Firewatch is a video game by Campo Santo. While I played it on my PC, it is also available on console, but not mobile. It is aimed at adults and older teenagers, since it contains adult references and deals with more serious topics such as death, alcoholism, and complex representations of grief and relationships.
Firewatch uses walking to advance the game’s enacted and embodied narratives and immerse the player in the fantasy of being a fire lookout exploring the mountain wilderness. Firewatch, as a “walking sim”, involves literally walking around the game’s world, gathering information through exploration. Firewatch gives the player remarkable freedom in this: not every section of the world is immediately accessible without plot progression, but even from the outset the places the player can access is vast, encompassing almost the entirety of the Two Forks region of the part that Henry acts as lookout for.
The game’s plot advances as Henry completes a series of tasks each day, typically ones that his coworker Delilah asks him to do over the radio. Actually completing the tasks is very simple on the player’s part. Particularly in the early game, the player can’t really fail a task once they’ve started to work on it. For example, one of the first things Henry does when he gets to the camp is to stop two girls from setting off fireworks. There are several different things Henry can say to the girls to make them stop, with varying levels of aggression, but all of the dialogue choices will still result in the girls taking generally the same actions. The problem is actually getting to the places where Henry needs to do things.
This is where Firewatch really capitalizes on the walking mechanic to simulate the fantasy of the outdoors. The game largely leaves players to their own devices when it comes to navigating the forest. When assigning tasks, Delilah will tell Henry where to go, with very loose verbal instructions. After that, it’s up to the player to make sense of their direction of travel, aided by a compass and a paper map.
The experience is almost identical to having to read a real print map, though the game will at least display a responsive red marker at Henry’s location. Other than that, the map is completely static. Picking out specific trail paths requires closer examination, and while there is an option to highlight certain routes, this can only be done by copying them down from other maps pinned around the forest.
The aesthetics of the environment design embraces the chaotic, changing nature of a real forest, which means that trails you’re following aren’t always clear. Sometimes one will split into two paths, or become muddled by fallen trees and leaf cover. I often found myself having to turn back because I had incorrectly sprinted down the wrong fork. The open world of the Two Forks region transformed, in these moments, into more ways that I could get myself so hopelessly lost.
Additionally, as the day starts to end and the sun goes down, changes in light levels affect how players experience the world. Details in the path and surroundings become shadowy. Since the map is a physical object held in Henry’s hand, it is harder to read at dusk. These lighting decisions further immerses the player in the sensory experience of the forest, imbuing the story being carried out through Henry’s tasks with a sense of urgency, and helps build the tension of being alone in the wilderness. At the end of the first day, I became more desperate and hurried as I noted the sun getting lower and lower, and I still wasn’t back in my tower. What if I couldn’t make it back in time? Then I’d be forced to stumble about with only my flashlight to see, or worse: plunged into total darkness.
Walking and wayfinding don’t just make the game difficult, but is how it carried out its embedded narrative. Navigational challenges mean that players like me are encouraged to explore more of its world in the process of finding our way, and to look closer at our surroundings when we do so. While Henry and Delilah advance the game’s enacted narrative about the mysterious assailant menacing Two Forks, items left behind from years of people working and hiking in the region expound upon the past story of the region’s lookouts, which eventually become crucial to the game’s wider story. For example, I would not have found the abandoned backpack belonging to the child of a former lookout if I wasn’t running around in circles trying to get somewhere. The discovery of the backpack prompts Delilah to divulge information about the former lookout, and is the first hint at the eventual fate of the lookout and the child.
