Campo Santo The woodland environments in Firewatch offer great variety thanks to Olly Moss's art direction. There are plenty of landmarks in the world to help navigation without having to use the map as a crutch. Both are wonderful, charismatic, funny and share a chemistry that bolsters the excellent script by Sean Vanaman – who also wrote much of Telltale Games' first season of The Walking Dead. For the most part Firewatch is a two-hander, with Mad Men's Rich Sommer and voice over actress Cissy Jones playing the two leads. I believed in Henry and Delilah as complicated characters, and I was invested in their developing friendship and the mysterious occurrences that plague their summer. In the case of Firewatch the dialogue worked wonderfully in drawing me in. So long as a player is not told one thing and the reality ends up being another, the only thing that really matters is how all of it helps to engage a game's audience. Some games pride themselves on player choices impacting what happens, while others do not. These are crucial to Firewatch, but much like the opening, what the player chooses doesn't impact the broad strokes of the plot. Throughout Firewatch players select dialogue options that take conversations down differing routes. As the backstory converges with the game proper, the player is offered a small amount of input into what happened – but the result is effectively the same.
#Firewatch drawing how to
How Henry got to this point in his life is told during an excellent opening that breaks up the player's first steps, and some simple lessons on how to control the game, with a retelling of how Henry's marriage started and what went wrong. If that's sounds a bit dry, don't worry, this is a thoroughly fun, and often funny, tale.
His only regular communication there is with Delilah, his supervisor, whom he talks to via walkie talkie. At a critical moment he seeks a self-imposed exile, taking a job as a fire lookout for the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, USA.
Henry's marriage is falling apart, due to forces within and out of his control. There's no gratuitous violence in Campo Santo's debut, no childish notions of sex or gender – it's a game about adult relationships, responsibilities and problems. One that is adult without being immature, mature without warranting a blood-splattered 18-rating.