At the very end of the game we are treated to a series of photographs found on a disposable camera that Henry finds on an abandoned rucksack: one of the pictures is an accidental selfie, a shot of his baffled, chubby face and immediately after we see the happy faces of the original owners of the camera, a father and son who we never meet but whose presence resonates throughout the story. At the start of the game, the sad story of what happened to Henry’s wife is punctuated with a glimpse of him flicking through one of her old notebooks: and there’s our man, sketched fully nude in cartoonish profile, apropos of nothing. While the dialogue has a tendency to veer between sarcastic quippery and earnest assertions, it feels churlish to complain about that because one of the great things about the game is the way it balances moments of reflection with moments of levity.
The writing and the acting are fantastic. And, as in life, there is no way to rewind if you say something stupid so while the main events of each playthrough will always be the same, every player will likely only ever hear a fraction of the possible dialogue recorded for the game. It’s through Henry’s conversations that the player is able to exercise the most choice: picking one option over another will change their relationship in all kinds of subtle and interesting ways. Henry’s only companion throughout the game is Delilah, his supervisor, who he communicates with via walkie talkie. In theory, his job is to sit up in a little cabin all day and watch the horizon for signs of smoke in practice, a series of incidents during the game send him rambling through the local woods in pursuit of a complex unfolding mystery.
Here’s how it works: you play as Henry, a man approaching late middle age who takes up a job in a fire lookout station in a Wyoming national park. It didn’t bother me especially because part of what I found so valuable about the game was the simple fact that the landscape is supposed to feel entirely indifferent to the situation that the characters find themselves in. Whether this is a problem for Firewatch probably depends on how you feel about this broader question of coherence. I could even see the setting of the park as a place where you could string together multiple interrelated stories over a series of episodes - a zone of possibility, like an immutable version of the world from Minecraft. I can easily imagine another story (or stories) included in the place of the one which exists. Both are, in themselves, very fine and good but I don’t think one exists to serve the other. For example, I’m not sure it’s possible to reconcile the story of Firewatch with the world it depicts. This is a big ask, not least because the average video game might require many more working parts to be created from scratch than the average film - and it’s still a rare thing in the medium for every element to be ‘directed’ by a single individual.īut I sometimes wonder if this kind of total unity is always desirable. In the same way as one might argue that every line in a book or every frame in a film must work towards a greater whole, one could also say that the mechanics and character and writing and music and world design and systems in a video game all must be working together in a way which supports the theme of a game. There is a certain tendency right now to want the best games to reconcile everything in a totally coherent package.
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