Critical Play: Firewatch
For today’s critical play, I played through the prologue and first day of Camposanto’s Firewatch. For those unfamiliar, Firewatch is the story of Henry, a 39-year-old man from Boulder, Colorado. After his wife begins suffering from early onset dementia, Henry decides to take a job as a forest lookout to escape from his troubled life.
While most of the story is experienced through traditional first-person controls, the prologue features a mix of first-person snippets and backstory told through a Twine-esque interactive text-based narrative. The use of text to tell the backstory is an effective way of skimming through Henry’s life up to the point where the game start. While hopping around time via fully rendered interactive 3D scenarios would be disorienting, text has a more easy time skipping around, just offering enough salient details for the reader to connect with the events. Meanwhile, the bits of first-person gameplay interspliced with this text narrative serve 2 important purposes. On a practical level, these moments tutorialize the control scheme. But, on a narrative level, they allow the player to experience Henry’s exit from society into the wilderness.
During the main chapters of Firewatch, which are split up by days, the player experiences the narrative largely through their interactions with their supervisor, who talks with them over the radio. These moments help to both characterize the supervisor as well as Henry himself. Moreover, they help guide the player through the tasks they must accomplish throughout the day, lending both gameplay and emotional cues and context. While Firewatch is certainly focused on its story, there are also light gameplay elements. While most experiences of this type guide the player through narrow passageways and obvious paths, Firewatch places an emphasis on player driven navigation, with the player orienteering through the wide-open wilderness with only a map and compass to guide the way. Placing the burden of navigation on the player helps to emphasize the player’s sense of isolation, all alone in the woods. This is a feeling which the game then capitalizes on towards the end of day one, as the player comes back to find their lookout tower broken into. Realizing they are not alone, this event sets up a sense of unease which carries over into the next day.
There were some minor gripes with the control scheme. Namely, the interface to talk with the supervisor felt clumsy due to my mouse’s imprecise scroll wheel, and the button to pull up the map was far out of the way, making it difficult to pull up when walking. But, these gripes aside, Firewatch does an excellent job of placing the player into the role of the character and evoking a sense of loneliness and unease.
