And Henry's wife? Surely her early-onset dementia is more a story about her than it is a story about Henry? Henry owns his running away, but that's about it.Īs neat as this is, there's another layer, of course. He's fixated with Henry not because Henry's fantastically interesting, but because Henry's bumbling presence is a pain in the neck. Those scientists are a con being played by somebody else again whose tragedy is very real but very personal. Those kids just went off and got in trouble somewhere else. It's the reason that its huge red herrings aren't really red herrings at all, but crucial elements that the developers need to trick you into maintaining your certainty that Henry is at the centre of it all. This is the fallacy that makes Firewatch work, I think. Another day, another sense of impending doom. Everything that happens must, in some way, be happening to him.
Henry's special because he's the main character in a narrative video game. What is her deal? What is she hiding from Henry? Is she watching him? The answer that suggests itself - it's the answer that suggests itself at almost every stage - is: of course she is. Poor Henry - are they trying to frame him? Or is it something worse? We go home and ponder Delilah's tower, bright in the distance. What a terrible thing to happen to him! The girls down by the lake go missing. We work through the text-adventure backstory sequence at the start and think: sick wife, childless - Oh man, what a burden this must be for Henry. To me, Firewatch is all about the dangerous assumptions the player makes as they play - the writable way we approach readable games. This is a game about plotting, and about the way that plotting can foul you up as a player. Paradoxically, to know all that is to ruin the game entirely, because the narrative is not all that's really going on here, I suspect. This is a simple domestic tragedy that actually played out long before you arrived, with no need for lights in the sky or government spooks in the bushes. The biggest spoiler regarding Firewatch is that it actually plays things straight. They aren't up on the hill in the first place. The girls who went missing haven't been murdered by your character Henry in some kind of fugue that the player was not privy to, the scientists up on the hill aren't keeping tabs on your every movement. The park you're in isn't a Prisoner-style gilded cage.
Delilah, your good buddy on the CB isn't a figment of your imagination, and she isn't a government watcher. The biggest spoiler regarding Firewatch - and this is possibly a sign of how weird narrative games are getting - is that you can't really spoil it. Be warned: This article contains spoilers for the entire plot of Firewatch.
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