Developed locally here in the Bay Area by Campo Santo, Firewatch is a love letter to a lot of things that I hold in high regard:
1980's setting ✔️
Great voice acting ✔️
Beautiful outdoor environments ✔️
Strong art direction ✔️
Flawed as fuck, but likable, protagonist ✔️
Great atmosphere ✔️
It's kind of weird that I put the game off for so long, right?
WRONG. I had my reasons.
I'm normally not one for heavy story in games. That probably sounds weird to anyone else who's picked up a controller but in my experience, story usually comes at the expense of something else. Gameplay, that is, the challenge and elation of inputing a specific sequence of commands in response to meticulously designed and calculated stimuli on the screen, is why I play games - because of how things feel, not because of why I'm doing them. The story is context - it explains why you're doing the thing you're doing, and that's really all I need from a game's story.
I explained the difference just so I could say that even though I was a film studies/english lit double major, I just don't give a shit about story in games. I don't like the Uncharted games all that much, I've never played the Last of Us, and as you saw in my first Backlog Quest Log - I think the Telltale games are historically kind of underwhelming.
So yeah, I was as surprised as anyone that I liked Firewatch so much. It definitely helps that I beat it in about 3.5 - 4 hours, but more than that, I was genuinely engrossed in the story. So let's start there.
It opens with a selection of "this or that", choose-your-own-adventure prompts that feel kind of like the Scientology personality test. More than choosing dialogue, you're choosing behavior, modeling yourself after the lead character, Hank. You're at the bar one night you meet a knockout, and the two of you immediately hit it off. Over the years, you two have a passionate and loving romance that before Julia is beset with Alzheimer's. While you manage to take care of her for a bit, you get arrested with an unfortunate DUI during a stressful night you were having. Julia's family returns to the States to take their sick daughter back to her home country of Australia, and you're left without her.
Hoping for a fresh start, you take a 90 day rotation assignment on, well, Firewatch, in Wyoming near Yellowstone, following the fires of '88. After taking a grueling hike up to your post, you meet Delilah over the radio. She's kind of like your manager, and the only person you'll speak to over the next three months, strictly through your walkie-talkie. On your first night you're asked to check in on some fireworks being shot in the park. You find it's teens and head back to your post (or, like me, you threw their radio in the lake where they were swimming because teenagers suck, cleaned up all their beer cans because nature, and confiscated their whiskey because whiskey). On the way back, you see a mysteries shadowy figure who scares the bejesus out of you.
As the summer goes on, strange things happen. Your post is ransacked, communication wires are cut, unreported fences are established by shady (maybe) governmental agencies, you're kind-of-sort-of framed for murder, and a deeper mystery beckons. I don't want to get too much into it because the game is short enough for you to beat in one sitting and it's pretty compelling stuff, making it feel even shorter.
Though not a horror game, there were parts of Firewatch that were genuinely creepy and unsettling. The game made me afraid of the dark (y'know, in the game), and kept me on my toes so that every time I was rappelling down a cliffside, I found myself holding my breath because I assumed something would go wrong, whether accidental or malicious. I was scared playing the game, I was brave playing the game, and I was genuinely moved not just by what happened to me, but by what I felt I had to do.
Damn that's immersive.
There are supply caches throughout the area you're in charge of monitoring, and in each of them there's updates you can make to your map and some supplies that will help you get into new areas. These moments are subtle though, and don't feel like learning a new power in Metroid or anything. It's incredibly helpful to seek out these caches, but it never feels video gamey.
The through-line is the player's relationship with Delilah. It's simultaneously the biggest pull and greatest frustration of the game. It's kind of like that movie Her which is an awesome to pull from because let's be honest - that movie rules. You select what to say to her from a series of options and you get to cater how you want your relationship with her to go. The frustrating part is that ultimately it feels like no matter what you do, things will always end the same way. That was my biggest gripe with Emily Is Away, an awesome nostalgia-fest that presented choice, but was ultimately just the illusion of choice.
But what makes it work is the way storytelling and gameplay mix together, even if the gameplay is technically limited. Traditional AAA rely too heavily on cinematics or in game cutscenes to advance the plot, but Firewatch doesn't. There are interstitials that let you know what day it is during your rotation, but they're really just loading screens to change the over-world, and it's a smart way to mask those changes. It never feels like "now's the time for the story" and "now's the time for the game" - they're simultaneous and don't come at the expense of the other.
I really, really dug Firewatch, and I think you would too. You can beat it in the amount of time it takes to watch the first two Batman movies from Nolan's trilogy, and while those movies are a perfect way to spend 4 hours and 50 minutes, Firewatch scratches a completely different part of your brain that can itch and is more than enjoyable in its own regard. If I didn't have a blog where I was going through my backlog trying to play all the games I haven't gotten to, I probably would've replayed it already.