Recent reviews by ❌ BlqCk0!! ❌

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“Firewatch, then – on the strength of its gripping story, brilliant branching script, wholly convincing voice-acting performances, and stunning art direction – is easily one of my favorite and most memorable game experiences of this decade.”

Firewatch is a story of a lonely man in a big country, presented as a series of prettily frescoed spaces, strung together for the player to explore in exacting chronology.

The player strolls along narrative paths in the first person, gazing at passing tableaux of gorgeous nature, while investigating a mystery parceled out in discrete, bite-sized chapters of the authors' devising.

Inside its confining corridors of cottonwoods and aspens, boulders and ravines, Firewatch delivers a deft story about loneliness and paranoia in a world of deceptively far horizons and dreamy vistas. It's a pace-y series of scripted scenes that amount to a graceful and entirely beguiling illusion of agency.

The story remains gripping for almost the entirety of its five hours. It's only in the final sequence that the illusion begins to blur and disintegrate as the drama's converging arcs fail to entirely yoke together.

Firewatch is about solitude and space, a first-person journey through the massive wilderness of America’s Shoshone National Forest. It’s a space of such magnitude that it almost unavoidably conjures mysteries and conspiracies of corresponding size. But in this game, we are drawn back down to the essential and human.

You are Henry.

This is how it all starts, in the second person like a choose your own adventure book, although the opening prologue is more like a multiple choice quiz sketching the history of Henry’s heartbreaking early adulthood. You meet a girl. Life happens. There are moments of extraordinary joy, giving way to an overall theme of devastation. Henry decides to escape, to a job as a fire lookout at Shoshone National Forest.