Last night I finished Firewatch. It’s a first-person mystery game, being rudely dubbed a ‘walking simulator’ by some of the reviews I’ve seen elsewhere. While it’s true, the game has you fulfilling various tasks in a forest in which you navigate solely by hiking, that description completely ignores the beautifully told story and the reason you are there at all. Having completed it, I want to recommend it to everyone because it’s fantastic. I also would say that the less you know the better, so don’t read the rest of this review, just go and get it.
Still here?
Okay, well I’m going to talk a little about the setup and there’s no way to really delve into that without spoiling the beginning of the game, just so you know.
You play as Henry, a 40-something aged man, which by itself is pretty unique in the world of videogames. He’s lived, he’s been around, and he has shit to deal with. During the opening sequence, you’re shown a series of snippets of Henry’s past in the form of some elegantly written prose. You pick a few answers to questions such as what you said to the girl at a party when you were younger. Her name is Julia, she becomes your girlfriend, and then your wife, and you choose what they named their pet dog, and whether they planned to have kids or not. All very simple, but incredibly effective way to pull you into Henry’s character.
In a heart-wrenching moment, (still within the game’s opening, which is just these text prompts interspersed with a few first-person scenes of you hiking into the woods) you learn that Julia has early onset dementia. She has problems at work, becomes forgetful, and eventually loses her job altogether due to this horrible condition. She deteriorates very quickly, and sometimes forgets who Henry is… Henry has to decide whether to try and look after her himself, which he’s not really qualified to do, or whether to see his own wife taken into a nursing home, and you get to make that decision. Suddenly, you wonder what this has to do with a man taking a job in a forest for the summer to become a watchman.
He’s running away. It has become too much for him, and Julia’s family take her home to live with them in Australia leaving Henry alone to figure out what to do next. He decides to take up a summer job in the Wyoming forest. The opening sequence ends with you emerging out of the woods to a wooden watchtower, your new home for the duration of the game, and that’s when you meet Delilah.
Delilah is your boss, a fellow forest ranger living in the tower across the valley, and talks to you via a radio. The radio becomes a lifeline between your isolation and contact with another human. You spend most of the game alone, but Delilah is always there to offer a quip, a sarcastic comment or some guidance on where to go next as you interact with objects and scenery in the forest.
The choices you make in the opening sequence affect the dialogue conversations you have with Delilah in a subtle and natural way that helps you connect to the story on a personal level. It just feels so adult and well done compared to what we’re used to in videogames. I want to call it ‘mature’ but that sounds tedious because it doesn’t do it justice. Delilah and Henry both feel like real human beings. They talk about themselves (if you choose to), they joke about their job, they argue, they laugh, they get to know each other. It’s hugely engrossing.
You will do a lot of hiking, and while the area feels like a sprawling forest, it’s cleverly designed to feel bigger than it really is. It only takes about 5-10 minutes to jog from one end of the map to the other, but you will rarely be required to do this. More often than not, the game’s various tasks take you to new spots on the map that conveniently link to the next area, and it’s a joy to navigate and explore. The art design is gorgeous, featuring a subtle transition from day to night as the time progresses, with a stylised aesthetic that feels like a cross between a cell-shaded cartoon and a Pixar animation. It’s consistently stunning.
As the story develops, I found myself pulled into the mystery involving missing hikers, teenage vandals and a secluded fenced off zone that isn’t marked on any of the maps… Am I really alone out here? Is someone following me? Are they listening to our conversations…? The tension ramps up, but never to the point of outright horror. There are no cheap jump scares, only intrigue and a growing sense of paranoia.
All the time, I was worried about Henry’s well-being. He’s a man that has been through a lot of emotional turmoil, and I don’t blame him for deciding to escape for a while to clear his head. He feels guilty about being there, and I did too when I found myself talking to Delilah about things a married man probably should not. But it feels so real, and natural to do so. Games rarely explore this kind of territory. I think the story would translate to a film pretty well, but the fact that it’s interactive makes you connect with it on a deeper level and it’s one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve had since I finished the Mass Effect trilogy. All this despite being only 6 hours long and just a ‘walking simulator’. Man I hate that phrase.
