![]() ![]() Like many of the recent crop of narrative and experience-driven games, the point is to tell you a story and involve you through discovery, not to develop muscle-memory skills and then push them forward. Otherwise, the mechanics of the game are not challenging. Even navigation is largely a joy, and if you turn off the optional location marker, you can restrict yourself to finding your way with just the game’s map and compass and your instincts, which helps encourage you to look at your surroundings all the more. I can’t remember stopping to look at the scenery in a game anything like as much as I did in this one. By all accounts this feeling is something that the team put a lot of work into, and it’s not just eye candy: the sense of nature as an actor in the game gives it a lot of its atmosphere. The result is unquestionably the closest I have ever felt to being in the great outdoors while playing a video game, complete with sunsets that feel like sunsets. The rest of Firewatch’s rich personality comes from the landscape itself, which is presented in a glorious, impressionistic palette of sun-kissed oranges and lush greens. Much of the game’s personality comes from the landscape For both Henry and you the player, she is a lifeline of sorts, and dialogue with her gives the game much of its human colour. Your only contact is with your supervisor, Delilah, stationed in the next tower along, and available through a hand-held walkie-talkie. ![]() Playing as Henry, careworn and perhaps a little bitter after going through a rough patch in your life, you withdraw to the Wyoming wilderness, taking a summer job as a fire lookout and living in an isolated tower, two days’ hike from anywhere. And it’s that experience that the game deftly taps into, as a tense and very human narrative gradually unfolds. No doubt we’ve all felt that way at various points in our lives: walking home late at night being lost in an unfamiliar place getting out of one’s depth in a social situation or at work. Feelings of vulnerability, both to the elements and to other people, are perhaps the central theme of Firewatch, the recently released debut game by young studio Campo Santo.
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