I was going to review a book this month, but I didn’t have as much reading time as I’d hoped, so I decided to use this month’s review to defend something that I’ve realized is badly in need of a good defense. That would be the game Firewatch, an indie “walking simulator” that I have never once managed to explain to someone without making it sound lame. But I was recently reminded of how incredibly good this game is, and decided it deserved some love. By the way, this review will be spoiler-free.

Firewatch, released in 2016 by the San Fransisco development studio Campo Santo, is a first-person suspense game set in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. The year is 1989, and you play as Henry, a man in the throes of what could, by way of a massive understatement, be called a mid-life crisis who takes a job as a forest fire lookout for the summer. Your job is to sit in one of those cool-looking watchtower thingies you see in the mountains and look for fires. But almost immediately, strange things start to happen that draw you out of your tower and into the wilderness to find answers. Your only companion is your boss, Delilah, who is stationed in a nearby tower, and is just as confused as you are. Talking to her via two-way radio is pretty much the only interaction you have with other people throughout the game. (Pretty much.)

I’ve played Firewatch twice now, once quite a while ago and again recently during a weekend when I found myself badly in need of the woods, but the weather where I live was tragically unsuitable for backpacking. It’s pretty short, with both of my playthroughs clocking in under five hours. The art style and graphics are stunningly gorgeous, perfectly capturing the ambiance of the Wyoming wilderness. The dialogue and voice acting are some of the best of any video game I’ve ever played, making the main characters feel tangibly, heart-wrenchingly real, despite the fact that you never actually set eyes on any of them.

If this is sounding awesome to you so far, good! It is! But I should warn you, every friend to whom I’ve ever recommended this game has told me they think it sounds horribly boring, because 99% of the game is just walking around. In fact, this is the primary complaint you’ll hear if you scroll through the game’s online reviews. We are conditioned to a bizarre degree to believe that video games need to involve action, combat, levels, and other aggressively accomplishment-based game mechanics. Firewatch has none of this. In fact, the most action you’ll ever wring out of it is the “run” button.

But I stand by my position: this is a very fun game. And I think it has something really profound to teach us about the pure storytelling potential of the video game format. This isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept, of course, but Firewatch highlights it especially well given how closely the gameplay is intertwined with the story itself. The story isn’t something you seek out or manually advance by checking off steps on your objective menu or accomplishing set goals. As in life, it’s something that just happens to you, whether you want it to or not. The story unfolds because you are there to experience it, resulting in an experience more immersive than almost any game I’ve ever played.

The good

A masterclass in dialogue

I’ve been singing the praises of the immersivity of this game this entire time, but immersion is sort of a squishy concept, no? What is it exactly that makes a game – or, more broadly, a story – feel immersive? In Firewatch, the single biggest thing that contributes to this is the dialogue.

If you’ve ever cringed during a game because you were subjected to a line of dialogue that a real person simply would never say, then I promise, this game will heal your pain. Dialogue is critical to the immersivity of any story, but especially video games. There are a myriad of ways you can interact with a game, but dialogue is the primary way the game interacts with you. All too often, video game dialogue feels flat and infodump-y, and when you think about its main function in the game, it’s actually easy to see why. Since dialogue is the central way the game is able to talk back to the player, it can sometimes feel like the only avenue for straightforward, direct delivery of information. Without it, you’re left trying to explain things about the world or the story using indirect methods like strategically placed newspaper headlines and signage scattered around the world, or written materials most players will collect happily, but never actually read. If you’ve played any game at all for more than five minutes, you know what I’m talking about. The point is, if you have a piece of information you can’t figure out how to deliver through your worldbuilding, pretty much your only option is to stick it in the dialogue. Hence, infodump.

Firewatch actually does do this from time to time. After all, any story will have some pieces of information to deliver that fall into this category – it’s why exposition exists in the first place. Trust me, no one would agonize over it so much if it weren’t necessary. But Firewatch is very careful with where it inserts these exposition segments. It waits until Henry actually has a reason to ask about them – and not just in passing, either. He asks about things that are time-critical, pertinent to the part of the story you’re in, and critical for making sense of whatever is happening to you right now.

