Plus, Campo Santo has done a terrific job capturing the hot summery atmosphere of the Western United States. It’s worth hiking around shale slides, lakes, winding paths along cliffs, and rocky caves – works of art, all – simply to breathe in their beauty, much as a real hiker might in a real wilderness. Indeed, Firewatch‘s lush and inviting world makes exploring simply for the sake of exploring is one of the game’s greatest strengths.

The story jumps ahead to key days and events throughout the summer as necessary to serve the plot, but players are generally free to roam about as they like prior to getting to these events.

It creates a thin layer of artificiality atop what otherwise seems a sincere friendship, making it just a bit harder to accept them as who and what they seem to be. For example, Delilah occasionally comes off as reactionary and overdramatic for someone with her experience, and Henry usually just takes it in stride rather than questioning it.Īnd that neither of them elects to hike to the other’s tower – or meet in a spot between – all summer long despite their growing closeness seems a bit strange a contrivance created for the sake of the story so that the Delilah remains a bit mysterious. That said, their friendship doesn’t always ring completely true. The payer’s goal is simply to experience a story, ushering it along at his or her own pace. But the object isn’t to win or to be clever or to riddle stuff out. You can choose, to a degree, what to make Henry say in certain situations.

You can select which objects to look at and which ones to ignore. You can move and explore the world around you. It’s a largely predetermined narrative in which a degree of agency is granted the audience (meaning you, the player). Campo Santoįollowing in the footsteps of games like Sunset and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch has no combat and not really even any puzzles. But what he soon discovers is that while he can remove his physical person from a difficult situation, he can’t escape himself, and that perhaps this is where his real problem lies. In an attempt to put some distance between himself and a situation he feels he can no longer handle, the man – Henry, (played with scrappy authenticity by Mad Men‘s Rich Sommer) – has decided to spend the summer in a remote forest outpost keeping lookout for fires, a la Smokey Bear. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Firewatch game journal