The writers behind Telltale Games' acclaimed The Walking Dead have delivered another tour de force videogame story in Firewatch.
As a newbie staffing a one-man outpost in the Wyoming wilderness, the first line of defense against forest fires, you're alone and almost entirely cut off from society. Almost. Your only human interaction is Delilah, your boss, barking orders at you on the other end of your walkie-talkie. And then... well, the story goes on from there. And since experiencing the story---living the story, really, feeling your way through it---is the essence of the Firewatch experience, I should stop there.
Although its creators came out of Telltale's point-and-click adventure factory, Firewatch, available Tuesday for Steam and PlayStation 4, seems more strongly influenced by 2013's Gone Home. They're both first-person exploration games in which the player's interaction is generally limited to moving around the environment, picking up items, examining them to learn a little more about the world, and then (maybe) putting them back where they found them. More so than walk-about games like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch is a more pick-uppy, interacty, hands-on story.
But not challenging, in the traditional game sense: Although there is certainly a pervasive sense of impending doom at every moment of Firewatch---painted in equal parts by the tight mystery writing, Olly Moss' foreboding visual designs and Gone Home composer Chris Remo's deftly executed score---you're never in danger of anything going wrong. But the tension barely drops, even knowing that.
Firewatch has a crunchy physicality to it that other such games lack. In Gone Home and many other first-person games, you get that feeling of being a camera on a stick, floating lightly and precisely through the world. Firewatch's protagonist Henry, though, is right there with you---he's a little overweight, he huffs and puffs, he jerkily hoists himself up and over obstacles with some effort. It adds to the characterization, to the outdoorsiness, to the sensation of being a person.
You rarely see other people in Firewatch, but you're constantly interacting with Delilah over the radio. She'll buzz in to give you tasks or just say hello, and you respond by selecting from a short list of options. You and she keep up a running dialogue throughout the game, pushing the story forward and letting Henry voice his thoughts on things, which often turn out to be your thoughts on things; as in Telltale's games you have a limited amount of time to respond (or not) to Delilah's prompts, and that can take the conversation in different directions (although it doesn't seem as if it affects the major story beats, or the finale).
The isolation of games like Gone Home (which, similarly, stars a protagonist in an empty house) and Firewatch is a marriage of story and game design constraints: Virtual humans are expensive to make, hard to get right, and throw you down the uncanny valley besides. By stripping out the people, developers like Campo Santo or Fullbright can deliver sheer beauty on tight budgets. (See also last month's Oxenfree, which zoomed out the camera until the players were stick figures. See, even, the first BioShock.)
By removing the videogamy parts of the videogame, Firewatch opens itself up to a wider audience, although I actually wonder if it doesn't handicap itself a bit in that area. Many of the simple tasks you need to perform require clunky multiple-button combinations---press up on the D-pad to bring up your map, hold the L button to zoom in if you want to actually read it, then use the right analog stick to move your field of view around.
If you want to talk to Delilah, you have to hold the R button to bring up the radio, use the left thumbstick to pick a response, then use the L button to select it, while you're still holding R. So two of the game's most-used functions require a triple-button press-and-hold combo that even momentarily jammed my fingers up on occasion. (And if Delilah calls while you have the map open---sheesh.)
You do use the map a lot; Firewatch kicks off with you having to open it up and use it with an old-school compass to navigate your way from your lookout tower to a supply cache. You get the idea that there's going to be an element of navigational exploration of the woods in Firewatch, which actually doesn't turn out the be the case. Very quickly, you realize that not only is the Wyoming backcountry actually kind of on the small side, but it's been neatly subdivided into a hub-and-spoke series of linear pathways that always guide you to the next location. It's the most organized wilderness ever.
Firewatch may leave you before you're ready to be done with it; like Gone Home, Oxenfree et cetera it's a six-hour experience that you can easily start after lunch and finish before bed. But it's an emotional gut-punch all the way through, for many reasons, and largely a pleasure to explore and find yourself lost in---mentally, if not geographically. This is your next must-play story, another voyage to a place games don't often take us.
