For this critical play assignment, I chose to play Firewatch. A friend from my dorm had bought the game a couple years ago and was nice enough to let me play it on his laptop for an hour or so. For that hour, I found myself wandering around a forest in the middle of the summer, piecing together my life as Henry. I’m a middle aged man going by “Henry”, living in a Wyoming fire-lookout outpost.
The environment lends itself to exploration. It’s beautiful. I felt like every frame of this game could be a wallpaper or a painting. Firewatch is on the slower side—it’s a walking simulator. This is a far cry away from the games I’ve played in the past where I’m either coming out guns blazing to raze down the enemy team or crafting diamond swords in an underground bunker. I knew what I was walking (no pun intended) into. I knew this was a slow paced game that wasn’t designed to be constantly stimulating, but I couldn’t help but want things to speed up. It still felt refreshing though. I threw myself into it and truly tried to exist not as Kai, but as Henry.
A huge component of the game is the smooth flowing dialogue between Henry and Delilah, a fellow worker at this fire watch outpost. The player never actually gets to see Delilah, they only hear her via walkie-talkie. One almost feels like they’re listening to a podcast or an audiobook that they’re actively participating in. The back and forth banter between Henry and Delilah carries most of Firewatch’s narrative. I found myself hooked on the narrative as it played out. It started feeling more and more suspenseful, the story felt deeper and startling and . There’s something going on, there’s something afoot, but the game doesn’t quite allow the player to put their Henry-esque finger on it. There are peculiar things that are happening in this beautiful environment and I kind of felt like we were ignoring them an moving on and it left me feeling unsettled. Why are there missing people out here in the middle of no where? Why was there someone secretly taking a picture of me as I patrolled the forest? Why was my lookout tower vandalized? It’s not ever explicit—no jumpscares or loud noises. One couldn’t call it a horror game, but slowly traversing this string of strange situations creates a sort of burn that drives the player crazy trying to guess what is going on. There isn’t an explicit enemy either: no evil dark lord or bloodthirsty monster or spiked turtle in a castle with a princess. Firewatch’s enemy is hidden and unknown, but you can still feel its presence watching you. The quiet and vacancy of the world crafts an unsettling environment for players—but it’s still beautiful, almost in a haunting way. The player asks themselves, “What’s going on?” The questions are many, the answers are few, but one thing is for certain—walking.
