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Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

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I'd say that's the conclusion you're intended to make, but given that this is a piece of science equipment calibrated to track the Elk collars, it's a stretch. Possible, sure, but a stretch. Unless the alarm came from science people and had some connection there, but I don't think there's a lot to suggest that.

 

There could have been a tracker in the backpack I suppose.

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My take on them, which may not be completely accurate, is that they were basically just another example of a relationship that wasn't as deep as one side thought.  Dave at one point reaches out to Ron, asking for a should to cry on or something along those lines (something bad happened), and Ron's reply was, "Yeah,we're work buddies, this isn't that kind of friendship."  Which ultimately has parallels to Henry/Delilah. If there's more to it, I missed it and would also like to know.

Yeah me too, it only seems like 3 letters were exchanged (4?) and I have this feeling there is more in the game I somehow missed.

 

The only thing that makes sense is that Ned had finally decided someone needed to find Brian.  He would have already known that there was another way out of the cave.  Locking the door behind Henry wasn't about locking him in, but forcing him to go forward to find Brian (that Henry didn't have climbing gear is something Ned might not have been aware of since Henry had done so much rapelling around the park).

 

Yeah that's my thoughts, that the only way any of what he is doing makes sense is if his motivations suddenly changed, but the game really gives no indication of this (Like how you just posted his notes confirm he doesn't want you to find Brian and there is never any indication he does), which is why I wanted some other element to be revealed as part of the mystery instead of just Ned. Just seems like by Ned having clashing motivations it's only there for the sake of additional intrigue rather than to make sense.

 

I also feel like the alarm was going to cause some trouble, maybe a knock to the head or something since it was rigged, but since it was not it just seems to be there to create tension. However it also creates an element that doesn't really make sense on a couple of levels, so maybe the alarm could have just been left out?

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So... Ned observes Henry leaving the cave on day 1, and decides to scare (?) Henry and Delilah on day 3 by making a mess of Henry's watchtower, and again on day 76 by leaving a creepy transcript of their conversation on a rock and a walkie-talkie a bit further away. Once Henry finds these items Ned knocks him unconscious. The transcript mentions Wapiti which Ned assumes Henry and Delilah may investigate (provided that they don't pack their bags and leave), and so he types out personality profiles of both Henry and Delilah to further creep them out, plants them on the table of the scientists tent on top of a transmitter collar, turns on the tracking device and hides somewhere nearby. Henry picks up the tracking device, finds the papers and eventually leaves, after which Ned immediately torches the tent, presumably noticing the absence of the tracking device first, as there is a distinct lack of loud beeping noise in the tent. Later that day* Ned decides to hide some supplies in a backpack near Henry's watchtower along with a key to the cave, and rigs up an alarm system for the cache. Either the backpack has a tracking device so that Ned can more easily find it afterwards or the alarm system is some sort of a bizarre contraption that inadvertently transmits at the same frequencies as transmitter collars. While Henry is looking for the backpack, Ned tapes a walkie-talkie to the door of Henry's watchtower. At some point, Ned realizes that Henry has found the key to the cave, and as Henry goes to investigate the cave the following day, Ned locks the gate behind him for whatever reason. He then records a confession and leaves.

The backpack cache is really problematic in my opinion because Ned should either know not to use transmitters to mark the caches because Henry has a tracking device or (in case the backpack was planted before the Wapiti thing) not to leave a tracking device lying around for Henry to find because he has made hidden caches with transmitters. The other alternatives are that he wanted Henry to find the key (which I assumed at first, but is not supported by Ned's notes, it seems) or that the alarm system is really weird contraption indeed (which sounds a bit too arbitrary).

I'm also not sure that locking me in a cave would motivate me to investigate the cave more thoroughly than I would have otherwise. Most likely I would just try to find an alternative route out and fast.

* These could be hidden earlier as well, if we accept that Henry's tracking device just suddenly picks up the signal at random after both the tracking device and target being stationary for a long time.

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Also sorry to keep repeating this, but thinking more about Brian's body still lying there over the years, I am still confused why it is left out if we start the game where presumably Ned never wants his boy's body to be found (even before we entertain the notion of wanting to be absolved of guilt). If he had stolen the key from a former lookout to keep people out, perhaps he could have just destroyed it? Even then before that look out started he could have buried Brian or just moved Brian somewhere else. My initial thoughts were maybe he could not get down to where Brian fell, but the carved part in the wall shows someone had rappelled down there before. And besides that Ned is a great climber, which is what led to Brian's death in the first place. Maybe Ned is just lazy then? Well the guy is doing a lot of involved and wacky shit over the course of the game he seems anything but lazy.

