![]() ![]() You’ll head down to a lake to discourage some drunken teens from setting off fireworks, collecting cans of beer and picking up supplies from cache boxes, but then stumble on some increasingly strange sites in the woods. ![]() The joy of Firewatch is how effortlessly it mingles the mundane and the mysterious into one immersive package. It also happens to be 1989, and with the worst forest fires in Yellowstone’s history having only occurred one year prior, the job of sitting in a tower and looking out for any smoke among the ferns becomes a very real responsibility. Henry takes the job to escape, but time hasn’t ground to a halt outside of the forest’s edge, and Firewatch sees him faced with unravelling a mystery amid the trees, rocks and rivers while coming to terms with the painful truths about himself and his loved ones. It’s not perfect, and there are some noticeable technical sacrifices to justify its existence on Switch, but it’s no less essential. It’s heartfelt, silly, unsettling and beguiling all in the space of its roughly six hours of story. It’s a walking simulator and proud of it, but it tells a very specific story about a very specific person as they attempt to cope with the heartbreaking truths that are defining their very specific life. Released back in 2016, Firewatch is many things – tense, intriguing, charming and a little frustrating – but it’s never, ever boring. “It’s the most boring job in the world.” And yet, despite that rather eye-opening reality check, the studio went away and created one of the most memorable games of this current generation. “Why would you make a game out of this job?” some of their interviewees would say. During the early days of Firewatch’s development, Washington-based indie studio Campo Santo made a point of speaking to real fire lookouts to get a sense of what it’s like to be stationed for months on the end, deep in a North American forest.
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