Game: Firewatch
Creator: Campo Santo
Platform: PC( with a Controller)
Target Audience: 16+
Firewatch is what a novel wishes it could be. And that’s exactly what is starts out as. The game opens up as a visual novel where you are presented with choices that which construct the exposition of the story. This, is frankly, an extremely clever way to handle an exposition dump, as it gives the player agency from the beginning.
The choices matter. Deciding to go with your wife’s choice a small puppy named Bucket, versus your preference of a tough German Shepherd named Mayhem, leads to your puppy getting kicked and you getting threatened in an alleyway. Bucket later dies.
When the game opens up to the explorable portions, your character will mention the choices you made from the start. The player is immediately bought in to the magic circle of the games world.
This introduction also gets you started with the choices which will consist the rest of the game. You’ll find yourself exploring the game world, examining objects with your walkie talkie, and making decisions as to what to tell( and what to not tell) your partner Delilah, who is assisting you via radio.
In this way, the visual novel is sort of transposed onto the physical world around the player. You’ll also be exploring and inspecting little objects, expanding the narrative.
Every object is you examine is detailed a little different, increasing the immersion.
But, it’s more than that. Being a park ranger means making decisions on how to best navigate cliffsides, picking lockboxes, stomping out campfires, and best of all, navigating. The game hands you a small ingame map and a compass you need to learn how to use in order make your way through the park.
And what a park it is. Making your way over rocks and through gorges leads you to beautiful vistas that you can choose to add narrative to with an interjection from Delilah:
Or you can choose to simply be silent.
Initially getting around the map is confusing, but you quickly figure it out, and if you get quite stuck, inspecting things will naturally give you hints on where to go through Delilah, so it never quite feels like the game is strangling you.
So far, I think the game as an artistic whole is an excellent with no major blemishes. More freedom would be nice in exploration, but I understand the nature of the specifically designed narrative.
The fun of the game draws from “Fantasy, Exploration, and Narrative”. And what fun it is. I usually play more action-packed and technically demanding games, so I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this change-of-pace.
Thanks for reading,
This was Ore 🙂
