far horizons and dreamy vistas. It's a pace-y series of scripted scenes that amount to a graceful and entirely beguiling illusion of agency. The story remains gripping for almost the entirety of its five hours. It's only in the final sequence that the illusion begins to blur and disintegrate as the drama's converging arcs fail to entirely yoke together. The story takes place over the course of an entire summer, with different “days” – which are treated as chapters of the story playing out at different hours of the day and night. That allows bold reds, yellows, and oranges to color this fictional Wyoming forest’s beautifully painted scenery (a contribution by renowned illustrator Olly Moss) all in a comfortable and immersive first-person perspective. It is a testament to both Moss and Firewatch’s level designers that, even despite the stylized look, the Two Forks Woods sticks in my mind like a real place: the narrow passage through Thunder Canyon, the serene calm of Jonesy Lake, the comically small size of Pork Pond, and the unexplained mystery of the Medicine Wheel. In fact, only the strange absence of almost any wildlife whatsoever betrays the convincing setting.Right from the jump, their relationship feels real, despite the fact that they’re communicating entirely via radio, with no faces on screen to lend emotional cues. Henry – or Hank, as she sometimes defiantly calls him – comes across as a good man at heart, but a flawed one – a man not sure about whether or not to go back to the life he left behind in Boulder, Colorado. He is fully capable of matching wits with Delilah, who uses humor as a shield for the personal life she doesn’t like discussing as they get to know each other over the course of the summer. It’s a pair of firework-launching teenage girls that set Firewatch’s story in motion, and you can choose to talk to Delilah at almost any time by bringing up your two-way radio. She’s got something to say about almost everything, whether you need advice on how to handle a given situation or you’re just reporting your progress on a task she’s given you, and she’s so engaging that I found myself eager to call about every little thing I came across.

Things get darker  in a figurative as well as a sometimes literal sense when the teens go missing, and you and Delilah try to piece together the puzzle of their whereabouts while making your own critical (sometimes difficult) decisions. The writing here is simply head and shoulders above nearly every other game I’ve ever played. In a way, we’re looking at a classic two-hander, but one that stretches out over several square miles of Wyoming wilderness as Henry investigates fireworks, reports on downed lines and explores the park’s forests, canyons, lakes and creeks. You’ll seek out caches and supply drops, search for vandals and watch out for signs of grizzly bear. And all the time you’ll have Delilah on the other end of the radio, as you squeeze the controller’s trigger and use the stick to select answers in a clever simulacrum of Henry with his handset. The questions your ask and the replies you give begin to steer your relationship with Delilah in new directions, and this in turn pushes the story along new paths. There’s a real sense of identifying with Henry, and of your choices altering both the character and the role. And as you play, the game subtly shifts in tone, promising a love story, threatening a thriller, surprising you with sudden revelations that might turn everything on its head. Firewatch can be bleak, warm, funny, chilling, nerve-wracking, exciting and melancholic, sometimes within a single hour. Kudos to the writing team, the actors – Rich Sommer and Cissy Jones – and the composer, Chris Remo of Thirty Flights of Loving and Gone Home fame; Firewatch works on all sorts of emotional levels.
 

Many games ask that you personalize by choosing a hair color or shoe size. But Firewatch requests that you choose a pet and name it, or that you pick from optional ways to interact with Henry's unwell wife during the early backstory. These mini-choices demonstrate a sense of humor, while creating empathy. Firewatch is a subtle story told with economy and verve. Delilah is the central enigma. She's smart and conscientious, but she makes mistakes. She likes to drink and to flirt. Sometimes she is self-centered, but she can present as caring. She has moments when she shows a need for companionship, and others when she is wary and aloof. From the start, she seems likable, but not entirely trustworthy. She is, of course, a device to give quests and to make sure the player is paying attention to important narrative events. But she is also is the central storyteller, revealing secrets about herself while teasing depth and contrast out of Henry's character. Delilah and Henry represent an emerging trend in games, of paired characters who are individually and collectively simpatico but who struggle with their own anxieties and with one another's perceived shortcomings. Their relationship has form and shape, though it shimmers and shifts as the story progresses. These two characters are written with a conviction and authenticity rarely seen in video games. Neither of them is idealized, not even for a second. Their self-doubts and flaws are carved into the script and into the optional responses. Their ordinariness is what makes them so appealing.

