This is a game I’d heard great things about for years, but I’d never really put much priority on ever playing it. However, it recently went on sale for two bucks, so my wife picked it up to play through, and I figured what better time to pick it up and play through it myself than when I have her to talk about it with. It took me about 4 hours to play through the English version of the game.
Fire Watch is the story of a man named Henry who takes a job in one of Wyoming’s national parks doing exactly what the title of the game says: watching for fires. You follow his time there during the several months he’s assigned there, seeing the things he gets up to on the job as well as following his radio-enabled relationship with another of the fire watchers, Delilah. I hesitate to give more away than that, because a lot of Fire Watch’s story is really just going to hit better when experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. Though there is a slight degree of optional content to engage in, this is a game at the very least adjacent to the “walking simulator” genre, so the story is really what you’re here to see in the first place. And that story is done really well! The dialogue writing is excellent, with Henry and Delilah feeling so much like real people in the way they talk. The end result is a game that does a great job discussing guilt, regret, and the passing of time. Even though I don’t feel I relate to Henry on a direct level very closely at all (he’s just a very different person than me), the larger story beats were something I had no trouble seeing myself in at all. It’s a real shame that this dev team is probably never going to get a chance to actually make another game, because the way they execute the storytelling here is top notch, and as far as modern story-over-gameplay games I’ve played, this is easily near the top of the pile. The gameplay itself is, as I mentioned before, really nothing terribly special, as it’s basically all just walking places and pressing the button on stuff at the end of the day. You have general objectives to complete, sometimes they require a little bit of scavenger hunting via the map & compass you’re given to navigate, and there are some optional places to explore here and there, but this absolutely isn’t a game you’d go to because you heard the gameplay was stellar on its own without the story. I absolutely think that the gameplay does a good job of putting you in Henry’s shoes, at creating the correct atmosphere for the relevant story beat and all that, but this really is basically a walking sim at the end of the day, so don’t go in expecting some narrative-focused survival game or anything like that (not that I’m sure why you’d have that impression in the first place <w>). The presentation of the game is really well done. Just as the gameplay does, it compliments the narrative very nicely from the graphics to the sound design (not to mention the excellent voice acting. It’s so well done, it’s honestly hard to imagine the game looking much different while still having such an affective narrative. My only *slight* issue would be that, with the way the color palette of the game is done, it can be a bit hard to actually find your way through the forest sometimes. It’s an uncommon problem, sure, but it’s one I encountered often enough that it felt wrong to not mention it here. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game that absolutely lived up to the hype. The normal price is a bit steep for a four hour game, I’ll admit, but if you can get past that (or get it on sale), this is an excellent narrative to spend an evening with. If you’re a fan of narrative-focused games, this is for sure not one you wanna pass up on, because you won’t be disappointed. (A very special thanks goes out to my friend Robin for buying the game for me when I was having payment processing issues on Steam, as I was like 7 cents short of affording the game on sale <w>)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|