As the credits on Firewatch rolled and Etta James’ soulful tones whisked me up and out of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, I could not help but give the slightest of shrugs.
Was Etta telling me to reproach myself for turning a blind eye to the suffering of Julia? Was she singing a wistful contemplation on my ultimately curtailed relationship with the Other Woman, Delilah? Or were her lyrics symbolising my wilful regression back into my guilt-ridden self? With this natural refuge now a blazing inferno of rapidly carbonising trees, self-imposed jail cells, homework copy books and the skeleton of a young child, my guess is that she was doing any, or all, three of them.
I feel like I was predisposed to like Firewatch. I don’t just have a patience for this new breed of narrative driven “walking simulators”, I actually like them. I would even go as far as to say that they have been some of my favourite experiences of this current generation (see previous post on The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture for more on that). So, it is then somewhat surprising that I walked away from Firewatch with such a feeling of ambivalence.
There is a lot to like about Firewatch. In fact, it starts on the exact right foot. The introduction skilfully and sensitively sets up your (Henry’s) backstory and motive. You are lost and you are desperately seeking validation. And in the shadow of your partner’s rapid decline into Alzheimer’s disease, and your actions around that heart-breaking situation, who wouldn’t be? I’ve never had to deal with such an issue in my own life, and I can only imagine how incredibly hard it must be to do so, but Firewatch was able to elicit a genuine emotional response in me that not many games have done so before. By the time I arrived at my tower and got my first look out over the jumble of peaks, troughs and interconnecting pathways of the Shoshone National Forest, I felt the scene was just right for a journey deep into my guilt and insecurities. (Surprise! I enjoy pretentious games!)
Delilah, my mirror, my validation, my partner in crime, my tormentor, welcomed me through the gates into this world of purgatory in the only way she knows how… by being inappropriately forward in her tone and questioning. Ten minutes in and I was setting myself up for a real slog through the rest of the game as I was forced to deal with this inane woman on the other end of the radio. However, being the generally polite creature that I am when in unfamiliar surroundings, I tried to respond as amicably as possible. This was hardly the time to cast off the weighted shackles with which I ascended up to the tower, but equally I could not simply dismiss this other person who is just trying to say hello. Thankfully, her chatter was brief and I was soon able to go to bed. It had been a long fourteen years and I just needed a little time to process things.
A couple of hours later, and contrary to my expectations, I actually found myself missing Delilah’s voice when it wasn’t there. The world felt muted without it. Perhaps that is the nature of being deep in a forested northern wilderness like Shoshone where silence is the norm (a jungle city of wildlife it is not), but as time moved on I increasingly found myself contacting her on the merest of pretences (yes, I wish to report an abandoned outhouse, please… Now give me another wise crack to take my mind off the crushing guilt of it all). Delilah was both the person to interrupt my descent into mental self-flagellation and also the one to facilitate it, depending on my willingness to divulge, and I quickly came to rely on her. As questionable as some of her own decisions that summer were, and as socially awkward as she could be, Delilah was the lifeline with which I dragged myself over to and out the other side. I could not imagine Firewatch without her.
As I’m sure you can tell, I very much enjoyed this aspect of my time with Firewatch. The game managed to confound my early misgivings and create, in a very short space of time, a solid sense of friendship with this dismembered voice at the other end of a virtual radio, and for that it deserves a lot of praise. However, it is also the point at which my enjoyment of the game begins to waiver.
I tried not to read or listen to too much about this game before playing it, but one of the few comments I did hear being floated around was that it had something of the air of a 70s thriller. And sure enough, it did contain many of the elements you would expect to find in such films, riffing hard on the intrigue and conspiracy leanings of movies such as The Conversation (only this time YOU are the one being listened to). Towards the opening half of the game, this is the element that dominates, and the atmosphere is neatly wrapped in a blanket of unease and tension. However, as you move further forward and the in-game calendar gathers momentum, you begin to learn more and more about the story of Ned and Brian, a sad and ultimately tragic tale of a slightly unhinged father and his young son.
While Ned and Brian’s story was an interesting and moving one on its own (albeit slightly tempered by the underwhelming reveal in which you discover the fate of Brian), it was disappointing for me to discover that, in the end, the two narrative threads tied together so definitively. Of course, the lack of an actual conspiracy to transcended the obsessions of yet another guilt-ridden male hiding out in the woods may actually lend the game a greater sense of realism than it would have had should it have ran with the government meddling plot device employed earlier, but personally I was in it for the wilder and more fantastical trip and what I was served was not what I had ordered.
This is a tough point for me to argue, as I am sure there are many people out there who prefer the direction the story took, but I can only speak about how I felt after the game and what I felt was just a little underwhelmed. After such a strong opening narratively speaking, the latter half of the game, to me at least, simply whimpered away into a bit of an anti-climax. I wanted the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, but what I actually got was a bit of a soggy bottom.
My hesitations in wholeheartedly recommending this game also stretch to other areas of the game (both in terms of execution and design).
While having such a strong and real-time through-narrative was a wholly welcome change of pace for the “walking-sim” genre, it did also have the perhaps undesired effect of stopping me from fully exploring my environment (and therefore uncovering some of the subtler aspects of the environmental storytelling). Compelled to press on in the interests of maintaining narrative momentum, I often found myself at pains to not leave the main path and explore the map in all its minute detail. However, saying that, I do not know to what extent this would even be possible should I have given in to this impulse to explore, as on the few occasions that I did find myself wondering off into the bush (more often than not as a result of being lost), I found myself either blocked by an obstacle to which I did not have the tools with which to pass, or alternatively urged by Delilah to stick to my objective. Given that I have talked in the past about the momentum killing effects of open exploration on narrative driven games (see post on The Witcher: Wild Hunt) I am aware of sounding churlish here, but ultimately it is something I came away from the game feeling very acutely.
Even putting all these narrative-based concerns aside, there are still the enormous performance issues that plague the PS4 version to contend with. I am not typically somebody who would be too hung up on drops in frame-rate and pop-in etc. (I have no problems enjoying Fallout 4 for example), but the constant stuttering I encountered during my playthrough of Firewatch was enough to drive me to distraction and to even consider leaving the game alone until patched. I stuck with it in hope that I would simply acclimatise, but from start to finish the game was a mess in terms of final execution. I could perhaps understand if I was looking at something breathtakingly beautiful, but while looking pretty, Firewatch is far from stunning. I like the art, and I like the world Campo Santo made, but performance issues like those I encountered left me with a definite bitter taste in my mouth when I finally put the controller down. Maybe what Etta was actually getting at was for me to close my eyes and experience the game solely on the audiosphere? Hmmmm…..
Firewatch was a confusing experience for me. I enjoyed my time with the game in a lot of ways, but that time was also tinged with a few elements that simply did not sit particularly well with me. Most of these elements are probably more down to my own sensibilities than through objective failings in the game’s design (and in truth I have enjoyed the game more in hindsight now that I have had the time to process it), but whereas I came into it expecting to love it, I left it in something of a huff (yeah, cheers for ditching me Delilah!).
The emotions run deep in Shoshone and the writers deserve a lot of credit for the way they introduced such a sobering and mature, yet subtly delivered conversation in a medium that generally struggles to produce more thoughtful narratives without becoming overblown and overly saccharine. It is just a shame for me that the final narrative hook that pulls you over the finishing line was so blunt.
dublinperspectives 