Firewatch takes us to a time and a place in which people expected that they might be left alone. It reminds us that invasion of privacy is a stark and frightening violation, even when we leave ourselves open to such abuse.There are things Firewatch doesn’t quite deliver, though. There are glimpses of the complexity of a puzzle game – with its items, for instance, which can be picked up, moved and examined that it doesn’t quite follow through with. Early on, dealing with those kids and their fireworks, Henry can pick up their stereo and then, though the game doesn’t specifically suggest it, it’s possible to throw it into the lake. There’s a thrill to knowing the game has anticipated this leftfield choice, something reminiscent of the obscurities and intuitions of classic PC adventure games, and something Firewatch doesn’t do again.

Firewatch uses branching dialogue and tactile objects and items (the walkie-talkie, the map, dozens of small nothings) to give players a handhold in the experience. It feels like it could gate progression by building puzzles using these items, but instead we’re very much led, albeit skilfully, through the game’s world. Time is elastic, according to the needs of story. Days and even weeks are skipped over. Sometimes, with a plot point reached, days simply end while Henry is wandering in the open. And why not? It’s effective storytelling, but it also underlines that Firewatch is moved forward by player discovery, rather than player activity. All of which means that Firewatch does what it sets out to do it tells a simple, effective story using its keenly developed sense of location and by binding us to Henry through smart writing and dialogue choices. The question of whether these choices can substantially impact the outcome of Henry’s story does niggle: were we just witnesses or active participants? However, Firewatch’s final few minutes provide a rush of revelation and reconciliation that caps a triumphant and involving piece of emotional storytelling. It is, in the end, like a choose your own adventure book, played without dice or fighting. You are Henry. And you’re glad you played Firewatch.

Firewatch is a game of exploration, both in the physical sense and intellectual sense. It's the story of Henry, who takes a job on a forest watch station in the late 1980s. Via a walkie-talkie, he communicates with his supervisor Delilah, who literally oversees him from her distant mountaintop destination. As Henry, the player's job is to follow Delilah's instructions. She sends him out to investigate a column of smoke, or some kids letting off fireworks. He hikes. He jumps over felled trees. He climbs rocky inclines. He picks up stuff. On those very rare occasions when he encounters other people, he follows limited dialogue options. Mostly, he reports what he finds back to Delilah, via more complex dialogue trees. In the course of these quests, Henry finds himself encountering unwelcome conflicts that propel the tasks beyond mere fetch chores into the realm of engrossing missions. He and Delilah come to believe they are being monitored. People go missing. It's possible that Henry is being set up for committing a serious crime.

As a challenge, Firewatch asks nothing especially demanding of the player, while always offering plenty of stuff to do. Traversal usually takes some measure of puzzle-solving, reading a map, consulting a compass and exploring the environment for hidden exits. There are plenty of physical barriers, such as rocks to climb, ensuring that the player is constantly engaged and feels like progression is more than a conveyor belt. There's also stuff for the player to use, either on cue or by fancy, such as an axe, a flashlight and a camera. These are objects that must be sought and found. It all adds up to a game that offers few tough challenges, but many moments of intense concentration. There is one moment, near the end, when the game lets go of the player's hand, and asks perhaps a tiny bit too much lateral thinking and intense exploration, a sharp upward curve in difficulty. Firewatch's missions serve the story, not the other way around. Its cascading quests are obviously designed to open up the map and unlock new gadgets, but there is usually a sense that they are intimately entwined with the unfolding drama. Game designers have spent years trying to splice together the starkly different materials of player agency and authorial story. Firewatch mostly succeeds in convincing the player that they are one and the same. Cleverly, developer Campo Santo makes sure the player is heavily invested in Henry's character and personality right from the start of the game, demanding a few personal choices on his behalf that transform him from ordinary everyman into someone special.Many games ask that you personalize by choosing a hair color or shoe size. But Firewatch requests that you choose a pet and name it, or that you pick from optional ways to interact with Henry's unwell wife during the early backstory. These mini-choices demonstrate a sense of humor, while creating empathy. Firewatch is a subtle story told with economy and verve.