Most of the game is keeping banter up with Delilah, talking and listening as you photograph the landscape, huck empty beer cans around, follow mysterious clues. The awkward pauses, white lies, and collaborations. Firewatch thrives on the little nuances of getting to know a stranger, and getting to be known by them. It is a meaningfully interactive experience, but one perhaps too delicate to compete with the antic violence that typifies video-games. How many booklets have we all flipped through, how many wildlife info-tags, how many abruptly-ending handwritten letters skimmed for a quest marker and ignored? More often than not, the relationship between your loosely-defined, semi-player-determined character, and everyone else, feels more like an obstacle (oh so much skipped dialogue) to the real game - the riding, sniping, plundering, profiting - than something that makes you more part of it.Ī relationship is what results from two characters deliberately interacting. Yet nowadays it's often obvious that narrative, exposition, and other "fluff" has been developed by a completely separate department than the rest of the game. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of a game's "story" being separable from all its other elements, because as players we experience only the whole. In such games, character relationships behave more like incidental by-products of that bolted-on mess we refer to as "the story". The president's daughter follows the hardened cop around like a stray animal, or the local survivor gives orders to the wayward explorer through a one-way radio only. Many games take character relationships for granted, allowing conversation to merely act as a vessel for exposition, comedy, or other bullet-point character moments. and meet the delightful, devious, and disembodied Deliliah. Then he (We? I?) get to the lookout tower. It sounds dry but plays out like the most heart-wrenching Mad Lib of all time. The text is broken up with brief segments of footage and gameplay of Henry as he treks into the park for the first time, as if he himself is reflecting on how he came to be here, just we are are making decisions about it. We're given unnarrated text summarizing Henry's life and marriage leading up to the events of the game, and you fill in gaps in the story with your own choices, effecting dialogue and relationship options later on in the game. But instead of tallying up Pickpocket and Garroting skills from some monolithic pool of abstract values, it's more like digesting regrets. The game even starts with a character creation screen, of a sort. Instead, it commits its brief duration to deeply developing the relationship between Henry and Delilah, two fire lookouts on the run from their own lives in the scenic Yellowstone Park wilderness of 1988. It answers the question, Who do I wanna be for this next little while? Who am I willing to be stuck with? Firewatch doesn't reach for pie-in-the-sky thematics or hard moral lessons. Filling in the crucial details, like the number of serrations in your flaming bastard sword, and ignoring the unimportant ones, like your childhood pets and criminal record, is the foundation of a reflexive gameplay experience. EVADE GISMO RATING *INTERACTIVE MOVIE* 2-4.5 hour playthrough / Story progression / Light decision treesĮveryone who's played it knows that the funnest part of Dungeons & Dragons (or should I say Wizards and Wyverns?) is character creation.
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