Firewatch and the Dangerous Lure of Escapism
Can we ever truly hide from our problems?
It’s now five years since Campo Santo’s Firewatch was released. I remember playing through the game in its entirety across two sweltering Melbourne nights, a pedestal fan running in the corner of my room as I turned to a video game to keep me entertained while I endured the heat.
Drawn in by the incredible art style — courtesy of British designer Olly Moss — I was immediately taken aback by the game’s text-only opening. Where were those beautiful mountains from all of the promotional materials? It turned out, however, that Firewatch wasn’t just a visual showcase (as so many games are). It wasn’t even a story-focused game, necessarily. Instead, it was one of the first games I’d ever played that was truly and genuinely focused on exploring, uncovering, and revealing the human condition.
Of course, the text of the prologue almost immediately begins to cut back and forth between the written past and the fully animated present. The text itself is beautifully written, tracing the budding romance and, later, the crushing pain of ordinary lives gone wrong. A subtle piano score pulls at the heartstrings, but with melancholy rather than simple joy or sadness.
In text, Henry (voiced by Mad Men’s Rich Sommer) and Julia’s (never heard or seen) college love turns into a shared life while, in “the game”, an unseen player character collects his things and bundles them into a truck. In text, Julia begins to suffer from dementia and its symptoms worsen while Henry struggles to deal with the changes in his wife, as in “the game” the character heads out of town. In text, Julia’s family takes her to live with them and Henry takes a job as a lookout in the Shoshone National Forest, while in “the game” we approach the fire watch tower.
And the rest of the game is about confronting, dealing with, and accepting everything I just recounted. At least, for Henry it is. For the player, it can be about your own regrets or the things you’ve failed to face up to. It could be about your own love of the outdoors, of the peace that solitude provides. It could also be about your ability to connect with people you never actually meet, represented in Henry’s relationship with Delilah (voiced by BAFTA-nominated Cissy Jones), his supervisor, with whom he communicates via a walkie-talkie. On the other hand, it could be about how you use parasocial relationships to avoid the pain of your real life. All the while the fire rages on the horizon, coming ever closer.
The story of Firewatch is, on the surface, about Henry’s summer at the Two Forks Lookout, and the strange occurrences that he encounters and investigates with the aid of companion and guide Delilah. There’s a threatening figure by the lake, some odd voice recordings, a weird laboratory, and an ominous mystery to uncover. Is it bigfoot? Is it aliens? Worst of all: could it be the government?
Spoilers, of course, but no it’s not any of those things. In this game, whose prologue spun a tale of gritty, real regret, it turns out that the following story is actually about… a tale of gritty, real regret. A camper and his son went spelunking, and the son — an inexperienced climber — fell to his death. The father holed up in the forest, unable to return to real life to confront his grief. And now, at the impetus of player-character Henry, this man may have to finally accept his son’s death. And at the impetus of this mysterious man and the fire on the horizon, Henry might also have to finally accept the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of his wife.
Of course, all of this high-falutin’ narrative is wrapped inside a first-person adventure game, and involves dialogue choices, mild puzzle-solving, and a fair amount of walking around. But much like fellow indie adventure game Kentucky Route Zero, a game I consider my favourite of all time, it’s not so much about the puzzles, or the dialogue choices, or even the walking around — it’s about making you feel something. And like Naughty Dog’s contentious sequel The Last of Us Part II, it’s subverting the gamer’s expectations of how a story usually plays out in order to make you feel those feelings.
If it hits you right, it makes you realise that all that “walking around”, “solving puzzles” and “talking to a woman on a walkie-talkie” wasn’t really getting you anywhere at all — in Firewatch, or in life. Was the game “tricking you” into thinking that maybe there was a great conspiracy at play — or did Henry just want there to be? The crazy revelation at the conclusion of Firewatch is that at the end of the day, it’s all just sad dudes turning to total escapism in order to avoid confronting their trauma.
No, Firewatch won’t be to everyone’s taste. But I’m so pleased that it exists, as a testament that games can be art. I’m really sad that Campo Santo’s next project, In The Valley of Gods, appears to be on permanent hold. But if it ever comes out, I hope I have a spare few nights in a stifling Melbourne Summer to sink myself back into Campo Santo’s world.
And the fire draws closer.
