Where most games typically empower players with strong, noble characters, Henry is instead a character I could way more immediately relate to in my own life: he’s kind but shy, noble yet timid, and willing to do a good job, but reluctant and unsure of himself throughout the game.
That started pretty much from the game’s opening sequence where, more than I can think of recently, Firewatch‘s protagonist Henry was someone that I could easily see myself being, even while I was in the shoes of a existing, established character: shockingly so, in a lot of ways. Combined with the game’s first-person perspective, it’s to the credit of the game’s writers that being able to craft characters that I could so immediately relate to and want to know more about was what made Firewatch such an enjoyable experience, even with it being a particularly brief one (I finished the game in about three hours).Īs brief as it was, the experience of Firewatch was less about a comprehensive backstory, or an expansive lore: compared to grander epics like a Metal Gear or The Witcher, Firewatch (and other games of its genre) play more like a short story or a novella, and at the center of it getting to learn and know about Henry and Delilah’s past easily made getting to know them as rich and investing as any fantasy world or sci-fi epic I’ve played before. Much like a long-distance relationship or those predicated on other means of communication (texting, chat rooms, etc.), the entire character development of Henry and Delilah unfolds through radio conversations on their walkie talkies. From there, players are introduced to his supervisor, the sarcastic and witty Delilah, as he spends the summer monitoring the Shoshone for any potential fire outbreaks: all the while, supernatural elements start messing with Henry’s head, and even more so Henry’s past and present converge in some pretty shocking and emotional ways throughout the experience. Set in Wyoming during the late 1980s, the player is put into the role of Henry, a newly-appointed lookout/ranger for the Shoshone National Forest tasked with maintaining and reporting forest fires and other natural events throughout the summer of 1989. Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, Lee and Clementine in The Walking Dead, the player and GLaDOS in Portal, and several others all come to mind, and in that sense, the dynamic relationship between Firewatch‘s two main characters, Henry and Delilah, pretty much became the highlight of my experience with the game: even more than the elements that I went in looking forward to the most at first: the setting and visuals. What I wasn’t expecting was encountering one of the most memorable character relationships that I’ve seen in a video game in quite some time: almost on par with some that I’ve come to grow with and admire over the years.
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