Many games ask that you personalize by choosing a hair color or shoe size. Firewatch mostly succeeds in convincing the player that they are one and the same.Ĭleverly, developer Campo Santo makes sure the player is heavily invested in Henry's character and personality right from the start of the game, demanding a few personal choices on his behalf that transform him from ordinary everyman into someone special. Game designers have spent years trying to splice together the starkly different materials of player agency and authorial story. Its cascading quests are obviously designed to open up the map and unlock new gadgets, but there is usually a sense that they are intimately entwined with the unfolding drama.

On the whole, Firewatch's missions serve the story, not the other way around.

It's possible that Henry is being set up for committing a serious crime. He and Delilah come to believe they are being monitored. In the course of these quests, Henry finds himself encountering unwelcome conflicts that propel the tasks beyond mere fetch chores into the realm of engrossing missions. Mostly, he reports what he finds back to Delilah, via more complex dialogue trees. On those very rare occasions when he encounters other people, he follows limited dialogue options. She sends him out to investigate a column of smoke, or some kids letting off fireworks. Via a walkie-talkie, he communicates with his supervisor Delilah, who literally oversees him from her distant mountaintop destination.Īs Henry, the player's job is to follow Delilah's instructions. It's the story of Henry, who takes a job on a forest watch station in the late 1980s. Set in the rugged outdoors of Wyoming, Firewatch is a game of exploration, both in the physical sense and intellectual sense.

Firewatch game reviews