But that’s not quite enough – the best thing it does to make the dialogue feel natural is to make it character-driven. These exposition segments are few and far between. The between is filled up with natural, conversational interaction between the two main characters, Henry and Delilah, as they banter, reminisce, and smack-talk their way around the wilderness. It’s a testament to not only the quality of the dialogue but the incredible talent of the voice actors (Rich Sommer and Cissy Jones) that even the most dramatic and emotional snippets of backstory or exposition never feel overacted or shoehorned in. These two don’t feel like characters in a story – they’re just two people, two normal humans, stuck in the woods with nothing but a radio, some emotional baggage, and each other for company.

Navigation

Another area I’d like to highlight in terms of immersion is the game’s navigation system. Firewatch has a gorgeous open world filled with hiking trails, rock walls to scramble up and down, open fields to frolic through, rivers to wade in, and so much more. You navigate around using a paper map and compass, which you can hold and reference while you walk (you can also pull up just the compass if you prefer). As you unlock cache boxes around the world, the map gets updated with additional detail on the exact locations of trails and terrain features. Henry will also sometimes circle areas of the map that become important as the story goes along. This system lends a perfect balance between the freedom afforded by giving the player the whole map right away and the sense of accomplishment everybody loves when you discover a new area.

The experience of the map is also refreshingly realistic. In most games, the map is a separate screen altogether, and will sometimes even pause the game when you pull it up. Firewatch, on the other hand, makes using the map part of the game, which makes sense given that map and compass use is an integral part of hiking in the backwoods (especially in the pre-GPS era in which this game takes place). It removes a common immersion-breaking element of the average video game, and enhances that magical, “Now, where the hell am I?” feel of the real-world backcountry. I think for the type of game this is, any other map-use mechanic would have been a catastrophically bad choice.

Character customization, but not

With a game this heavily character-driven, you’ll typically find one of two things happening: either the characters are completely rigid, their personalities set in stone, or it swings completely in the other direction, with a choose-your-own-adventure-style decision-making mechanic resulting in multiple endings. I have my issues with both. The former has no replayability whatsoever, but the latter always makes me feel like I’m missing something somehow. Firewatch, refreshingly, does neither.

Firewatch doesn’t have multiple endings – nothing you say or do will actually change the outcome of the story – but you can still make choices that lightly influence the characters themselves. The dialogue you choose breathes a unique life into Henry, imbuing him with a bit of your own personality as you move through the game. You can play him as funny or serious, aggressive or vulnerable, kind and empathetic or a complete and utter jackass. Your choices bring out a different side to Delilah as well, giving her character more dimension and drawing out different elements of her story. Although the story itself doesn’t change, this style of gameplay still makes you feel like your experience of the story is totally unique, creating replayability without depriving one-time players of anything.

Pacing and balance

The plot of Firewatch is a suspense-filled mystery punctuated by occasional relaxing, daily-life-type tasks like collecting supplies, fixing up the watchtower, and stamping out illegal campfires. It does this largely by breaking the story up into days, each of which is meant for a specific purpose in terms of the storytelling. Only some of these days are intended to advance the story, with a highly suspenseful atmosphere from the moment you wake up. There are parts of this game that make you genuinely afraid to look over your shoulder, despite the lack of any combat, direct confrontations, or jumpscares in this game (apart from a part where a racoon jumps out at you, which gets me every time). There is an ambiance of uncertainty to much of the game, and the palpable discomfort of being watched drives you forward through the story’s tenser moments.

