I finished Firewatch today, and for lack of better words…wow. What a story. I’m definitely going to have to let that sit with me for a while.
There’s a lot one could say about the ending and the dénouement, and whether or not it was satisfying or if it did justice to the premise and the events leading up to it. But thematically, everything checked out. The logical progression of the plot events themselves mattered less than the motifs and emotional threads of the story and the characters. And that’s why the story worked.
It reminded me a bit of a few other narrative games I’ve played recently, and out of all of them, this one was most successful in achieving what it had set out to achieve. Many narrative games feel like limited, self-contained experiences, even if most of them are really quite good. But Firewatch was the first to truly give me the sense that things were much bigger and darker more mysterious than they were, especially given how linear the story ultimately was.
Firewatch is an important game, and one of the first I’d use to argue for video games as art. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to everyone who likes games; rather, I’d recommend it to anyone who likes stories.
Something special
I finished Firewatch today, and for lack of better words…wow. What a story. I’m definitely going to have to let that sit with me for a while.
There’s a lot one could say about the ending and the dénouement, and whether or not it was satisfying or if it did justice to the premise and the events leading up to it. But thematically, everything checked out. The logical progression of the plot events themselves mattered less than the motifs and emotional threads of the story and the characters. And that’s why the story worked.
It reminded me a bit of a few other narrative games I’ve played recently, and out of all of them, this one was most successful in achieving what it had set out to achieve. Many narrative games feel like limited, self-contained experiences, even if most of them are really quite good. But Firewatch was the first to truly give me the sense that things were much bigger and darker more mysterious than they were, especially given how linear the story ultimately was.
Firewatch is an important game, and one of the first I’d use to argue for video games as art. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to everyone who likes games; rather, I’d recommend it to anyone who likes stories.