Things I Thought: Firewatch's Story Is Too Short and That's Not Cool

One thing I try to avoid doing too much is going against general consensus. Over the years, I've learned that disagreeing with the popular voice tends to lead to the impression of being an edgy dude and while it might be true, it's not really a description I'd like to stick with me. With Santo Campo's latest game Firewatch, however, I'm afraid I'll have to straddle the line. This is because while the game received a lot of good reviews, I found the game's story to be too short to make the impact it felt it wanted to. While it deserves credit for telling a mature story, the major issue is that it tries to tell too deep a story in too short a space of time. The experience leaves a weakened taste, a lot like a teabag not left to embroil in balmy water for long enough.

If you haven't played Firewatch, then let's recap. The game tells the story of Henry and Delilah: two volunteer fire lookouts operating in the Wyoming wilderness during the heat of one lazy, hazy summer. With no fires on the horizon, the two have little else to do but converse with each other via the game's emblematic walkie-talkie device. They tell each other everything, like schoolkids keeping secrets, and in turn reveal their tumultuous pasts to us, the player, eager and voyeuristic as ever. For instance, we learn that Henry became a lookout to forget about a troubled relationship with his wife, Julia, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. And Delilah? Well she's just as troubled, prone to alcoholism, harbouring serious guilt about a missing kid, and unable to hold down a serious relationship to boot.

It's these types of situations that highlight the game's willingness to tackle mature themes, relevant to so many things that I'm sure they're bound to resonate on one level or another. Naturally, a combination of them all provides the framework for the story to develop and the result is a realistic account of two characters caught in what I'll kindly describe as arrested development. It's quite a refreshing turn of pace from most games and there are both serious and humorous moments to be found, like when Henry's mumbles over the word 'panties', or when Delilah nearly suffers a nervous breakdown from fear the two will be blamed for the disappearance of two sulky teenage girls.

One of the problems, though, is that while the game embarks on a quest to make us see how their vainglorious and foolish actions have only led them toward solitude it only haphazardly provides moments for self-reflection. Instead of being able to witness Henry and Delilah come to an understanding of their personal problems on a daily basis, we're offered very little insight unless they're conversing directly. Revelations come and go, often feeling as if a light bulb went off somewhere in the off-screen, prompting us to wonder exactly what each character might have been thinking. At one point, the game skips forward from Day 3 to Day 50, suggesting that while the developers wanted to tell a much longer story, they weren't willing to write the dialogue needed for it.

While the game clearly wants to stay brief, the elliptical design inevitably means that the game's emotional qualities get watered down. Final attempts to wrap-up the story by having both characters receive epiphanic moments about their action only serves to reinforce the point that it often feels like we're being told what Henry and Delilah are thinking, not being able to see it for ourselves. While the game could let us rarely afforded much time to investigate them as people from our own perspective, it doesn't. This means that there's too little to take from what is essentially a game that relies on us forming a close connection with them.

Personally, this disappointed me because while Henry and Delilah always felt as if they could be great characters, it never felt as if they actually were. While I was happy to experience their story, I didn’t find that there was much more to take from it other from it than a broad message about not running away from your problems. While I can appreciate that, it was spoiled a bit by the fact I'd just played the exceptional Everybody's Gone To The Rapture a week before. While not a long game either, it feels like a veritable season compared with Firewatch’s two-part pilot. Its characters are deeper but, crucially, it allows players to see characters change in real-time. While I’m sure many will appreciate Firewatch’s short two-hour duration, I invariably left the Wyoming woods wondering if it would have been better by being slightly longer.

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