While the drama takes place in the dialogue itself, it’s agitated by travel Delilah sends Henry off to investigate all manner of disturbances, and the things that he finds often jostle the plot. The tension is further wound by the ever-present threat of fire. This study in rudderless forty-somethings is focussed and sharpened by an unfolding mystery in the forest, which mixes the mundane (the vandalism of beer- and vendetta-fuelled teen-agers) with campfire horror (abandoned caves, nefarious eavesdroppers, strangers glimpsed in silhouette). The characters’ exchanges are complex and nuanced right from the get-go. You choose how Henry responds to her jibes and inquiries, selecting from a range of options to reply either in kind, in defense, or with silence. Delilah, who has spent many summers here, is by turns a mentor, a therapist, and a flirt. The core of the game is the relationship between Henry (voiced by Rich Sommer, better known as Harry Crane, from “Mad Men”) and Delilah (Cissy Jones), a neighboring lookout with whom Henry keeps in near constant contact on his battery-powered radio. By the time you reach the wilderness, you share Henry’s guilt and his eagerness to escape. The game’s opening, which establishes the premise with snippets of dialogue, charting the decline of mind and marriage, is both tender and devastating. He is married to a person at once present and departed-a wife afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s, who now lives with her family in Australia. The emptiness and solitude is apropos: Henry, the game’s protagonist, is here to heal a heart that’s broken in complicated ways. The game is set in a few acres of a fictional national park in Wyoming, where you play as a fire lookout who intends to spend the lingering days of summer working alone at his typewriter, occasionally scanning the horizon for curls of smoke.
“I think we made a good thing, but I think we also made a strange thing.”įirewatch is certainly singular. “I’m nervous about the launch,” he told me, earlier this week. Now, for the first time, Moss has brought his eye to interactive entertainment, with a video game called Firewatch, which débuted on Tuesday. He has a better hit rate than Hollywood’s artists, delivering iconic imagery in reliable (and, lately, highly collectible) servings, and perhaps as a result, his aesthetic-narrowly defined palettes, gracile typography, striking composition-has grown familiar enough to parody. In the past six years, Olly Moss, a twenty-nine-year-old self-taught graphic designer and illustrator from Hampshire, in the south of England, has become known for his stylish reinterpretations of classic film posters.