Firewatch has been on my short list of walking simulators I want to play for some time now. I like narratives, and I particularly like experiencing them in an interactive way, so walking simulators have become a few of my favorite (albeit not the greatest) games of the last decade. They rarely wow you unless their story is engrossing, but occasionally you find a Gone Home or a What Remains of Edith Finch brewing up a storm of inspiration deep within the drawer of the genre.
Firewatch was one of those like I mentioned that had caught the eyes of critics and players alike. Partly this is for superficial reasons, because the game was easy to make look good with in game photos. It was often joked to be a "wallpaper simulator" because of its pretty rendition of the Wyoming wilderness. And while the game can look rather nice here and there, I wasn't overly wowed by it. I usually come for story, so if the graphics look a bit clunky (such as the remarkable Sagebrush) it isn't much of a deterrent.
Firewatch's story is . . . fine? It becomes almost hard to critically review it because of how little there is to really say about it. That hasn't stopped many from praising it, though if you look carefully that praise comes without much in the way of explanation. For part, I get the reason for this since the game is best experienced without spoilers, but even describing the plot in detail would only fill out a couple of sentences. It's straight forward, with a bit of intrigue and a charismatic back-and-forth between our protagonist and the faceless Delilah to fill in the middle. But the game's story works on a simple impression of an idea, and fails to really make that mean something.
The game ropes you into its narrative very well, spelling out a situation to your character's past and allowing you to make one of a couple of choices here and there, feeling your way through a rather difficult past that would inform the character for the rest of the game. It's a good set up, and it gets you caring for this guy, Henry, early on before you've so much as walked a few feet in his shoes. He's had a rough go of things, and his taking the job of firewatch at a Wyoming national park is his way of putting it behind him for the time being, letting himself breath life again. It's obvious from the outset that, at some point, Henry will have to go back and confront what he is running away from, but until then you get to experience his attempt at brief, escapist therapy.
Rather quickly, you get roped into a friendship with Delilah, the firewatch in the zone next to yours, whose tower you can only just see to the north. Firewatch wants us to find the chemistry between these two charming, and for a lot of people it succeeded, but it took a long time before I warmed up to either of them. Henry comes out hostile and rude, right out the gate, and Delilah is sarcastic and far too interested in talking to someone who is plainly being an ass. Throughout the game you will be given chances to talk to Delilah, either in noting observations around the national park or in response to comments she's made, and there's quite a bit of wiggle room here. The game is, more than it is a walking simulator, a talking simulator, where you choose how to approach the conversation you're having and choose the tone. To my annoyance, the sarcastic choice was extremely prevalent throughout, but I can't blame the game too much for allowing for a different playstyle, regardless of my personal taste. I went relatively kind, although avoiding one particular avenue I could tell the game designers were desperately trying to attract me to. So while you can steer the individual conversations to your liking with a bit of fidelity, overall the game is really railroading you toward two particular 'personalities' for Henry and how he approaches his relationship to Delilah, with a third (my route) that the game puts up with but you can tell the weight at the end might have deflated a bit because of it. Despite this, I found myself becoming attached to both Henry and Delilah, even as I began to realize that both had sincere flaws I knew I'd never see them confront.
Unlike most walking simulators, Firewatch makes an effort to feel as nonlinear as possible, although from a technical aspect it is incredibly linear. They give you a map and a compass and let you walk around as you please, exploring the wilderness and what abandoned structures and such are out there, although there isn't really much to see. The game will give you direction as to where to go for a given scene, while Delilah delightfully chats you up along the way. Firewatch is smart to make this walking simulator feel more than just "hold forward to see story", asking you to also navigate with basic tools rather than dressing up a hallway with theming. Edith Finch, for all the praise I gave that game, was technically just a hallway with nice set dressing, but that game also touted much more detailed meis en scene. Asking for another level of engagement, even so little, is welcome in a genre that threatens to feel too samey over the course of its history.
This nonlinearity is a sham, however, and the game railroads you through a day system in which you follow a plot that gets more paranoid as you go. The finale left some cold, and while I liked it in that it allowed the story to end without needing something extreme or wild to close up its narrative, I couldn't help but think the game didn't have much to say. The characters you talk to or hear about are all looking for escape from something, and the theme of confronting that thing permeates the game without much of a payoff. You are given a request at the end right before the credits roll, but it has all the impact of someone saying "the conflict of the game is X". If the point of the game is to reflect on this habit, one of trying to breath when life suffocates you under grief and unfair responsibility, then it fails because the meat of the game has little to do with that. If instead the spoilerriffic plot in the middle is meant to imply something about our characters or some intermingling theme about bonding, it also fails because it has nowhere to go with this theme. The game is ideas, floated about because giving them weight would mean having to struggle with them. Instead, the game would rather give you emotional excuses for its intrigue, even as it has no intentions of paying those off. I enjoyed the game for what it was, but it left me feeling the whole experience was rather thin. It's hard to make a game about escapism when your game escapes having something to say.
6.0
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