I wanted to restart Firewatch as soon as I finished it. I wanted to see what happened if I made different choices at crucial moments, or if my character Henry talked to Delilah differently throughout the game. Were there multiple endings? Were some happier or sadder than others? I wanted to know, and with the game’s considerately conservative length it wouldn’t take that much effort to find out.
I didn’t start a new game. I realized it would have felt wrong. You can’t really change a book once you’ve read it. The story is the story, and I’m not one for fan fiction. Firewatch might have multiple endings, but it ended the way it ended for me based on my choices, and it would almost feel disrespectful to the Henry and Delilah I got to know to redo it. Henry couldn’t redo his conversations, and I shouldn’t either.
Firewatch hinges almost completely on those conversations between Henry, a new fire lookout in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and his supervisor, Delilah. Their chats can become flirtier and more confessional as their relationship grows, two sardonic loners with drinking problems (one active, one recovering) becoming close friends despite never really seeing each other. Delilah helps Henry learn the ropes of the job but also lends a sympathetic ear to Henry’s depressing personal problems, and she always seems to know the right thing to say. At times she almost seems too clever and ingratiating. Like Henry, you might start to doubt her intentions: is she really just a fire lookout supervisor? If so, what was up with that weird conversation you overheard on the radio that one time? And why is that part of the forest fenced off? And what’s happening with those missing girls, and the strange man occasionally seen in the forest from afar?
All these mysteries can make Henry a little paranoid. Which is to say they can make you a little paranoid. And although they may not all resolve in a particularly satisfying way, they at least introduce some drama and suspense into a story that is otherwise focused almost entirely on walkie talkie conversations between veritable strangers.
Firewatch is driven by a sense of loss at its core. Delilah acknowledges that all fire lookouts are there to get over something in her very first call to Henry, and that emptiness and solitude loom over the entire game. Henry’s loss, specific and devastating, is introduced directly, perhaps artlessly, at the very beginning of the game, but Delilah’s is vague and mostly hinted at. We learn some facts about her family, some about her, but despite how close she and Henry seem to be by the end of the game, she remains something of a phantom. She’s this spectral voice on the radio, sometimes helping us with our problems, sometimes just listening while we vent, presenting the illusion of the perfect friend. Perhaps this is what it’s like to date via the internet?