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Either the backpack has a tracking device so that Ned can more easily find it afterwards or the alarm system is some sort of a bizarre contraption that inadvertently transmits at the same frequencies as transmitter collars.

 

Unintentional doesn't make sense to me:

 

The frequency range of any RF would be directly related to the shape and length of the antenna being used, hence if it wasn't intentional, that means that the circuit would have to have been an unintentional antenna on the board in the appropriate shape and length to transmit in the range of the collar. That seems impossible given the kind of circuit he'd need and how incredibly simple of a design that alarm would have been.

 

The other bigger problem is that the alarm is rigged to trigger when the backpack is pulled away from the alarm via clothes pins attached to a cord, which means it's probably just closing a circuit to power the alarm. That means that it's not even powered until the backpack is removed, which makes sense because you don't want to be actively burning battery when nothing is happening, hence there can be no EMI at all before the alarm is triggered.

 

I guess tracking device in the pack unless someone has a better explanation?

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Also sorry to keep repeating this, but thinking more about Brian's body still lying there over the years, I am still confused why it is left out if we start the game where presumably Ned never wants his boy's body to be found (even before we entertain the notion of wanting to be absolved of guilt). If he had stolen the key from a former lookout to keep people out, perhaps he could have just destroyed it? Even then before that look out started he could have buried Brian or just moved Brian somewhere else. My initial thoughts were maybe he could not get down to where Brian fell, but the carved part in the wall shows someone had rappelled down there before. And besides that Ned is a great climber, which is what led to Brian's death in the first place. Maybe Ned is just lazy then? Well the guy is doing a lot of involved and wacky shit over the course of the game he seems anything but lazy.

 

Well, the message he leaves for Henry mentions that the reason he hasn't tried to get someone to find the body was that there would "be questions" (Can't remember the exact wording). This is also why he hasn't returned to civilization himself. As for why he left Brians body there, I'm not sure. My initial feeling was that maybe it would be too risky/hard to actually move the body out of the cave as climbing with an extra persons... dead weight, I guess... would make a climb both heavier and harder as the weight would move around.  The way Henry finds to get out seems fairly safe, but with the state we find Brians hideaway in, it doesn't seem like Ned has even found it. In fact, that this is where we find the anchors(?), doesn't that mean that Ned wouldn't have been able to get down there? 

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My initial thoughts were maybe he could not get down to where Brian fell, but the carved part in the wall shows someone had rappelled down there before.

 

Pitons are designed to be driven into existing cracks in rock faces. The thin metal blade is either meant to bend and contort to the curvature of the crack as you drive it into a natural break or wedged away from the direction of load.

 

Intentionally carving a crack would be laborious and possibly compromise the strength of the rock. When they put in entirely artificial hard points, you drill a hole and put a permanent bolt in that's either glued, as common in the modern era, or compression fitted. More rarely you'll see cement being used from ages ago.

 

So the crack would just be a crack, not indicating anything really (other than that's probably where Brian fell from).

 

I think there's a few possible explanations:

1) He couldn't get down to the body in any fashion because Brian had stolen all of his hardware (e.g. the pitons), so he had no way of setting up an anchor to lower (ignoring that there's a huge ass horn right beside the crack that he could have roped off of).

2) If Ned still had hardware and he couldn't retrieve the body from where it likely fell, for whatever reason, there's nothing really stopping him from just walking it out as Henry did himself, or moving it to a location where he could rig a system to pull it up. So in that case maybe he just couldn't bring himself to move the body of his dead son.

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Yeah, I'm inclined to think that Ned just didnt want to confront the physical reality of his son's death anymore than he already had.

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But if Brian had hid all the pitons what were they both using when he fell? The reason I mention the crack is because Henry discusses it with Delilah and then uses it.

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But if Brian had hid all the pitons what were they both using when he fell? The reason I mention the crack is because Henry discusses it with Delilah and then uses it.

 

I thought there were two separate horizontal cracks? One above where Brian fell and another earlier in the cave where Henry descends. To be honest, the entire sequence about what happened didn't really make sense to me and I don't think I have a clear picture of exactly what happened. The general points that Brian did something wrong and fell, that it might be Ned's fault, I get that, but the details I don't know at all.

 

Henry mentioning something along the lines that someone setup an anchor there with no visible signs of one, the piton attached to a biner and what looks to be a really short length of rope, the lack of a harness or any other gear lying around by Brian, Ned's confession to Henry, all that stuff didn't really give me a clear picture of what happened.

 

Was Ned there at the time? Was Brian alone? The physical setup isn't what you'd do in reality so you can't rely upon it to tell you the story.

