The second book club game! Firewatch is a work of art that I don’t want to talk about without spoilers, so don’t click read more if you haven’t played the game. IF you haven’t played Firewatch, I recommend it.
Firwatch is a game where two people talk to each other over walkie-talkies while one goes on various wilderness hikes. It amazes me how much this game does with so little. It reminded me of watching like a minimalist stage play or something, where two people are just like walking around pantomiming with a couple of chairs for two hours, and at the end you still cry because you are so invested in their performance. There isn’t a whole lot to do mechanically in Firewatch, and other than you finding tools that let you access blocked-off areas, the world remains relatively small and static. And yet, the dialogue and pacing makes you feel as though the setting is dynamic and alive. It really manages to suck you in. I don’t play a lot of horror games, so the level of real life paranoia that this game made me feel shocked me. This is DESPITE the fact that… nothing scary ever actually happens visually. At one point I was so worked up about being stalked in the woods that I wasn’t sure how I would react when I next saw any NPC, and that made me realize that there aren’t really any NPCs. You understand through the dialogue that there are multiple other people out there with you, but their character models might not even exist in the game code for all I know. The fact that Delilah, who you spend most of the game developing a rather intimate relationship with, completely lacks a visual identity and exists only as voice lines, fucks me up a little. Firewatch’s greatest strength is making you feel that orders of magnitude more things are going on than actually are. It’s true of the gameplay but also a big component of the plot: you have these three (I’m counting Ned) characters getting worked up into a vicious cycle of paranoia due to their isolation. All of the characters think that something bigger is going on than actually is, and that convinces the player, and that is also true of how the player relates to the game part of the game, and I think that’s neat.
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