Firewatch
The moment I knew that me and Firewatch were not going to be friends happened very early in the game.
I chose the “One day” option. I did want to have kids with Julia, just not now. I was not trying not to have children, I just thought we’d make better parents if we’re a bit older and smarter. Simple as that.
Alas…
This told me that whoever was in charge, was not particularly interested in making a choice-based game, but rather in telling me a story.
To be clear, I don’t mind choices that, especially when you learn of alternative paths, turn out to be inconsequential. Game design is all about the magic tricks that make you believe you matter. In the case of choice-based games, Telltale are the masters of that.
But you cannot give me a choice, then two minutes later render it useless in a way that makes it all sound like it was my own fault.
“Do you want to kiss the girl?”
YES.
“You think about kissing the girl but decide not to.”
That’s not how I imagine a proper choice-based game works.
One could argue that Firewatch is not a game about me, the player, but about a certain guy named Henry. That’s fine, many games work nicely this way. But then why do you want me to write this guy’s life story, except not really?
Now, if external forces rendered my choice useless, that would be okay. If we wanted kids, but one of us turned out to be infertile, for example, then that would be fine (from the experience’s perspective). But it’s not fine when my choice disappears because apparently I have actively or passively opposed it.
But that little issue with a certain choice was not the reason I dropped the game after an hour. That reason was much more mundane, and it was a simple boredom. And maybe a bit of anger.
The anger part came from the visually slick but badly designed UI. This simple walking simulator has more keys to remember than some of the flight simulators out there, and the way it handles a gamepad is silly. For example, when playing with the pad, all hints and actions are displayed with keys and mouse icons only. I often had to go through all the buttons before I found the one that was “left mouse click” or “Z”.
This is just one of the dozens of issues with the implementation (don’t get me started on the location of the Zoom button). Long story short, even after an hour of play I was still struggling with the controls.
The boredom part is more important, though. And the reason I was bored is that the game wanted me to do mundane things in a world I did not believe in.
Take the stuff like the the map and the compass, for example. They exist in Firewatch just so there’s “gameplay” (but come on, no one bought this game to struggle with directions), or to make the world more believable, more real (but then that does not work either: a cartoonish, sloppily built world can work in a Telltale game as a background, but I don’t buy it as a space for an open world-like exploration.)
After a while, I realized that the only thing that excited me in the game was the dialogue: maybe a bit too smart for its own good, but at least genuinely funny every now and then.
But then I looked at what I was actually doing in the game — walking around in a world that felt like a decoration, checking the map, checking the compass, picking up and dropping tens of useless objects, opening boxes to get more useless objects — and I realized that hey, “New Girl” also has some funny dialogue, but the action is faster and tighter.
So I just stopped playing. That happened precisely when Day 2 greeted me with a task to “check the power line”, a dark echo of the most typical and tired mission objective in video games ever. And most replies to the tweet below made me continue only through YouTube...
…because I still wanted to know how it all ends.
As a kid, for some unexplained reason, I always had to finish what I started. It did not matter if a book, a movie or a game were bad — I had to read, watch, or play them to the end.
Now that I am older and, hopefully, a tiny bit smarter, I no longer feel that need. I try to give everything a fair chance, but if something is boring or feels weak to me, I just drop it.
I still need to know how it all ends, though.
So I watched parts of the walkthroughs, read some analyses. And, luckily for me, it looks like I made a wise choice of not pushing through: the plot is silly (once you start asking questions), the moral of the story clashes with the smart and humane choices you can do in the opening segment (sorry, hard to explain without spoiling), and the gameplay stays as uninspired as it was in that first hour.
I don’t mind the length of the game (on the contrary), I don’t mind the story being — spoiler! Feel free to skip the paragraph — another case of Gone Home-like play with “supernatural, paranormal or mysterious turning out to be just good old real life”.
I did mind everything else, though.
However, Firewatch is a game loved by many, sold a million copies, gets great reviews from both journalists and gamers, and honestly I don’t have a problem with that. If you give Bloodborne 5/10, I’ll fight you tooth and nail, but if you say that Firewatch is your game of the year, the harshest you’ll get from me is: “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
If the mundane does not bother you, if you have the time and the patience, and if you’re looking for something that tries to be different, you might want to give this game a chance. I think that the game does some things objectively wrong, but some issues I have with it are clearly subjective, so your mileage may very. Last but not least, even though I did not finish it properly, I did get something out of it and it’s a great food for thought — but that’s a story for another time.
Meanwhile, if you finished the game, here’s a couple of links I recommend visiting — they almost made me a believer:
- Firewatch: Story explanation and analysis
- Reading the end of Firewatch, by Emily Short.
- The end of Firewatch, on the developer’s own website.
- The video below:
