Justin Wicker weighs in with his review of Firewatch.
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| Henry's home away from home! |
Are you feeling happy? On top of the
world? Just can’t shake that good mood you’ve been having? Well then I have a
game for you! Firewatch is a game about humanity, isolation, cowardice, and
what happens to people when they reach their breaking points. At times, it will
make you smile, and bring up starry-eyed memories of the days of yore. At other
times, it will remind you of things you wanted to forget, or make you feel like
you are going insane. Firewatch is an intense and poignant mystery story that is
emotionally devastating in a way like no other game I have ever played. And for
that, despite its flaws, I have a lot of respect for it.
Firewatch puts you in control of Henry,
a man like many of us, who is trying to find an escape from the real world. And
what better way to escape from the hustle and bustle of personal relationships
and technology than taking a job in a firewatch tower, deep in woods of a
Wyoming national forest. At the beginning of the game you are introduced to
Henry’s backstory in a “choose your own adventure!” book or Twine game fashion,
and it does a phenomenal job of telling a deep and emotional story in a short
time through very limited mechanics. It sets up perfectly the idea of Henry
being the ‘Everyman’ with a storied past, and makes for a cleverly constructed
jump-off point for the beginning of the rest of the game.
The majority of the game is told from a
first-person perspective, controlling Henry through the mundanity of his new
employment. Mechanically, this felt a lot like traditional adventure games or
an even more apt comparison would be to a game like Gone Home. You
venture out into world, picking up and inspecting objects, exploring areas of
the map, and taking in the sights and sounds of the organic world around you.
The environments are absolutely beautiful, despite not being full of high-res
textures or picture-perfect design. Firewatch’s art design was led by Olly
Moss, creator of game art, movie posters, and book-covers alike, and the
environments are just bleeding with style and wonder. I am not typically one
for stop and smell the roses moments in games for a number of reasons, but I
found myself often forgetting my objective and just wandering aimlessly
observing the gorgeous environment.
While Henry does take solace in
solitude, he is not completely alone out there in the wilderness. When you
reach the tower you are greeted via radio by Delilah, your new boss. Delilah
gives you ‘orders’ and communicates with you throughout the game, and is the
center of direction for what the player should do. More importantly, the
communication and relationship building with Delilah seems to be the true focus
of the game. The radio is the central tool for basically everything you do.
Delilah will talk about items you pick up, experiences you have, and even ask
questions about Henry and his personal life. This functions in the form of
branching dialog trees that let you decide how you want the relationship to
develop, and how open or distant you want Henry to be about his life and
problems. In this way more than anything in the game I felt like I was allowed
to make Henry more like a facsimile of me as the player. You can answer the
questions however you like, but I chose to answer them the way I thought I
would given I was in his position, and to me it made this experience that had
already completely grabbed me even more immersive.
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| The map and manual compass for extra immersion! |
The dialog between Henry and Delilah is
very fluid and natural. While their sarcasm and quips may get a little stale,
the conversations themselves don’t have the stiffness or ‘out of a can’ feel I
have come to expect after years of poor dialog in video games. The voice actors
they chose, Rich Sommer of Mad Men fame, and Cissy Jones, best known
from her work on Telltale’s The Walking Dead adventure games, both knock
it out of the park and their real-world conversational chemistry does not go
unnoticed. The dialog develops and changes as the player builds a relationship
with Delilah, and it is through this dialog and the exploratory findings of
Henry that Firewatch’s mystery story unfolds.
The aforementioned mystery is not
necessarily something that's new to games, but the level of tension it puts the
player through is impressive considering its scale. It follows a lot of
structure of a mystery film or novel, complete with all the red herrings and
tropes you can imagine. Despite these concepts being central to mystery
stories, this is actually one of my gripes with the game. The player is
rewarded for exploration by more dialog and more story developments via finding
objects, but sometimes that reward can be irrelevant in the grand scheme of the
game. The red herrings are frequent, and when you mix that with the resolution
of the mystery story itself feeling disappointing, I left the game with a sour
taste in my mouth from a narrative standpoint.
Firewatch was not free of its technical
problems either. I had a frustrating amount of technical issues when playing
the game. There were some of the simple issues like framerate drops during
masked background loads, and the occasional long load screen. Albeit
annoying, these particular issues are far from unforgivable. The real problems
I had with Firewatch were hard crashes and freezes. Several times throughout my
experience, keeping in mind this game is only around 4-6 hours, the game just
totally froze up. It didn't show the ‘blue screen of death’ or kick me
back to the home screen, the game just froze and I had to kill the application.
And, during several of these times I did not have a recent save and and to
re-do some content, which never feels nice. I realize the game was created on
the Unity engine which currently has some issues running on consoles, so I
sympathize, but it's important to note issues like this and not become
complacent with their prevalence.
I would love to talk more about
Firewatch and gush about how it make me feel, and the story points, but really
you should just give it a shot. Spoiling any of the story really does a
disservice to the player since the narrative really is the emphasis. If you
like games that give you feels, are looking to expand your gaming horizons, or
you just want a good mystery story give it a try, but don't be surprised
if you feel like you need a stiff drink when you are done.
Like Justin's review? Please share!
Developer: Campo Santo
Publisher: Panic
Platforms: Playstation 4, PC, Mac, Linux
Release Date: February 9th, 2016
Reviewer’s Platform: PS4
Score
-Justin Wicker