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Thursday 29 March, 2018
For my final playthrough, I was able to finish Firewatch. I played far longer than I intended, but I really wanted to get to the ending of the game. The ending proved interesting, but also seemed to squander a lot of the setup that led to it. I definitely think things could have been more satisfying, and things tied together in a neater way. I also felt like more resolution to Henry's and Delilah's past would have been very satisfying, especially if it included a strong conclusion to their relationship. Overall, I really related strongly to both characters, even with them making some poor decisions. I played Henry as a little more levelheaded, balancing out some of Delilah's more impulsive tendencies. For example, when Delilah suggested starting a fire to cover up for something, I suggested that was probably a rash decision. I am curious that if I had said otherwise, if we would have actually set the fire. Either way the fire is set, so it would have been interesting. Like I mentioned in my last Gamelog, the game really dives into the choices we make, especially under pressure. There's the hint of them being in a social experiment which ends up not being the case, however the narrative still focuses heavily on the choices the main characters made in the present and the past. This particularly focuses on the choices we make when under duress, when it is the most difficult to make the "right" choice. I think a lot of it involves our natural tendency to seek out happiness for ourselves, and sometimes the choices we make to maximize our happiness do not do so for everyone involved. It will be interesting to dive into this more, perhaps from the Utilitarian approach, where maybe one person's happiness outweighs the misery of someone else. There's definitely many interesting lenses for this, and I think the game gives a lot of good material for exploring this. I look forward to writing up something over the next week that explores these ideas.
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