![]() ![]() He wasn’t totally ready to head back into the real world. Having seen what had happened to Ned Goodwin when he tried to cover up the past and his own mistakes, Henry had edged maybe closer to some emotional resolve, but it would have felt false to me if he’d left Shoshone a changed man. Henry and Delilah’s relationship is more sewn up than I would have liked, but by the end, he, at least, felt like he was still struggling. Personally, I don’t like to think of the ending as that complete. ![]() An optimist might look at it like this: the fire burns, taking the national park and all of Henry’s reasons for being there along with it, and he leaves it behind to rejoin people and restart his life. Yet at the end, he literally reaches out and grabs a person – Firewatch climaxes with a physical reconnection to people. ![]() Henry is out here to get away from it all. Apart from Delilah’s voice, and the distant visage of the two teenagers, both of which only increase your sense of isolation, this is a game where you don’t see a single human being, let alone touch one, the entire time. Better would have been for Delilah to just get on the helicopter, leaving Henry to find his own way back, silent and alone.Īlthough, I did enjoy the very ending, when Henry reaches out and grab’s the fireman’s arm. And so for the game to end on such a frank emotional exchange feels wrong. Sat in their observation towers – man-made eyesores, visible for miles around against the clear Wyoming sky – the characters in Firewatch are hiding in plain sight. The game’s dialogue choices don’t mean much, roaming the landscape provides little in the way of tangible videogame reward and the very nature of Henry and Delilah’s job is seclusion – Firewatch’s core, Hitchcockian mystery involves a father not wanting anyone to know what happened to his son. But Firewatch I think genuinely earns a vague conclusion. Ambiguous endings often feel like cheats, as if the writer, in lieu of knowing how to resolve her story just left it wide open, and then dressed her indecision up as meaning. Jesus, do you really know anybody?īut then you sit down to call your own evacuation helicopter and Delilah is on the line, and in your final conversation you tie off a couple of loose threads: Henry decides to go (or not go, depending on your dialogue choice) to see Julia, and Delilah says she won’t have time to meet Henry for a date. Even when you arrive at Thorofare itself, the power of that ending is still intact – looking through the former living quarters of the now departed Delilah, you get an all important sense of loss and wanting. And that’s a wonderful, visually wonderful ending, the central character, wandering by himself, through the flaming wreckage of the game and by extension the events that bought him to this point. It’s just you now, walking through the burning forest. ![]() After a few casual goodbyes she boards the chopper and leaves, and for the first time in Firewatch, you’re truly, utterly alone, no Delilah on the radio, no teenagers swimming in the distance, no Ned snooping around the caves. There’s a fantastic moment, during Henry’s climactic hike to the extraction point at Thorofare Tower, where Delilah tells him that she’s getting on a helicopter now and leaving. The ending, too, could have been trimmed. All of the stuff about Julia, her relationship to Henry, her condition and why he’s taken this job is pretty much covered, or at least sufficiently hinted at, during conversations with Delilah later on. That intro could just be chopped entirely. I understand that you’re supposed to be shaping your character and that it acts as a kind of alternative customisation screen where instead of physical attributes you assign him a personality and a history, but it’s so obvious and jarring – considering how much the rest of the game pulls back and leaves emotions and events to percolate, putting your character’s life and history in literal writing, and framing it as a cheap choose your own adventure story, starts Firewatch off on a deafening wrong note. THIS POST INCLUDES TOTAL SPOILERS FOR FIREWATCH ![]()
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