Other days, however, are completely unscheduled, allowing you to wander the map to your heart’s delight with nothing threatening or ominous on the horizon, uncovering easter eggs and enjoying the gorgeous scenery and relaxing music. There’s a pet turtle you can find and adopt, and plenty of litter and smoldering campfires left by careless hikers for you to clean up and be grumpy about. These are the days when the term “walking simulator” doesn’t quite seem to cover it. It’s a hiking, park ranger-ing, yelling-at-teenagers-for-not-being-responsible-stewards-of-our-national-forests simulator. As an avid backpacker, career wet blanket, and someone who has always wanted to go inside a forest fire watchtower (come on, don’t they look cool?!), this is pretty much all I’ve ever wanted from a video game, and I’m happy to say Firewatch completely delivers, with a side-order of suspense that feels perfectly balanced and never overwhelming.

The bad

The ending is meh

For how much I enjoy the story of this game, the ending has been a bit of a let-down both times I’ve played it. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s a relatively simple explanation that is completely at odds with the level of tension and mystery we’ve been building up this whole time. I’ve spent an absurd amount of time thinking about the ending and trying to get at what the writers were trying to say – because I really do feel like they were trying to make a point, and probably a very good one at that. The problem is that there wasn’t enough of that point embedded throughout the rest of the story for it to really shine through in the conclusion.

What makes this really annoying is that there were so many opportunities for the game to clue you in to the direction this was headed earlier on. There were plenty of places where the game could have embedded a few extra clues in the worldbuilding or the dialogue. This wouldn’t have spoiled the ending by any means – it would still be shocking and tragic and heart-wrenching – but it wouldn’t feel dissonant, which is my current problem with it. We’re built up to suspect that a very specific thing is happening, and then it’s a very specific something else. If the point they were going for was something about how people get locked into one viewpoint and see only what they want to see, I think that thematic idea would have been better served by giving us the option of seeing something else, then pointing out what we missed entirely. As it is, the story takes more of a “Ha-HA, we tricked you!” approach to its twist ending, which feels a little cheap considering they had a far better option available.

Is this annoying? Yeah. But is it enough to stop me really, really liking this game? Not by a mile. And in fact, I’d be very curious to hear if anyone has a different take on this ending than I do, because I really do feel like I’m missing something. If you’ve got a better explanation for why they went with this, or if there’s foreshadowing hidden in there that I missed, please leave a comment and let me know. I think the story of this game is, at its core, actually really strong, and if you change my mind on the ending, I will love you forever.

Technical junk

Firewatch was relatively glitch-free for me. The first time I played it was actually on my Macbook Air, against the developer’s dire warnings not to let it anywhere near a computer without a dedicated graphics card. I had to turn the graphics settings down to low, but it ran just fine – some lag in a couple of places (the area around the lake was particularly bad), but not enough to make the game unplayable or even particularly annoying. I can now report that it is really, really stunning and totally smooth on an actual gaming computer, but you definitely don’t need a beefy set-up to play and enjoy it.

As for actual glitches, there are very few. I did notice that sometimes, if I encountered something new to report to Delilah while in the middle of a separate conversation, raising the map and putting it back down would sometimes make that new dialogue option disappear. I haven’t heard of anyone else having this problem, and I didn’t notice it happening on my second playthrough, so it may just be one of the perils of playing this game on a low-spec computer – or maybe just the game’s way of telling me to give poor Delilah some space. (I really like Delilah.) There were also some minor graphical issues on some of the sections that take place at night when I played on higher graphics settings, but these didn’t really bother me.

I’d recommend playing this game with a controller if you can, rather than a keyboard and mouse. The controls feel extremely natural, especially for things like using the radio, making the game all the more immersive.

Firewatch is available for PC (Windows, Mac, or Linux), as well as Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.

The final verdict

I give this game 4/5 illegal campfires. From the stunning scenery and creative mechanics to the immersive storyline and incredible acting, Firewatch is a joy to play, although I felt the ending detracted from it somewhat (again, if you think differently, I want to hear about it!). I highly recommend it for fans of story-based psychological thrillers, especially if you are looking for a setting a little less grim than the typical locales of the genre. There’s an attitude that hardcore gamers are likely to not enjoy this game, but I’d encourage you to give it a try anyway – it might surprise you.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the woods – I have some irresponsible hikers to scream at.

Happy gaming!