Firewatch

I’m powerfully late to the party on this, 5 years late in fact. But this has always been a game I’ve been interested in trying, I loved the look of the game and the concept of a game of being a fire lookout is something that tweaked my interest and has stayed there in the back of mind for a long long time. It was recently £2.99 on the PlayStation store and bang, it was time to pull the trigger and get involved.

This is probably the best experience of player characterisation I’ve encountered to date, with the opening section of the game really helping you get into the character of Henry, who he is and why he is out taking this job out in the wilderness. He’s a bit of a dickhead, selfish and he has been unable to deal with a major crisis in his life and he’s running away from the situation he cannot deal with.

It’s something that resonated with myself, it’s probably something that’ll resonate with anyone who have gone through a bad time in their lives and exploring that characterisation and ‘living’ the role so to speak was very enjoyable as the events unfold, how much do you open up, how much do you trust the other lookout? It’s just great, the performances are great, the time pressure to react in conversations really plays into this as well, what do you say? Do you say anything at all?. The fact that you can behave very differently to every situation, say, throwing the teenage girls boombox into the lake or just leaving it? 

I can’t really go on too much about the story as I wouldn’t want to spoil it, but I’ve found some criticisms of the ending a bit puzzling really. I personally found it appropriate and well, human. And that’s the thing aint it, life, it’s not always possible to please everyone and be captain fantastic, like say in any given Mass Effect game and I think that’s why Firewatch will live on longer as a emotionally resonating experience than say, what Mass Effect became. There’s a realism, an emotional realism to this game and while there were parts of this game that felt like it could have went all, well, stranger things… I’m very glad it didn’t.

I played Firewatch on PS4 Pro, performance wasn’t super great and there’s some rough visuals around the edges; floating trees, missing geo and that sort of thing and not having a real time shadow for Henry felt a bit of a shame. But on the whole, for 3 quid I have no complaints. 

Get involved, see what you think. There’s a lot worse things to do with 3 or 4 hours and on the whole, I found this game quite inspiring to be honest. Oh and this game had the best jump scare I’ve experienced in years.

Call this one in