I don’t want to give too much away, but despite some deficiencies in the way the mystery is wrapped up, the story was thoroughly enjoyable. It’s romantic, tragic, and left me evaluating my life and character in ways I didn’t expect. It’s an exercise in paranoia and the effects of isolation. It’s a mystery that rachets up from zero to 100. The story itself is not at all what I expected. Both characters are written with a myriad of flaws bolstered by an absolutely wonderful sense of humor that makes their repartee - the only real delivery system for the games story - feel natural, real and engaging. You could very well choose to ignore most of her conversation options, but through doing so you would lose out on a lot of the games story, and for a game that clocks in at about eight hours of play, that would be quite a loss indeed.ĭelilah is instantly likeable and flirtatious and Henry can respond with detachment or receptiveness. As a player you do have some choice with how much you engage with your boss, Delilah. Your boss is a charming voice on a radio sending you instructions and engaging you in conversation from her own fire tower some distance away. It’s a summer job, out in the wilderness of Wyoming where you will be charged with keeping watch over the forest for any sign of fire. Things having gone so poorly, Henry (and you the player), have taken a job you found in a local newspaper. (Check out this great article about player agency in Firewatch over at Polygon, spoilers abound). Campo Santo takes away your ability to create a Henry that is a self insert, or to mold a life for him that reflects what your own choices might have been - instead, we always begin the game with a sad, sick taste in our mouth of a life derailed. Whilst playing through the introduction (which I’ve done a few times now) it becomes clear that no matter what choices you make as Henry, nothing will ever turn out as you intend. Having spent the bulk of my time gaming with RPG’s such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect, it was immediately strange to have the choice of who I was playing dictated. A middle aged man whose life has been a combination of blissful married years (always in a heterosexual union with a woman named Julia), romping and strolling with your dog (here you get some choice between dogs, mine was a beagle named bucket), and dealing with the emotional toll of what becomes a long distance relationship and later your wife’s declining health. In Firewatch, the year is 1989 and you play as Henry. In Firewatch, you don’t begin the game with an intricate system of categories and sliders, nor do you name your character or pick bits of backstory from a list.
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