Firewatch is tagged with “the walking-simulator games”, like the game Gone Home. (which unfortunately I did not find engaging) But I have to say I had a very good time playing the Firewatch. The game has fully lived up to my expectation despite its relatively short playtime and to me, Firewatch resembles a post-modernism novel in telling people a story and unfolding the plot and the ending. Here are my thoughts.

The game started with a script-choosing prologue, providing the basic background of the story (basically about the early life before our protagonist, Henry). I found this part very immersive for the simple dialogue choosing mechanism and the relaxing background music, the characters are all very relatable and the twist in Henry’s early life made my tears welling up :( It is just ordinary people’s life, but it proved to be moving, especially when this initial part only took up about 15-20 minutes to present Henry’s whole life before he went to the wilderness to be a fire lookout. It was such a climatic experience and after this initial part the gamers should have a basic, yet ambiguous understanding of why Henry took this job.

The main gameplay of the game is fairly good, first the mechanism of walkie-talkie is really brilliant idea, as the name puts, it allows you to report many thing you see to your supervisor, Delilah, which you do not feel lonely while exploring the wilderness. To make this mechanism work, the voice acting is essential and it is just fascinating. The navigation system---the map and the compass combination is very interesting and works well. The major problem I have with this game is the performance, the game has glitches during the autosave when you move to the next region, and the game requires high spec for its grass&trees rendering and shadows. There are many invisible walls in the game, which breaks my immersion sometimes.

To the end of the game, some people found it “anticlimactic” and frustrating about the short 4-5 hrs playtime to “complete” it. Personally I disagree with these opinions. The longevity of the time never justifies a game when the quality is below average. This game is all about imagination, people nowadays are easily become disconcerting when something strange happened, especially for gamers (or Hollywood movie fans) who has taken it for granted that---there has to be a climax, many conspiracies and lots of twists in game’s story. The fact is, what the developers want to tell is a small episode of life involving only several character(Actually the number is 6, according to the cast list) and I think they have done a good job. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the ending, yes you never actually get to meet Delilah, which is acceptable in my opinion, in the game, when you get into her tower in the end, you can found her sketch of you, which was completed only by the descriptions of how you look through radio times ago in the game. I definitely think that everyone has his/her very own image of Delilah, and so again this is a game about creativity of human thoughts, which is imagination. So I do not think the game has a mundane ending.

If you are into readings, you shall find that the style of story’s beginning, unfolding and ending is quite close to the post-modernism. In this category, we have Murakami Haruki with 1Q84, Lisa Genova with Still Alice Jonathan Safran Foer with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and so on. These books, they all offered readers a basic yet vague setting, people HAVE TO use imagination to understand, to engage. The ending will not surprise you that much, but that is the real life. In the Firewatch, the same applied, maybe you can be sure to expect the ending exactly in the middle of the game, but there are still many things remains unexplored, many choice to reply to the supervisors I would like to try out. I have already decided to close the captions in next playthrough for more immersion :)

Pros:
-Immersive story and gameplay
-Amazing voice acting
-Beautiful art style (just check community screenshots)
-Great original soundtracks (Highly recommended! Including FLAC & MP3 version)
Cons:
-Performance (frame rates drops sometimes)
-Relatively a high requirement for hardware as an indie game
Recommended especially to those:
-who loves AVG or Telltales series
-who loves Life is Strange for art style