Firewatch (PS4, 2016)
Firewatch is a walking simulator set in 1989 about a man named Henry who takes a job as a fire lookout in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming after his wife is diagnosed with early onset dementia. As things happen and time passes Henry's relationship with his wife, Jules, and his supervisor, Delilah, are explored, along with other things.
I've had two playthroughs of Firewatch and it's taken me a while to decide what I think about it. As walking simulators go it's pretty standard stuff. You walk around a fairly large area of national park with trees and canyons and rocks. You can technically explore it at will, although some areas aren't accessible until you've reached a certain point in the story. If you just follow the game as it intends however you still feel a natural sense of exploration. The park itself isn't really brimming with features for you interact without outside of the story objects, but it's pleasant and atmospheric enough to enjoy wandering about in for a few hours.
With that in mind, there are two points I need to raise as what I would consider bad design. At one point in the story, you will find a fence between you and the place you are trying to reach. You - player and character - quickly determine the fence is insurmountable. Delilah says that there were some firemen nearby recently and they might have an axe you can use to break in. I went to the place the firemen were, but I couldn't reach it. I hadn't pressed the action button enough at the fence to trigger the next part of the game. A similar thing happened later when you're directed to a certain area of the map through a coded message. I consulted the document in game with the answer and determined where I was supposed to go. Only when I got there I hadn't triggered the next part of the game because I hadn't triple checked the location in the first place, so I had to go all the way back to do that. I played through the game in one sitting over 3-4 hours and these incidents cost me at least half an hour combined. For a game which doesn't have that much to actually interact with, this is virtually unforgiveable.
Walking simulators almost always live or die based on how enjoyable it is to walk around. As much as I will always maintain that a good story and characters can absolve a game of almost all criticism, if you can't get the walking part of a walking sim right, what hope is there? Firewatch has a bold, chunky design style which I enjoyed a lot. It's first person and you don't interact with any other people so the art is very environment-centric. Reducing a national park location to bold rockfaces, trees and grass through a limited colour palette might sound boring, but it works. It has an almost childlike quality, as if someone has coloured everything in using the boldest colours possible. The grass is green, the rocks are grey, the sky is blue. It's great. The game takes place over various days and the colour combinations change through daytime, night time, sunset, and so on. Each of these is striking in their own way and now that I think about it, the night time sections are the most evocative. Here you feel most conscious of being out in nature at night, under the stars. You can almost feel the chill in the air. There isn't any wildlife to interact with, but the environment doesn't feel lifeless unless you're running around in places you shouldn't be in yet like I was. The soundtrack to this is suitably minimalist, but I honestly can't remember it well enough to say whether this is a positive or not. If it doesn't pull me out of the pleasant environment, I'm going to say it was probably fitting.
After I'd finished the game I was slightly let down. I knew that a lot of people who had played this had positive things to say about it. It took me a few days and another playthrough to realise what I'd been missing. There are effectively five characters in the game. Henry, Delilah, Henry's wife and two people who were in the park before Henry who you learn about. The game starts with a surprisingly affecting sequence with text on the screen telling the story of how Henry and Jules got married. You can make a few choices but the result always ends up the same. Even though you're just picking text options and you don't know who these people are there's a simple, effective sadness about what happens to the relationship. It's interspersed with brief parts where you control Henry as he arrives at the park, and sets up the start of the game nicely.
Beyond this, Henry and Delilah take up most of the dialogue. You can talk as much or as little as you want to Delilah when you're going around doing fire lookout stuff, and your relationship can go in different ways depending on the responses you pick. I think this is more limited than it lets on, but I'm not going to play the game ten times to find out. I think the game's pacing is partly what lets it down here. You start at Day 1 then there's Day 2 and then there are a few minutes of Days 15 and 30-something I think and while the brief conversations you have here are notable, there is a slight sense that the relationship development is being skipped. You still feel invested in the two of them, but it's always going to be hard to condense two and a half months into a few hours. I understand why, but it's a bit jarring when it first happens. When choosing the dialogue options the first time I picked how I thought I'd feel in that situation. It didn't always seem like the right option. That probably sounds about right.
Anyway, a few days after I'd finished I was thinking about the game and I realised something that had stopped me feeling properly invested in the characters. You don't see anyone. You see a photo of Henry and a few drawings, but that's it. Delilah is a voice on a radio. Jules is a half remembered voice in a dream. The two others from the park who I'm not going to spoil are only properly explored towards the end, and by the time this happens the reveal the game has been working to is nowhere near as mysterious or shocking as you think it's going to be. As a result the game can feel quite anti-climatic by the time you finish it. The lack of people to interact with can make the game feel empty. I think this affected me the first time around because I kept expecting to find something, but didn't.
Starting a second playthrough with all this in mind I changed a few dialogue options around. I thought more about the old park rangers who had been communicating through written letters in the cache boxes which you can find. I thought about Henry and Delilah's relationship and how on my first go I had tried to project a certain sense of character in my responses. Then on my second go as I noticed Delilah's answers were all the same I realised what the game is about. Mundanity. But in a positive way. I realised why I hadn't been able to properly understand what had been going on. It's a game about a forty year old guy in a largely empty forest in 1989. Admittedly I probably expected it to be about the breakdown of Henry's marriage through circumstances outwith his control, but it's not. But it is.
Firewatch is a game about escape. It's a game about escape from something - an event or an existence, but unlike most media on this subject it's not about the act of escape, it's what happens afterwards. It's not about the relationship between Henry and Jules breaking down then him leaving, it's about what happens after he left. The answer is a lot of nothing. Escaping your problems doesn't necessarily achieve anything when you take them with you. The game is more subtle than it first appears. It's almost as if it lulls you into a false sense of security with the nice surroundings and casually strolling around looking at them (there's a sprint button if you have to backtrack like I did). I ended up really feeling an affinity for Henry's situation. I, too, want to run away from all my problems and live in the forest with no internet for a few months. In a way it's a shame Firewatch is as brief as it is. I don't think the brevity of the actual gameplay properly reflects the character development or feeling of immersion in the world or the people. It's a game which leaves you with as many questions as it does answers, but the same probably goes for the characters in the world itself. Ultimately though, the escape will come to an end and you'll have to go back to face up to what you were running from.
Firewatch wasn't really what I expected. What I got didn't make feel good, or happy, or especially satisfied. If I'm to leave on any sort of final summation of my opinion, I think that was the point.
