Firewatch
Campo Santo
Windows, OS X, Linux, PS4
Four stars
Firewatch belongs to the genre of walkulators (a contraction of "walking simulators", the faintly perjorative term for a game in which you wander around and people talk to you) in the mould of Dear Esther, Gone Home and, to some extent, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA.
The year is 1989, and you are Henry, a middle-aged man with tragedy in his backstory and a weight on his heart, who has exiled himself to the forests of Wyoming to take a job spotting for fires in the wilderness. Your only contact with the outside world is Delilah, Henry’s boss, who is on the other side of a walkie-talkie.
But strange things are a-happening in Two Forks Woods, and paranoia begins to take hold as Henry moves from firespotting to trying to figure out just exactly what is going on.
In Henry's radio-only relationship with Delilah, there are flavours of Twin Peaks' Agent Cooper and his dictaphone pal Diane – had she ever appeared on screen.
The dialogue is strong, but the acting is stronger: Delilah is one of the most convincing video game characters I’ve encountered, and there are story beats that are wonderfully witty and affecting.
Delilah is a flawed and possibly unreliable narrator. The relationship between the two characters – how it switches from flirting to ghost stories to distrusts and paranoia, via long stretches of emotional vulnerability – is sustained and developed excellently, with a denouement that, to most, will be an affecting payoff.
Of the two characters, it is the player’s personality that is more the cipher, alternating between player-provided backstory and script. Delilah, who is a purely authorial creation, outclasses her video-game peers.
Mostly, you walk the forests; fortunately, there is plenty to see. The environment is colourful, well-polished, and eventually succumbs to some powerful weather effects that add visual grandeur, while perhaps not-so-subtly acting as the game’s metaphorical underpinning.
The game designers clearly want you to appreciate the world they’ve built – they even give you a disposable camera to allow you to take photos of it to savour. (I took several photographs of a passing butterfly.)
There was, for my taste, a bit too much walking. On maximum graphics, it is pretty, but in a stylised rather than photorealistic way, which did not wholly visually enrapture me.
I got lost occasionally, which is no doubt deliberate. Given the authoritarian goal-mindedness of most games, Firewatch's subtle prodding to wander the woods is a noticeable change of approach.
The story proceeds in places more quickly than I was expecting, which was welcome – I did not want every single story beat to be tied to a fetch quest.
Some of the cuts and transitions reminded me of a Sundance entrant, more than a video game – in a good way.
Firewatch, which took me seven hours to complete, is short but frequently beautiful.
The narrative at its core is compelling, and the dialogue is hard to beat. Not everyone will be satisfied by the ending. But it is worth wandering in the Wyoming woods.
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
