Sunday 21 January, 2018

Session 2:
I’ve just completed 2 more days. I can’t get enough of Henry and Delilah’s banter. It’s excellently written, in my opinion. And thank goodness too, as their dialogue is essentially the entire game. The spookiness/mystery aspect is definitely picking up as well. I remember the first time I played, I was worried that I’d been bamboozled into purchasing a horror game. One scene in particular really sticks out to me. That moment when you’re walking back to your tower at night, and Delilah says “Oh well, at least you’re back in your tower,” but you’re not. And then she says “I am looking at a man that is standing in your tower. And it’s not you?” I get goosebumps just writing that. There’s something so profoundly unsettling about having a place where you should feel safe and secure invaded like that. Firewatch EXCELS at creating this suffocating feeling of uneasiness throughout the vast majority of its story. Even though I wouldn’t technically call it a horror game, I think it does a better job at creating the atmosphere of one than many that I’ve played (though I’m kind of a wuss, so that’s a very short list if I’m gonna be honest).

Firewatch is a very ambitious game, story-wise. It attempts to interweave several plotlines into one cohesive narrative, with the main exposition coming through a simple radio and some notes. By and large, I think it succeeds. It has its shortcomings, though. The developers tried to cram a ton of story into a very short game, and it shows. The plotlines don’t always feel fully fleshed out. That being said, I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. It dragged me across the entire emotional spectrum in a way that a lot of triple A titles can only dream of replicating. I’m sure a large part of why Firewatch is so short is due to a small budget, so with its success I hope Campo Santo’s next game will be more “feature-length”. I’m very excited to see what they can do without financial restrictions holding them back, and I very much look forward to playing it.

Great job digging into those tough decisions early in the game. Despite how you handle helping your sick wife, choices like those are still tough even in a video game. Knowing that your decisions will have no real world consequence, how does that affect your ability to make decisions in a game where narrative is so heavily influenced by what you choose to say? Does not having real world consequences make your decisions any more or less ethical and why?