Some people might be put off by the short run-time and relatively high-price point. Had I not been bought it for my birthday, I wouldn’t have spent £14.99, but would rather have waited for a sale-price. But such is the nature of Steam, you know it’ll be one of those games that you’ll be able to pick up for a fiver in one of the numerous sales across the year. And Easter is just around the corner…
Firewatch is brilliant. As an interactive piece of storytelling fiction, it’s one of the best out there. It is intriguing and beautifully presented with stunningly stylised art design. The writing is some of the best I’ve come across in gaming and the voice acting second to none. I highly recommend it.
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
Format: N64
Release date: 2001
Now and then one can’t help climbing aboard the hype train. You work yourself up into a frothing frenzy in anticipation of some new game whose trailers and screenshots make it seem like the best…thing…EVER. That’s how I felt about Conker’s Bad Fur Day when I first read about it in N64 Magazine (before the internet butchered the magazine industry). They did several preview write-ups about it in the years before it was released, and it changed from being a cutesy 3D adventure, to merely looking like a cutesy 3D adventure plastered with a layer of adult filth. I couldn’t have been more excited to play it. Did it live up to my expectations? Hell yes.
The game was made by Rare, so any right-minded Nintendo gamer should have been excited – they were responsible for some of the best games the console had to offer. But several delays seemed to kill the momentum of the game, and it was finally released in March 2001, right at the end of the N64’s lifecycle. Perhaps because of that, the game didn’t seem to sell as well as Rare may have hoped. Perhaps the fact it was one of the only ‘Mature’ rated games Nintendo had ever published at the time.
The funny thing is, Conker’s Bad Fur Day is far from mature. It’s fucking hilarious, though. As a kid, I felt so naughty playing a game with swear words in. I can still recite lines of dialogue in my head, I played it so many times. The cow-shitting level never ceases to have me in stitches… “Oh I do hope Mavis and Olive don’t see this!” And the rude cog in the tower near the dogfish, utters the frankly genius line, “Twatting shite, don’t ever do that again!” The game was beautiful too, the colourful cartoon graphics pushing the N64 to its limit. Great games always tend to come out towards the end of a console’s life, when the devs know exactly what they can do with the technology, and CBFD is a prime example.
Rare released an inferior remake of the game on the Xbox, with nice fancy new graphics, but it isn’t nearly as good as the original because they added a load of unnecessary combat and even changed some of the dialogue!
The reason I mentioned how badly the game must have sold is because the game seems to be a bit of a collector’s item these days, though there are plenty of them going on eBay. It’s bloody expensive though! £80 for a mint boxed copy. I only wish I still had mine. I lent it to some kid called Stephen who I barely knew, eager to introduce a child to a game that starts off with a hungover squirrel staggering around a cornfield. But the little git never gave it back to me. I hope he looked after it…
As gamers, we all like to imagine at one point or another what the characters and events in our favourite games would be like in the shape of a live-action production, whether it be the Halo movie that Peter Jackson was going to direct before it died on its arse, or the strong possibility of a Mass Effect movie, which by all means could still flop around on the floor like a dying fish out of water. But, isn’t that precisely what almost all big-budget video game movies are? Fortunately, there are always individuals who are willing to make unlicensed, short indie films based on the games we know and love, entirely for fun and not for the sake of making millions. Outside Aperture is a great example, and entirely worthy of your time.
This weekend, Anders Behring Breivik murdered 76 people is Oslo, Norway. He has written a “manifesto”, explaining his actions, and among the 1’500 pages of whatever bullshit a psychopathic zealot might discuss are several refrences to video games. He claims to have used Modern Warfare 2 as a “training simulation” for his operation, and WoW as an excuse to his friends and family for spending so much time in isolation. This is no doubt going to dig up the age-old misguided media-fuelled argument that videogames are responsible for making people go around killing people. I expect Jack Thompson will rear his ugly face soon enough, but I want to get in here right away: the man who carried out this attack is INSANE.
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