Take lessons learned in those areas, and apply them to just movement and narrative - no shooting - and you get this genre.Įverything about Firewatch is about creating this sense of place, and anchoring the player character to it.
It’s no surprise that, for example, Gone Home was made by ex-Irrational employees, the company that made BioShock, one of the most impressive games of its era for environmental storytelling, beauty, and effectiveness.
This type of game is built around level design - making spaces that the player can inhabit and examine and move through successfully. It’s not a “game” in the sense of having combat or dice rolls or strategy, but instead is a “walking simulator” - a term initially used to deride games like Gone Home or Proteus, but which instead has become ironically endearing. But those have the game interface overlaid, and there’s something special and almost analog about using the tiny game camera.įellow 'Inverse' writer Nicholas Bashore took more pictures of trees in 'Firewatch' than I did.įirewatch is a prestige game about wandering through a national park, making friends over your radio, and uncovering a mystery. And sure, you could take screenshots by pressing F12 in Steam or the Share button on PS4. You have less than two dozen opportunities to take the in-game photos.
#FIREWATCH GAME HOW TO#
If gives a quick little training on how to use it, and then suggests you take pictures with an indication that you’ll see them “developed” at the end of the game.īut the genius thing is this: The camera has only a set number of potential photos. Early in the game, your character, Henry, comes across a disposable camera. But it doesn’t just look nice, it knows it looks nice, and it presents its beauty to the player as the essential mechanism for understanding the game: not shooting, not puzzle-solving, not even talking (although there’s plenty of that), just looking good wandering the world.Īnd here’s how Firewatch knows that: It gives players a camera.
This is a game that builds a warm aesthetic throughout, presenting a world that is monumentally enjoyable to walk through and experience. “Pretty” seems thoroughly insufficient to describe what Campo Santo’s Firewatch is.
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