There are things Firewatch doesn’t quite deliver, though. It’s visible from Henry’s tower – glowing, hungry, uncontrollable – and it grows into an all-consuming force. In the second half of the game, as the mystery Henry’s investigating deepens, a fire starts to spread in the distance. He picks up supplies and ropes from locked cache drops – there’s a subtle sense that the regular safety net of games (slick digital map screens and GPS waypoints) has been removed, and Henry has to stay alert to stay alive. There’s a boy scout survivalism to walking the park every point to which Delilah sends Henry he must find with a map and compass he holds in front of his face. The wind howls as you climb the winding stairs to the top of your lookout tower. It also works because Firewatch delivers a good sense of being a small person in a huge space.
It’s a matter of investment, even if we’re not deciding anything crucial, we buy it. His words sound like something we might say, which makes the dialogue choices the game offers all the more effective. Henry’s sadsack dryness – by turns curt, dopey and earnest – isn’t just endearing, it’s endearingly realistic.
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Henry and Delilah’s exchanges are full of the familiar tug and tarry of people getting to know each other, of playing and of flirting, and of reaching out to feel less alone. The writing is not just believable, it is likeable and funny. Which is to say that we care, and that Henry feels like us. Meanwhile, the park itself envelopes him physically, this stocky, everyday nobody tumbling through the oblivious vastness of this wild place.Īnd it works. With his life paused and broken, his increasing dependence on Delilah begins to feel like an emotional precipice, the skewed power dynamic and his fragility a tinderbox mix.
Everything that happens to Henry in the park is designed to highlight his vulnerabilities.
The journey, though, is more important than the destination. This mystery motivates all of Henry’s tasks and movements: he’ll talk to Delilah, she’ll send him somewhere, he’ll explore the park, complications typically ensue. The other thing that happens is that Henry and Delilah become entangled in a slowly unfolding mystery, which grows from a simple infraction of park rules – kids letting off fireworks – to a paranoid, all-consuming plot. She works in a distant cabin on one of those tantalising far-off peaks, a warm voice floating into Henry’s ear through his lookout walkie-talkie, an absence in the physical space around him underlining his solitude.įirewatch’s visual grasp of the American outdoors is defined by the bright, airbrushed work of British artist Olly Moss. And what happens, really, is two things: he meets – or rather doesn’t meet – Delilah, a perky, forthright and funny lookout supervisor who is both exactly what Henry needs to trigger his emotional recuperation, and also his boss. It’s a world that delivers both variety – of colour, landscape, time of day – and sophistication within a dense, well-plotted space, its modest map efficiently filled with items, pathways and objectives.įirewatch is about what happens to Henry in the park, after the emotional foundation laid by the prologue. The park is an open world, with tantalising views of distant peaks and valleys stretching much further than the game’s explorable area. Made by a new studio of about a dozen people, Firewatch is stylised and almost cartoonish, its visual grasp of the American outdoors defined by the bright, airbrushed work of British artist Olly Moss. Henry decides to escape, to a job as a fire lookout at Shoshone National Forest.įirewatch is a relatively small game that projects itself big. There are moments of extraordinary joy, giving way to an overall theme of devastation. This is how it all starts, in the second person like a choose your own adventure book, although the opening prologue is more like a multiple choice quiz sketching the history of Henry’s heartbreaking early adulthood.
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