This week I played the first couple of hours of Firewatch. Given that I was playing a walking simulator, I wanted to lean into anything that would help with my immersion. Here I am with Firewatch set up on my PC with an ultrawide curved monitor: super immersive with the lights off. 
Firewatch is a walking simulator by Campo Santo Game Studio where you play as Henry, a newly hired park ranger in the Wyoming wilderness. This is a game for a mature audience. It references mature topics like disease, mortality, sex, and substances, and also delivers a gameplay experience that is slower and leans more into narrative and emotions than the games that younger players tend to gravitate towards.
The game starts even simpler than a walking simulator, it starts as a text based game. A sentence pops on an otherwise all-black screen, and you have to press a story option to continue. Sometimes there are multiple story options, but sometimes there is just one. This section of gameplay introduces Henry, and tells the story of his wife Julia’s descent into early-onset dementia at age 40. This section of gameplay doesn’t throw exposition at you, it’s often a couple of sentences of story at a time. The story is not told in flowery language, it’s direct. The combination of curt prose, the whole screen focus on a couple of sentences, and the need to interact to progress the story create an intense focus on the story. Aiding in this is an ambient soundtrack that seems to suck you while creating a sense of unease that only grows as the story gets sadder.
Firewatch is a great game because the story it chooses to tell works perfectly with the medium of a walking simulator. Eventually it’s clear that Julia’s condition has worsened to the point of no return, and you are given control of Henry after he has chosen to take a job as a Fire Ranger to get away from the world and process his grief. The game tells its story through a combination of embedded and enacted narrative. In each day of the game you live out Henry’s life as a Fire Ranger, which conveniently involves a lot of walking. My first day, I had to look for and reprimand some teenagers who were setting off fireworks in the park. I got to enact the story: I saw the fireworks go off, I got radioed by my supervisor Delilah to go stop it, I left my fire tower, and I hiked down to the lake. This game is beautiful, and delivers both sensational fun through the beauty of the natural landscapes in the game, and discovery fun through the sheer number of trails to explore in the park. The enacting of Henry’s life gives the player the push to get this sort of fun out of the game.
Firewatch also has a ton of embedded narrative. Through Henry’s comments, reactions, and conversations with Delilah, we learn more about Henry and his tragic backstory. I didn’t get to uncover much given how little of the game I played, but it’s clear that the game would really let us get to know Delilah. After just the first day out, Henry comes back to a ransacked tower with the window broken. There is lots of story in this world to uncover through conversations, clues left in the world, supply caches, and more that I surely have not seen yet.
So far in my game, violence did not play a role in the game at all. That isn’t to say this isn’t a mature game, it opens up immediately with the heavy topic of dementia, and forces one to think about the pain of losing someone while they are still alive. Given the broken window incident, perhaps there is room for violence later in the game, though I doubt it given the tone of the game so far. This game is focused on giving the player an emotional experience rather than a visceral one. Most games with violence let the player interact with violence as one of the main ways of having fun, which would not have worked with the more serious tone this game is shooting for.
