The Power of Simulated Nature
A Review of Campo Santo’s Firewatch
In recent years, I’ve gotten hooked on indie video games. Indie games are produced by small studios, and are targeted at niche, sometimes adult audiences. They tend to have more original art direction than those that are produced by the big studios.
Amongst these is a sub-genre called “walking simulators.” These are slower moving games with less emphasis on goals, and more on exploring the digital world as a real person would. Many of these games are set in nature. They often use human emotional or survival themes to motivate action, and to reward the player.
Recently I played one of these games, called Firewatch. It was the first game produced by Campo Santo, an indie game studio out of San Francisco.
The game is set in Shoshone National Forest, a protected area adjacent to Yellowstone National Park. Created in 1891, it was one of the first protected areas in the United States, or anywhere.
The game is a first-person walking simulator set in a beautifully rendered artist’s vision of a real protected area. The character’s name is Henry, a middle-aged man who has come to the park to work as a fire lookout after his wife became ill.
Between the difficult emotional backdrop to the story, and the moving beauty of the art direction, the gameplay unfolds with a richness that typical video games do not.
The story develops into a murder mystery and pseudo-sci-fi story with a few unexpected twists and turns. But the underlying story is still a believable one of personal healing within the quiet power of nature.
For me personally, waiting out the final months of a Quebec winter from the confines of an urban metropolis, and longing for time in forests, lakes, and the hot sun, the game was a salve.
Or it was enough of a salve that when I had finished the storyline, I put the game into “free roam mode” a few times in the days afterward, and happily wandered around the park.
