Gaming News & Discussion

This is kind of a review of Firewatch, and mostly an excuse to share a small moment near the end of my playthrough. Spoilers will be marked below (go play it! It's frequently very cheap!).

If you’ve been playing games long enough, you’ve likely developed some weird habits that run contrary to basic human behavior. Hoarding items and potions. Running everywhere. Recognizing the primary path and then exploring every other option first. They become second-nature, even if it’s not what the character would ever believably do, but we’re so accustomed that we don’t notice the tension. Plus, most games are polite enough not to break the illusion. Hold that thought, I’ll circle around later.

In Firewatch, you’re a middle-aged man with a lot of shit to work through, and he does that by actually not doing it and instead leaving civilization to work for the National Park Service in Wyoming. The game only asks you to walk, talk, and sometimes do orienteering (pro-tip: turn off your location indicator on the map, it’s way more immersive). While on the job, he’s on his walkie-talkie coordinating and bonding with his supervisor, Delilah. Considering her disembodied voice is the only thing interrupting what would otherwise be complete solitude, the dialogue and vocal performances are excellent. I found myself calling in over every interactable object, just to see what she would say. I wanted to hear every voice line and, in-game, who else was Henry going to talk to?

Near the end of the game, the intrigue and paranoia that’s been broiling for hours is revealed to have (partially) been a mixture of understandable misconceptions and the characters validating each other's imaginations. There was no grand conspiracy tying everything together, just a mundane tragedy and a handful of unrelated peculiarities. Henry's predecessor, Ned, lost his son in a climbing accident and stayed in the wilderness to avoid dealing with the repercussions. Behind that fence really were government biologists, and the missing girls turned up fine a few states away. Delilah’s reeling from the knowledge that she could have prevented the boy’s death if she’d enforced the rules more strictly. The park is in flames and it’s time to go. At this point Ned is long gone and every question has been answered.

But hold on, I’m at Ned’s hideout! There are interactable objects here! Notes and tools and a radio and that dead kid’s belongings. Sure, we may be mid-evacuation, but I don’t see a timer on-screen, do you? What if I miss something? So I rummage through everything, calling Delilah for flavor text just like I’d been doing the whole game. She doesn’t respond much. After a minute she sighs and says something like:

“I don’t know why you’re telling me this. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

…Uh. Yeah, that makes sense. What the fuck am I doing? I’m surrounded by whirling dust and smoke and I still have to trek a whole acre to safety. None of this matters. There are no more mysteries to uncover. Not only does Henry have no reason to be so curious, there are obviously more pressing concerns right now. I acted like a video game character and Delilah responded like a human being, which you might notice is the opposite of the actual arrangement. It’s weird how a character acting believably human actually calls attention to the artificiality of the experience, but I’m the one who created that dissonance in the first place.

I recall a moment in the opening of Chrono Trigger. The girl you just met is knocked to the ground, dropping her necklace. Surely talking to the girl will advance the story, so I’ll just check out the necklace first, I thought innocuously. An hour later in kangaroo court, that choice is presented as evidence against me because, yeah, that was kind of shady and inconsiderate. It’s tongue-in-cheek while prompting real introspection, if only for a moment.

Okay, look, I was going to stop here but now I just have to ramble about the ending. Maybe I'll make a pretentious argument about art while I'm at it.

After taking my thoughts and questions online, I found loads of people disappointed by Firewatch's resolution (or lack thereof). I've seen comments saying the story was "pointless" or "not worth telling" because it misleads the player and leaves multiple Chekhov's guns un-fired. I won't lie and say I didn't feel a sort of dull ache when it all wrapped up, but I consider it clever enough to justify itself. The characters' justifiable fear is exacerbated by their isolation and possibly an inflated sense of their own importance. They see patterns where there are none and let their imaginations run wild, and they appear perfectly rational to the player because you're working with the same limited information. It's a neat idea for a game, showing how we come to believe our lives to be more special than they actually are. We take a series of happenings to weave into a dramatic narrative, with ourselves at the center, when it was never really about us. For me, the explanation was so ordinary it looped back around to genuine novelty.

Some of my favorite stories in games deny the player what they want, because it's worth interrogating why they want it. I'll call this the Last Jedi Gambit (not a perfect movie but it gets the point across). In Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima takes away Snake and exposes you for the whiny nerd you are in real life; like Raiden, you have to accept that you can only ever be you, no matter how badly you wish you were someone better. The Last Jedi Gambit often inspires anger: "You implied something cool would happen, but now I'm wrong for wanting that cool thing?" A little uncharitable but, I mean... kind of, yeah.

If we keep insisting that games are art, then we have to allow them to invoke feelings other than pure dopamine. You're free to think Firewatch doesn't stick the landing, and I might even agree with you, but that doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile idea.