 

If we imagine that in the Firewatch universe the way Henry anchors his rappels is just how it's done, then maybe Brian improperly sunk a piton that blew out as he was lowering like Henry lowers, but it looks like a vertical drop as opposed to a slope, which is where Henry is always shown lowering. Say that's just how all rappels work, then why was the rope attached to the piton so short? There would be no chance at all of it reaching the bottom. If the rope being short is intentional, as in it snapped or was cut, then why did the piton blow?

 

I think you can come up with a lot of possible scenarios depending on how you chose to answer the questions, but I don't know if you can come to any conclusion from the evidence available.

 

 

Cool, there seems like a barrage of interviews right now: GB, Kinda Funny Gamescast, IGN.

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2e3b6820-5690-4fea-876f-69e1a85c11bc_nor
 
I keep trying to figure out why there are two ropes dangling near where you found the backpack, one shorter than the other. Did Ned encourage Brian to dangle off that terrifying cliff from those ropes, leading to him dropping his backpack? Are these the first steps of his never-finished Goldbergian contraption to retrieve his backpack? 

 

Yeah me too, it only seems like 3 letters were exchanged (4?) and I have this feeling there is more in the game I somehow missed.

There's another letter behind a thick brush to the northeast right near where you find the dead deer, which (along with some commentary from Delilah) sheds light on why Dave initially left home, with a fantastic Chris Remo-sung track giving closure to his arc. (I know this is a spoiler thread, but it's a really nice moment that might be better to experience yourself?)

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Ah okay I definitely missed that note if it's linked to the deer I didn't see. We were talking about in Slack that the Remo sung song wasn't in the game but it appears it is. I also took that the ropes above the backpack were the start of his device where no climbing was required.

GUYS I JUST REALIZED BRIAN CAUSED HIS OWN DEATH BECAUSE HE STOLE ALL THE PITONS CAUSING THEM TO RUN OUT WHILE CLIMBING. BAD BRIAN.

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You know, the more I think about it, I think I would have liked the game more if it had Ned pretend to be a bigfoot or ghost or something rather than creating some Lost-style plot.

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You know, the more I think about it, I think I would have liked the game more if it had Ned pretend to be a bigfoot or ghost or something rather than creating some Lost-style plot.

That's literally every episode of Scooby Doo though.

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I've always wanted a decent Scooby Doo game, so this is completely acceptable. 

 

 

(seriously, a Telltale scooby doo mystery game would be dreamy)

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Any game with Eat as a verb is automatically the best.

 

Does it need to be explicitly labelled?

 

GameBox.jpg

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That's literally every episode of Scooby Doo though.

True but it think it would be more plausible that someone could try to scare people in the woods by pretending to be a bigfoot than try to convince them they were part of an experiment. (don't get me wrong, I like the game a lot but I think this is a big flaw)

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He tries to make them feel like they're part of an experiment because they start talking about some sort of conspiracy, and it's easier to sell people on a notion they've already entertained.

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True but it think it would be more plausible that someone could try to scare people in the woods by pretending to be a bigfoot than try to convince them they were part of an experiment. (don't get me wrong, I like the game a lot but I think this is a big flaw)

Sure, that's fair. I think it's a tough line though because as a player the one thing I felt more sure of than anything else going into this game was that it wouldn't have supernatural elements. As people on this forum I imagine we're all more aware of Campo Santo than the average player but I think it's still reasonable to consider how plausible it would've seemed.

The flip side of this is that I also realized as I was playing it that where my expectations were, the addition of supernatural stuff would have been genuinely surprising and unexpected in a way it never is in games normally.

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I've always wanted a decent Scooby Doo game, so this is completely acceptable. 

 

 

(seriously, a Telltale scooby doo mystery game would be dreamy)

 

I'd love a Telltale Scooby Doo!

 

...As long as they take it back to the more traditional type of games they made early on. I mean, Borderlands reinvigorated my faith in their currently-popular formula of game, but with Scooby Doo, I think I'd have a lot more fun if I was, I dunno, exploring a haunted house on my own, and kept falling into goofy traps. I want to find clues and keys and whatever on my own, not have them shoved in my face. I want to switch characters on the fly (or, even scripted-like, as long as I maintain some semblance of real control).

 

Actually I just realized what I'm talking about is almost Luigi's Mansion.

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I finished this the other night, loved the shit out of it. I was just about having a heart attack on the walk to Cottonwood Creek/Wapiti Station, constantly turning around to see if there was some guy behind me.

 

One thing I don't think anyone's mentioned in the thread, though, that I never found an explanation for: there's this ruined shack with a firefinder, a guitar, and a bunch of other stuff that looks like it came from the same supplier as the stuff at Henry's tower. The Goodwins were clearly staying in Henry's tower, so what's the story with the shack?

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