spoiler
The answer is no. There is an alternative ending, but it isn’t based on dialog choices.
sclpls, do tell!
-Tom
I’m pretty sure it’s
alternate ending
if you wait long enough at the very end, the helicopter pilot takes off without you.
I was really looking forward to this but as soon as I got to the first point where you’re expected to use the map, I discovered that it came up as perfectly black. Turning off “show location on map” got it to show the map unzoomed but it goes back to black when zoomed in. It is impossible to progress without the map, so I guess I get to wait for a patch.
Yeah that’s it LMN8R.
Finished it. Eh.
Not bad, but I don’t think it’s something particularly recommendable.
spoiler time
The main character’s personal story doesn’t go anywhere. It’s all told in the prologue, and once you confess it up to Delilah in the first hour, it never comes out again, until the end itself when she says you should go see your wife. I’m like “Yeah, ok” (both the real me and the main character).
The rest of the story didn’t surprise me. It tries to play a mystery angle at first, but it fills like filler as there isn’t something that we can call “thrilling” in this type of story about a guy in a watch tower in a forest which talks every day by radio; which later turns into a conspiracy angle, but it all felt off to me.
Like, fake, or the writers trying to misguide me. For example when he finds the transcript of their conversation I thought there was a very bored (and a creepy) guy who just listening the same radio frequency, I didn’t think in a super secret government conspiracy.
The characters seemed to jump to conclusions weirdly, the entire conspiracy felt too nebulous and ethereal, always suspiciously generic and opaque, the research station seemed a normal research post with weather station and earthquake sensor and a comms tower, etc. At some point i wondered if what the game was trying to do is how they were prone to a paranoid and illusory state because their solitary job. Even the typewriter of the protagonist that had going to a faraway place to write reminded me of The Shining, and I thought “maybe the protagonist is a bit insane and I shouldn’t trust everything the game is showing”. Though it’s true there were some parts that supposed hard evidence so it seemed there was something in there. And surprise, I was right, the conspiracy was a red herring, with a small element of reality in it, Ned.
Which is the next point, I also guessed that the subplot of Brian Goodwin had some importance in it, once they mentioned it for a second time in a moment where frankly, it didn’t make a lot of sense (in fact at first I didn’t even knew what she was talking about, I had forgotten their exact names), and again for a third time later. And just before finding Brian’s body I was in fact thinking about the missing “actor” in all this story, Ned, as he could have also a role to play in here. And few minutes later I found out, lol.
I rarely post, but I can’t let this game go quietly without it.
I read Tom’s review and I essentially agree with his point of view, and since I’m not going to say anything detailed about the game, that Tom didn’t, I don’t feel the need to spoiler tag it.
This isn’t a game. Calling it a game is unfair to games. This is a giant cutscene with branching dialog (where the branches don’t matter) that forces you to wiggle the controls to keep it moving. There’s no challenge, there’s no possibility of failure.
If it was more of an actual ‘Choose your adventure’ style, where decisions you made actually mattered, that would be different.
If there were actual dangerous animals you had to be careful of running into or you might die, that would be different.
I was really disappointed with it overall. Which is sad, because I loved the style, the look, and the characters. The scooby-doo grade story was take it or leave it.
I myself loved it, yeah your choices don’t really matter, you are pretty much along for the ride.
The story was decent, and I love what they did with the camera you found in game. Stay for the credits!
Well, that was certainly something.
I think I understand what it was trying to do (And I agree with LMN8R about pretty much everything he wrote) but I was unfortunately kinda bored at times and had to look at the map a bit too often. Love the looks, and the idea, and the two actors and ultimately, its not that expensive. I also do think we need more games of this length, for all that I love games like Dragons Dogma and have hundreds of hours in it.
Hmm. Five sentence review?
The Thing Described
Firewatch seems to want to bring to light and personify this completely off-the-wall job that no one has heard about, fire spotter living in a tower in a National Forest, while at the same time wondering, what sort of wierdo would want to live there? Clearly in Firewatch the great outdoors is not for the healthy of mind; no one involved there operates on an even keel. It does well at artistically contrasting the solitary, lonely beauty of these places with the certainty that these places are eddies in life, holding patters, where life is placed in suspended animation, and where (and this is something i can attest to) hiking the mountains gives you more than ample time to ruminate on things. But it relies too heavily on contextual based morality , where the player is just told X and now you’re forced into situations that force you to consider (or transgress) X rather than coming to X naturally as a part of the narrative experience. And, i’m not 100% sure Delilah is on the level with Henry at any point in the game, as her weird talking shit about him to somebody isn’t clear if she’s actually doing this to someone or talking to herself, though there is one moment when it does seem like she’s talking in a way that’s meant for Henry to hear.
