Her first question is: what's wrong with you? That's Delilah, Henry's new boss, talking to him over the radio as he takes in his surroundings.
As luck would have it, I knew exactly what was wrong with him. I'd spent the game's opening minutes choosing between quiet human tragedies in order to give Henry a backstory, a narrative sufficiently stocked with devastating personal failings and disappointments to ensure that he would run away here, to a lonely lookout tower in the middle of a forest in Wyoming. What a place to spend the summer! A rickety bedsit at the top of the world. Isolation, in an era before mobile phones and social networks, where the only tweeting is from the birds. The kind of isolation that can get inside you, frankly. The job is simple enough: scan the horizon and watch the forest for flames. Call them in when you see them. Bear witness - and maybe witness a few bears while you're at it.
Firewatch looks like a wilderness adventure, but really it's a character-driven game, an internal mystery - and as such, though I've avoided anything explicit, it's hard to discuss it without spoiling something or other. Proceed with caution. Anyway, that horizon you're faced with is Firewatch's greatest asset. Mountains, clouds, an expanse of tinted sky. Silver in the early morning. Lurid, throbbing orange when the sun begins to set. There's such a lot of horizon to take in, and that's the point. Something bad is happening, but you don't know exactly what form it will take, and you don't know exactly where it will show itself. Fire is not enough here, in other words. Something deeper must be smouldering away alongside it, waiting to erupt. It must be! What's wrong with you?
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