Firewatch Review
Played on Xbox One (base)
Developed by Campo Santo
Released 9th February 2016
Despite it being the first title under the studio Campo Santo, Firewatch was developed by a team of experienced veterans and creative tinkerers. The group ranged from creative leads of games such as Telltale's The Walking Dead and lead designers of Mark of the Ninja. After the team's artist Olly Moss, emulated National Park Service posters from the New Deal era, Campo Santo used those drawings as inspirations and began their work on the award-winning debut.
Story
The overall narrative is an excellent thriller with an unsatisfying ending. It follows Henry, a man who has taken a summer job as a fire lookout in the forests of Wyoming, to cope with his wife's early-onset dementia. As time progresses, he and his boss Delilah are gradually overcome with a sense of paranoia as unsettling events start to take place. This game has managed to produce an eerie, stalked vibe masterfully, and for every tense moment it throws at you; it is almost disturbing how realistic it is. There's no magic, bioweapons or anything of the sort. The story is simply a manipulation of the stress of isolation, which couldn't be better suited to this type of game and environment. However, it, unfortunately, divulges some uninteresting sob stories during its final act, retconning all the creepiness it has built up. The ending does nothing other than fail to live up to the build-up it was garnering.
Gameplay
Firewatch may be one of the more exciting walking simulators out there. This game is by no means innovative or worthwhile experiencing if you want perfect gameplay. Instead, it's best described as being an interactive story. The whole time you're playing, you'll wander about lush, forested areas doing one of three things: interacting with items, picking dialogue or scaling rocky hills. While there are a couple of interaction prompts, they mostly serve as additional lore, secrets, etc. The dialogue decisions you make are mostly there to add to the depth of the characters and the rocky hills that you'll be traversing are portrayed by some realistic mobility that was a mixture of tedious, sluggish movements, and yet also by moments of tranquillity and tension. While these three main components of the game aren't flawless, they are pretty fantastic. For example, the dialogue may not serve as consequential, but it's great for a higher level of immersion.
Characters
The characters are possibly the best part of this game. Out of the two that we hear throughout, Henry and Delilah, are both very charismatic. They're not too quick-witted to feel like one-liner-slinging heroes, but they're not basic and mundane either, as if someone was trying to artificially replicate a conversation. No, they're both incredibly well written and performed, to the point that their banter, developing intimacy and sharing fears, helped further establish a type of realism, expertly depicted by the developers. The only problem I had with this game is that I wish they were more fleshed out. For the three hours the player spends with them, they're fantastic, but I can't help but wonder how much better the connection to these two would be if we were left with them longer.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere is possibly the only aspect of the game to rival the quality that the characters bring. If it couldn't be shown enough by this screenshot of the game, it's amazing. Thanks to Olly Moss, Firewatch was guided in a stunning art direction that rewards the player for pausing and taking in the view. Its vastly beautiful, nature-filled environments change between every time skip, never making any area feel monotonous in your solitary experience. The autumn colour flavouring, combined with the summer nature collection is wonderful. The soundtrack doesn't falter either. Its simplistic, yet effective guitar performance works in whatever way it's going thematically. Instilling a sense of dread or spectacularism is what it does best, and we have Chris Remo to thank for that. For the sound effects, I barely paid any notice to it while playing, meaning that they were enthralling enough to immerse me into the game, and not terrible in any sense, as to rip me out of this deep focus. On the technical performance, I've heard others say that they were occasionally plagued with drastic frame rate drops, but I was fortunate enough not to experience such things.
Story - 7/10
Gameplay - 7.5/10
Characters - 8.5/10
Atmosphere - 9/10
Good
Campo Santo has successfully turned a perfectly normal and dull experience of walking in a forest into a fantastic thriller by mixing a sense of realism, a theme of desperation and a style of greatness.
