Firewatch, meanwhile, is a genuinely mature, adult story. Usually, when game developers speak of being “mature” and “adult” and “emotional,” they’re really just using those words as smokescreen for veneer of seriousness used to lend a false sense of depth. GameplayĮnough cannot be said about the writing in Firewatch – it genuinely might be the best writing a game has ever had. “Player choice” is not really the name of Firewatch’s game instead, it’s “player opinion” that matters here. Small moments of conversation can completely reshape the thematic path of their story, obscure and highlight parts of the story’s mystery, and alter the nature of their interaction the entire summer. The big beats of Firewatch are largely independent of player choice, as was The Walking Dead’s, but the relationship between Henry and Delilah is extraordinarily malleable. Campo Santo’s founders Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman were the principal members of the creative team behind the famed first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and Firewatch is clearly a game built from the same design mindset and with similar appeal. Not because it would be spoiling (though it would), but because Firewatch is such a specific, personal thing that it simply must be experienced yourself. To say more, about anything, would be useless. Henry’s only emotional lifeline.Įvents transpire, and as the threat of fire looms over Shoshone, the park reveals itself to not be quite as peaceful as it appears. Way across the horizon, in a different tower, is Delilah (Cissy Jones), his unseen supervisor speaking over walkie-talkie. He is alone – there is no one with him in his tower – and yet he is not. One such person is Henry (Mad Men’s Rich Sommers), the protagonist, a middle aged man with memories he would like to forget over his summer stint on the firewatch in Shoshone.
Just a few years prior, a massive forest fire nearly burned nearby Yellowstone National Park to cinders, sparking a massive recruitment drive for new people to watch for forest fires. Ostensibly just another walking simulator, Firewatch takes place in the Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming, in 1989. I think Firewatch is something genuine, unique, and special, and ultimately as ambitious as the great outdoors itself.
From its heart wrenching opening sequence to the moments it leaps from influences like Far Cry 2 to the films of John Carpenter to a complicated emotional conclusion, I don’t think Firewatch ever misses a single beat. The debate over whether or not the ending works, waged for the next couple of weeks among the great game critics, is one that will be very fascinating indeed.įor me, I stand on the side of Firewatch being a triumph. But Campo Santo deliberately downplays the events at hand, and the story offers no grand final moral statement. To me, it’s a close to perfect emotional and thematic capstone to Campo Santo’s first game – an ending as purely human and intelligent and impressively adaptive to player opinion as the rest of Firewatch. I do not believe it’s such a deflated-balloon of an ending. By that, I mean a lot of people are going to hate it, or believe it is a letdown, or thematically out of step. The last 20 minutes of Firewatch are going to be the subject of much controversy. The first game from Campo Santo, a mystery in the Wyoming wilderness, Firewatch is an unqualified triumph.
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