Ethics:
Especially in the early parts of the game, explicit violence does not really feature in Firewatch. At no point, within the introductory section where you roleplay your relationship with your wife, or as you actually start your job as a fire lookout, is there the option to act violently towards other people. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the game will give me the option to in the future, but so far the game is pretty limited of the actions it allows players to take, and is even more limited of the people that players encounter. The solitude of Firewatch is a core part of the game’s fulfillment of the sensory experience of being in a forest, and violence, especially the ability to enact violence on other people, implies much more human interaction than seems to be on par for Firewatch. Unlike games that incorporate violence as a primary mechanic, such as Ultrakill (which is about being a robot who kills everything in Hell, and 99% of its actions are violent and the other 1% is puzzle solving) or Heaven Will Be Mine (involves having mecha fights with other space factions and/or hooking up with enemy mech pilots. Violence is not necessarily the default or most immediate / only option in most scenarios, but it is always on the table), eliminating violence as a mechanic forces players to think of different ways to solve conflicts.
Physical force is often seen as a more straightforward and reliable way to accomplish things, especially in the world of video games. If there’s no significant consequences or difficulty, for example, killing an NPC and taking loot off their bodies can be easier and faster than trying to convince them to give you their items. However, becoming too prone to violence can create a layer of apathy from the player towards the characters in the game, since designing a game that allows reckless NPC killing can cause the NPCs to become more like targets rather than “people” to interact with, especially for gamers that are less focused on role-playing or immersion. It also diminishes the realism of a game, which is something that serious games that want to explore real-world topics with more sincerity, like Firewatch, would want to consider. There are WAY more consequences for straight up punching or killing a guy because you want his loot or because he was annoying in real life, and though it’s true that the real world can often be a violent one, one of the aspects of existing within society is that many people are not inclined or incentivized to jump immediately to violence.
The threat of violence is very present in Firewatch, however. The mysterious assailant who trashes Henry’s lookout tower is an obvious element, and it’s this threat that carries the progression of the plot. Especially since the story takes place in the wilderness, where the isolation and distance from civilization proper means that there are less consequences, especially immediate consequences, for acting violently. If there ever was a place in the real world to behave that way, it would be in a forest far away from everyone else in the world.
A less prevalent theme, but one I found myself hyperaware of nonetheless, is Henry’s own capacity for violence, or at least his perceived capacity. It’s still true that the game doesn’t give you the option to actually enact much violence, through dialogue choices the player has the ability to define Henry as a character based on the way he responds in certain situations. In the introduction, one of the flashback memories that Henry has is of him and his wife Julia getting mugged on the street. The player has the option to choose how Henry responds, from verbally threatening the mugger to getting into a physical altercation with him. The way that Henry responds, either through actual violence or the threat of it, affects all parties involved, and though the mugger is scared off, it becomes a negative experience for Henry. (Screenshots taken from streams of Firewatch I found on YouTube, because I forgot to take screenshots of the beginning of the game and I can’t go back.)
Later on in the game, when Henry comes across the campsite of the girls whose fireworks he confiscated, it is completely wrecked and the girls are gone, having left a note behind saying that they think Henry was the one who took violent revenge on their belongings (at this point in the story, Henry believes the girls wrecked his lookout tower). One of the first things Henry does is radio Delilah and, explaining the situation, assure her that he was not the one who did it. As a character, Henry appears very aware and reticent of his physical ability towards violence, one that is tied to his sense of masculinity and marriage to Julia, and the way that others perceive him. Like, he’s a burly white man who has a drinking habit. He drives a truck.
His outward appearance does play into certain assumptions, not only from NPCs in the game but also from the player, which the game leverages in the way it slowly parcels out information about him. Especially in the introduction, where it gives the player the options that define details of Henry’s internality, while revealing bit-by-bit things like his drinking habit and the mugging scene. It doesn’t give the player total freedom in how to play Henry, but each small variation still builds up. You can choose to yell more aggressively at the girls or ask them more professionally to stop. In one part of the introduction, you can choose whether or not to pose for a drawing in a masculine way, or like a “Victoria’s Secret model”. Whether or not these small decisions matter in the larger plot of the game, it gives the player the breathing room and structure to create a small emergent narrative for Henry’s identity and grief, whilst grappling with the implications of violence and masculinity in Firewatch.
