You Saw My Downstairs Mix-up!

January 27, 2019 / Colin / 0 Comments

I’ve been gone a while and am incredibly behind in what I’ve been playing. I’ll write up about what I’ve been playing (and beaten!) but this article is going to be a bit more somber.

Let’s rewind back to June of 2015. A company I’d never heard of, Campo Santo, published a reveal trailer for their first game, Firewatch. I was absolutely enthralled with it, I must have watched that trailer a dozen times easily.

The art style and voice acting were superb, for the first time in a long while I was excited about a new game. This one absolutely came out of nowhere and I was cautiously optimistic. (Caution: Past here there be spoilers!)

Eventually on February 9th 2016 the game launched on Steam and I bought it without question, I was so eager to start it. This time I was going to try out my brand new Steam Controller and play it on my 62in TV. When the game launched it was magic, my whole living room lit up with the beautiful colors. You play as Henry and the opening sequence is quick clips of you loading up a truck with a camping pack interspersed with a story of you meeting a woman, falling in love, and eventually marrying them. Each one of these little clips presents you with decisions to make that seem completely benign, but as the relationship evolves, the questions get a lot more complicated. Eventually your wife, who was an incredibly smart and accomplished academic, starts to deteriorate due to early onset dementia. You start sneaking out at night to drink at the neighborhood bar because taking care of your wife is taking such a toll on you. Eventually taking care of your wife becomes too difficult and she is placed in a home closer to her family. You take that about as well as can be expected, so you decide to run away to Wyoming and take a job as a fire lookout. So with your soul nicely crushed into a fine powder the game actually starts!

Once you arrive at the national park you are equipped with nothing more than a map and a compass to get to your assigned tower. No fancy GPS or smartphone. This game is the definition of a walking simulator, There’s no combat, just walking and occasionally picking up things, and playing it with a Steam Controller was absolutely sublime. In the beginning of your new job you meet your boss, a fellow lookout named Delilah whom you only communicate with via walkie-talkie. While you are going about your days, talking with Delilah and doing absolutely mundane tasks like pick up garbage and scold drinking teenagers, things start getting weird. The teenagers you scolded earlier disappear, someone breaks into your tower, you find a secret research facility, now you’re involved in some kind of vast conspiracy. Are all these events tied together? Who started the forest fire? Is the Government spying on you? what happened to the teenagers?

While all this is going on your relationship with Delilah gets more and more intimate, idle flirting during the day, more serious talks at night. You’re both here because you’re hiding from your real lives, and that desire to escape brings you closer together. Campo Santo does a very good job of making you feel like you really are Henry, you decide what he does, how he reacts to events in the game, how he responds to Delilah, does he tell her the truth? Does he lie to her? That’s all up to you. It all feels incredibly real, and I loved it.

Unfortunately by the end of the game you start to piece the puzzle together and it all kind of falls apart, not in a bad way game wise, but it falls apart for poor Henry. There’s no conspiracy, the secret research station was for tracking wildlife in the park, the teenagers got drunk, ran off, and are completely fine. The ominous specter was an ex lookout named Ned, who always brought his son with him to the job and whose body you find in a cave, having died from a climbing accident. He was interfering with you and Delilah this entire time because he didn’t want anyone to find his sons body and know that his son dying was his fault. He explains this in a cassette you find, you never catch Ned, he’s long gone by the time you listen to it. All of this turned out to be you (Henry) looking for a deeper and more complicated explanation for what was happening because you didn’t want to deal with what was really going on in your life. At this point in the game the forest fire is out of control and you need to evacuate, but at least now you can meet Delilah at the evacuation point and leave together. By now you’ve probably guessed that doesn’t happen either. Delilah is freaked out by what happened with Ned’s kid because she knew he was there but looked the other way, she’s also freaked out about what’s been going on between the two of you. Unbeknownst to you, she took an earlier helicopter out, so you never get to meet her either. One of the last things she says to you is that you need to go back to your real life and go see your wife. It hurts, it really does. You get on the helicopter and the game fades to black and the credits roll.

When the credits rolled I was absolutely awestruck. You’re supposed to win at the end of a game, this isn’t winning, you didn’t save the world, you didn’t get the girl, you accomplished nothing, I was pretty upset. It didn’t help that I was at a low point in my life and felt vulnerable so this game really affected me more than I was expecting.

The game really drove home the fact that even though Henry took this job to avoid what was going on in his real life, it was only temporary and he needed to eventually go home and face his problems. It’s hard not to see the parallel between that and the fact that most people play video games to escape whatever is going on in their current life. The message at the end of the game is very real: you can’t perpetually avoid whatever difficulties are going on in your life, eventually you have to deal with them. I was definitely affected by the end, I really wanted Henry to end up with Delilah but not every story has a happy ending.

Maybe that’s why the game’s conclusion was so polarizing for people. You play a game to escape and having it remind you that this is just a temporary avoidance of your real life is a bit of a downer. It certainly was for me, but I will still remember the game fondly, and still recommend it to people that are looking for a short game with a stunning art style and solid story telling.