I finished it over the weekend and really enjoyed it. Great story, great atmosphere. Definitely a contender to include in my top 5 games of 2016. I took my time and played for eight hours, according to Steam. One tip: if you’re on the fence about playing this, don’t read any reviews and stop reading this thread. Just play it. The less you know, the better.
One bit I loved at the end:
Finding the Pork Pond sign in Delilah’s watch tower. Didn’t she tell Henry some kids probably stole the sign from the pond?
iMO it was clear who did that from her conversation. I wasn’t surprised. And jeese typing this on my phone sucks sorry!
I may have missed that clue or maybe the conversation was different for me.
Yeah, for me from the conversation it was definitely NOT clear. I got a good chuckle when I also experienced Gordon_Blue’s spoiler, that’s for sure.
I guess I’m good at reading between the lines; it wasn’t what she said but the way she said it (pauses, ect.)
ugg Phone formatting
In fact much of Delilah’s conversation are about what is the unspoken subtext than not. Her statements are often inconsistent, she seems to purposefully bad mouth Henry even while flirting with him earlier in the day, she says she can’t call out and then reports that she was just calling out, ect. She lies about how long she’s been working in a tower, and she clearly likes (in a reclusive way) the tower lifestyle because she hesitates to call out even when appropriate. She also lets slip that the other towers think she should be relieved of her duty, and she doesn’t really know what else to do. As Henry you have to decide whether to entertain a sort of verbal relationship with her, which I found odd since she seemed to maintain this one sided power structure, always having one over Henry and not really wanting Henry except at arm’s length and just as little personal closeness as she wants.
Finished this as well, and before I got into detail about my thoughts with the game.
The PS4 version runs like hot garbage.
the real pay off of the game is in the…
…choice of the dialog option when talking about ned at the end.
the three choices were “i think it was an accident”, “he was an awful dad”, and “i think he loved his son.” what choice you make determines how (you)henry sees himself and if the story ending is one of redemption, tragedy, or ambiguity!
see, ned was taking care of his family member but failed miserably and then stayed in the forest to avoid dealing with the consequences of his failure. replace the name ned with hank and you have the choice to see yourself as a jerk or someone who did the best they could.
if you didn’t notice the resemblance, then your answer makes it even more authentic than if you noted the parallel.
I was in the accident camp.
This is making the rounds. A Steam user made a thread asking the community what he should do. He played the game and enjoyed it, but he felt the 3-hour gameplay time (3 hours!? Was he running the whole time?) wasn’t worth the $18 he paid.
I want to support the developers, but there was so much more i could of got with my 18$. Should i refund, or hold on to it?
A Campo Santo dev popped into the discussion and gave her advice. It’s a long response, and you should read it, but the conclusion is this:
So yes, I am sad when people think this game is not worth the money we asked for (which we thought was a fair ask). It makes me feel like I failed them. It is ok if people don’t like the game, but it affects me personally a lot, when people feel like it was not -worth- the time they engaged with it.
But do I blame you for wanting to get the most out of your $18? No. I don’t know your financial circumstances. $18 might be a lot. Or even it isn’t a lot, why shouldnt’ you try to get the most out of it? That’s a fair desire. That’s why we asked for $18 too, because money is something we could all use more of.
So I supopse in conclusion, if you do refund, I am not upset. It’s on me to learn not to care too much. All I ask is that maybe sometime in the future, when the game goes on mega dirt cheap sale, you could gift tthe experience to someone else you think will enjoy it like you did.
I put about 3.3 hours into this last night (not sure how close I am to the end) and this is such a delightful game. One of the strongest experiences of 2016 so far (enjoying my time with this as much as XCOM 2). Incredible voice acting and dialogue, a well executed aesthetic, and a story that has kept me intrigued throughout. I only intended to play for an hour and then turn my attention to my XCOM 2 campaign, but I was so immersed in this game I played past midnight!
I am so happy that gaming experiences like this exist and are appearing more frequently.
Also I love the artwork for the dust jackets from the '80s. They did such a good job with that!
-Todd