While critics continue to argue about the proper name for narrative contemplative adventurous games: Narrative Exploration Games, Narrative Driven Games, Visual Story, etc., more and more such games are appearing and gamers seem to like them. Firewatch by Campo Santo is one such interactive story. It’s very beautiful and very deep.
The game’s protagonist, Henry, flees his family life that has turned into chaos into the forests of Wyoming. He takes a seasonal job as a forest ranger to get away from his problems, hide from people, get his thoughts in order, and perhaps decide what he wants to do next. A bit of cowardly behavior, but personally, I can’t imagine how I would behave in his shoes or how I would handle a situation like this, which really has no right solution at all.
Wyoming, where Firewatch takes place, is the most sparsely populated state in the United States, with only 580,000 people living in an area the size of Great Britain. The state’s forests are even more desolate. So Henry is left to himself and during the whole game will not meet face to face with a single living soul. His only contact with the outside world is his boss Delilah, who lives a dozen kilometers away from Henry on another observation tower. They communicate exclusively by radio.
The forests of Wyoming in Campo Santo’s rendition are a fantastically beautiful place. The authors deliberately refused from photorealism in favor of low-poly graphics, and for good reason. Every frame of Firewatch would like to print it as a picture and hang it on the wall. And, by the way, this possibility exists, you can order photos made with the help of the game camera as paintings on the official website of the game. A forest in the morning haze, a midday meadow, a grove permeated with sun rays, a stream jumping on the stones of a fanciful canyon, distant misty mountains. The landscapes are mesmerizing and set the mood. The forest changes as the plot develops and is also a certain allegory of the fire raging in the soul of the protagonist. The magnificent soundtrack emphasizing the general mood and setting the plot accents.
But the world of Firewatch truly comes to life thanks to the excellent performance of two actors: Cassie Jones, who voiced six (!) characters in both parts of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, and Richie Sommer, who played Garr Crane in Mad Men. Impressive voice work, not unlike what we heard in the recent Oxenfree. Dialogues of Henry and Delilah turned out unusually lively, natural, filled with internal chemistry, humor, emotions. However, a great deal of credit for this goes to the scriptwriters as well. And by the way, the warning of the creators on Steam is absolutely accurate: Firewatch is a video game about adults having adult conversations about adult things. And it’s not about sexual innuendo at all, just many of the topics touched upon during the conversations between Henry and Delilah will be uninteresting and incomprehensible not only to teenagers, but also to many players under 25 years old.
Firewatch’s leisurely developing story is not so simple. Strange things start happening in the woods around Henry and Delilah’s towers, either in the style of The X-Files or a horror movie. The characters try to make sense of what’s going on, connect the scraps of different stories and figure out who is trying to drive them crazy or turn them against each other. At a certain point it may even seem that everything that is happening is just a figment of the main character’s imagination, or that his interlocutor is playing a game of her own, incomprehensible to Henry.
The ending of the story has caused a lot of controversy among players. Some people think that they were deceived almost like in Mass Effect 3, but it’s not like that at all. The authors deliberately led us to such a finale. After all, Firewatch is a game about responsibility for your own actions, about the ability to take the burden of a decision and bear its consequences. In this respect, the ending does its job as well as possible and makes us think about the fate of Henry and the people who were affected by the story told in the game.