![]() Delilah is a constant companion, and while the map and the compass are a bit of a fumble, the radio you use to communicate with her is absolutely brilliant. Maybe you need concessions, but how many? Firewatch is all about the wild, but over time, and beneath the glorious surface, it becomes clear that it is not particularly wild itself.Įven without the magical map, Henry isn't alone. Yes, this is a place you'd want to get lost in, if only it weren't for the map in your hands, magically showing your position with every step - a concession that presumably caused huge arguments at Campo Santo, the developer behind all this. Even its slow unfolding is done with a sweeter grace than that of most gear-gated adventures. It's really a beautiful environment, a coherent and stylised take on nature that borrows the flat pastel colours and sharp lines of a romantic old travel poster, without losing any of the toughness that comes with rocks and streams and bracken. Each day presents Henry with its own task - kids messing around down by the shore, reports of a severed power-line up on a bluff - and so Henry grabs his map and his compass and heads off, with you guiding the way. The landscape itself is an absolute triumph: a small but multi-faceted square of wilderness with streams, lakes, caves and secrets. As the game unfolds, day one giving way to day two, day three, day 55, you're learning about Henry as much as you're learning about the landscape that the game plays out in. Somewhere along the line you pick up a camera, but if you're playing on PC F12 will already be your best friend.Īnd Henry is everywhere in Firewatch. ![]() You choose between choices that Henry has already very nearly settled on himself. ![]() When the game asks for choices - and they tend to be small, critical but small - the most you can do is tilt Henry a little in one direction or the other. You control Henry, more or less, and you see the world in first-person through Henry's eyes, but you are not Henry and you never will be. Your job is wriggling your way into his life and speculating about the things that happen around him. Firewatching is Henry's job, and contentment is not part of the Henry deal. The fire table in your lookout cabin could have been more than a wry prop, and you could have spent a pleasantly anxious couple of hours triangulating flames and lights and waiting for the big one. That would have worked fine, I think: mechanical and taxing, a Paper's, Please for outward-bounders. It must be! What's wrong with you?įirewatch could have been a game about studying the horizon. Something deeper must be smouldering away alongside it, waiting to erupt. Something bad is happening, but you don't know exactly what form it will take, and you don't know exactly where it will show itself. There's such a lot of horizon to take in, and that's the point. Lurid, throbbing orange when the sun begins to set. Mountains, clouds, an expanse of tinted sky. Anyway, that horizon you're faced with is Firewatch's greatest asset. Bear witness - and maybe witness a few bears while you're at it.įirewatch looks like a wilderness adventure, but really it's a character-driven game, an internal mystery - and as such, though I've avoided anything explicit, it's hard to discuss it without spoiling something or other. The job is simple enough: scan the horizon and watch the forest for flames. The kind of isolation that can get inside you, frankly. Isolation, in an era before mobile phones and social networks, where the only tweeting is from the birds. What a place to spend the summer! A rickety bedsit at the top of the world. I'd spent the game's opening minutes choosing between quiet human tragedies in order to give Henry a backstory, a narrative sufficiently stocked with devastating personal failings and disappointments to ensure that he would run away here, to a lonely lookout tower in the middle of a forest in Wyoming. Her first question is: what's wrong with you? That's Delilah, Henry's new boss, talking to him over the radio as he takes in his surroundings.Īs luck would have it, I knew exactly what was wrong with him. Gorgeous and clever, Campo Santo's debut is a triumph of craft - but it may keep you at arm's length.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |