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You'll spend most of the time listening to the pair's conversations, choosing Henry's responses to Delilah's advice, orders, and frequent prodding into his personal life.
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Sommer and Jones' performances are the real stars of the game. Henry's job starts out mundane - you start out by tracking a couple of drunk teens skinny dipping and setting off fireworks in the flammable parklands - but soon enough strange things start to happen around you, and the ploy pivots more toward a psychological thriller along the lines of Black Swan or Upstream Color. Henry, played by Mad Men's Rich Sommer, and Delilah (Cissy Jones) get to know each other and build a nuanced relationship purely through walkie-talkie conversations. Henry's only other comrade in the forest is Delilah, another lookout in a tower a few miles away. Like many relationships, though, things don't always go according to plan, and after a touching intro that hits similar notes to Pixar's Up, Henry eventually finds himself in Wyoming's Shoshone National Park, where the game begins proper. You have to make multiple choices through Henry's point of view, shaping his past and his choices at some very critical junctions in his life. The government has begun to repopulate old lookout towers, and you play as Henry, who took the job for the summer mainly to get away from his past.Īt the start of the game, you'll learn more about Henry's relationship with his wife Julia in a short text-based prelude. (Campo Santo Productions) Set after 1988 Yellowstone wildfiresįirewatch is set in the forests of Wyoming in 1989, a year after wildfires devastated most of Yellowstone National Park. "Nobody plays them for the really obtuse puzzles where you have to put maple syrup on cat hair to make a mustache." (That actually happened, in 1999's Gabriel Knight 3.)Īnd while genre standbys like exploration and mystery are key to the game, this is ultimately a story about loneliness, middle age, parenthood and guilt.Īs Henry you'll have to patrol the area and uncover mysteries with little more than a few tools and your supervisor Delilah advising you over a walkie-talkie. "The thing with a lot of those old '90s-era adventure games is that they were kind of good despite their gameplay, not because of it," says Campo Santo designer and programmer Nels Anderson. Instead Campo Santo, an 11-person team with past credits like The Walking Dead, Mark of the Ninja and Bioshock on its creators' resumes, dives into the story-rich history of the genre, paved by classics like Tales from Monkey Island or Grim Fandango. The Witness took the foundation of 1993's Myst to create a labyrinthine puzzle landscape with only the barest suggestions of a recognizable plot. Firewatch is the second game in a little under a month to take old-fashioned point-and-click adventures as a main source of inspiration, but goes in a very different direction with it.