Review
Played on: PlayStation 4Released: 2016
Small review here. I played through Firewatch recently with my wife. It's a new indie title, developed by Campo Santo and published by Panic. It's both companies first venture into videogames. The game has a rather original setting and unique artistic visual style, which has brought it a lot of attention since it was announced. Finally it's here, and playable on both PS4 and PC!
Firewatch is set in Wyoming in 1989 and you take the role of Henry, whom takes a summer job as a firewatcher, out in the bush. Remote and alone, he has to watch out for fires or people breaking the laws against open flames in the woods.
Let's just say, that strange things begin to happen out there. More than just checking for fires!
The game focuses around radioing and communicating with another watchtower, speaking to a female firewatcher called Delilah. This interaction back and forth, talking about things you observe or just life in general, is a lot of what the game is about. Building a relationship with Delilah through walkie-talkie conversations. The dialogue between them is really engaging and extremely well voice acted.
Sure, Firewatch is one of those indie, walking sims, once again, and partially you'd be right, though there's more substance here than simply traversing a landscape. There are set tasks you must complete and figure out how to solve them.
Viewed through a first person view and controlled by simplistic controls, and there isn't tons of items, fancy moves and collecting. It's a minimalist approach, where you must observe and explore the pretty, remote landscape. Visualised with a celshading artstyle. The sunsets, nighttime and landscapes look beautiful and capture the feeling of remoteness out in the mountains perfectly.
Viewed through a first person view and controlled by simplistic controls, and there isn't tons of items, fancy moves and collecting. It's a minimalist approach, where you must observe and explore the pretty, remote landscape. Visualised with a celshading artstyle. The sunsets, nighttime and landscapes look beautiful and capture the feeling of remoteness out in the mountains perfectly.
The colour of orange is heavily used, and gives the player an impression of a dramatic sunset and summer heat. It looks very unique and begs to have it's atmosphere soaked up.
There are some issues I wish to address. The PS4 port is a somewhat sloppy one, while it looks pretty, it has some very obvious technical issues. There are hickups in the framerate frequently. In fact, the whole screen freezes completely up for a few seconds, ever so often. Although this isn't a high paced title, that requires perfect framerate, the freezing is jarring and spoil the overall impression. If you're easily bothered by such issues, there's always the PC version to play as an option.
The game has a short lifespan, it took us about four to five hours to complete, but it's a game that doesn't really require for it to be longer either.
We ended up really enjoying our playthrough, it's a fantastic game to just watch and follow too. It ends very differently from what we thought during our playthrough, for good or worse.
The game has a short lifespan, it took us about four to five hours to complete, but it's a game that doesn't really require for it to be longer either.
We ended up really enjoying our playthrough, it's a fantastic game to just watch and follow too. It ends very differently from what we thought during our playthrough, for good or worse.
My only tip would be to remember to jump in on all dialogue options, as many of them are optional with a timer . Other than that, simply sit back and enjoy the atmosphere, story and feeling of being in a watch tower a whole summer!
