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Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

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Did you hear Delilah's story about Carter and Hawk's Rest?

 

Delilah didn't answer when Henry tried to ask about Hawks Rest.

Is there anything special that needs to be to trigger any stories about this cottage?

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Delilah didn't answer when Henry tried to ask about Hawks Rest.

Is there anything special that needs to be to trigger any stories about this cottage?

 

Delilah tells you the story

after you report the raccoon attack in the bottom floor of Hawk's Rest when you open the stove. Not sure what the conditions are, but I think it might have to be evening for it to happen.

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This is a must-listen/watch if you liked the game.

 

I found out that my choice to ignore the cottonwood and use my ax to go straight for the fence was something that was a huge pain for them to put in. I also missed on on all the animals and a decent amount of other stuff that I can try to find on my next play through.

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So as you are leaving north on the rope ferry on the way to being rescued, it fades to black and all of a sudden you are standing in a clearing.

 

The clearing leads up to Delilah's tower, but instead of going there, I was a little confused with the transition so I checked my map, Henry's little red player indicator was pretty damn close to his tower after the fade to black and for a second I thought I had blacked out and had been moved back to Henry's tower to try to escape again in a never-ending purgatory.

 

I then just moved up this hill a bit and saw Delilah's towers and realized it might just be a bug.

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So as you are leaving north on the rope ferry on the way to being rescued, it fades to black and all of a sudden you are standing in a clearing.

 

The clearing leads up to Delilah's tower, but instead of going there, I was a little confused with the transition so I checked my map, Henry's little red player indicator was pretty damn close to his tower after the fade to black and for a second I thought I had blacked out and had been moved back to Henry's tower to try to escape again in a never-ending purgatory.

 

I then just moved up this hill a bit and saw Delilah's towers and realized it might just be a bug.

 

I did exactly that same thing.

 

 

 

Was that Scooby Doo adventure game from the 90s any good? Never played it.

 

Scooby_Doo_Mystery_GEN_ScreenShot3.gif

 

 

I didn't know this existed!  I'm going to have check it out at some point. 

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They talk a bit about that in the IGN spoiler cast. Pretty interesting.

 

Is that page completely broken for someone else? Can't get a response the buttons on that page at all. Maybe it's a chrome thing?

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Delilah tells you the story

after you report the raccoon attack in the bottom floor of Hawk's Rest when you open the stove. Not sure what the conditions are, but I think it might have to be evening for it to happen.

 

Oh, so that's where that thing is. I never touched that while I was there.

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There should be a Firewatch pun thread - Fire watch with me.

Lots of rambling

In the intro the choice between trying to take care of Julia, or sending her to a home was really difficult. I eventually decided I would probably be too selfish and would try to handle it on my own.

I would love to know when and how the intro came to be.

After the intro, I had a character called Henry, and a hope that Henry could at least survive, perhaps even heal a bit. But after the intro I never felt as if I was Henry. I was kind of a weird disembodied soul that maybe could bring out the most sure-footed version of Henry about that the game allowed. It went pretty ok, and I enjoyed the ride a lot.

I suppose what I ended up with was a rather unrealistic, poor character, that merely reflected my hopes. At just about every time it was possible I chose lines that seemed to imply a rational explanation for things. Or forgiveness or kindness. At the end I chose for Henry to tell Delilah to go with the chopper, because I was a player playing the game and it was the rational choice and it was the choice people should make in that situation. To say it was ok.

I don't think the Henry of the intro was this person. It is perhaps a failure of the game. But it was a good fantasy to experience. Perhaps the most important part of the experience was seeing those dialog options, and worrying how mad things might this character end up saying, expressing, believing. The timer on the dialog choices worked well in this regard. I always managed to make a choice, but at times I had to hurry, felt some pressure.

I suspect this dicthomy was not intended, but I did work rather well for me. It has a lot similarity with books: identifying with a character, but not inhabiting that character. Having no control over where that story goes. However, I did have some control over the tone of the story. In movies I sometimes get these moments where you feel the character is about to do something, and I tense up and hope the character does not do that. And usually the character does because that's dramatic. Here, while I didn't have probably any control over the actions, I at least had some control over what the character says. And I strongly tried to steer the character away from those hurtful places. I don't know how much effect that had, but that is an experience no book or movie will ever give. I can understand preferring a stronger authorial voice and to a degree the gameplay and story are removed. But I do also kind of like this kind of storytelling.

The only thing I really regret though is that I spent a lot of the game collecting evidence, and I treated the camera as a way to collect evidence. I was afraid of taking photos, because I'd run out of film and then I couldn't document something curcial. I guess I was kind of expecting some kind of ending vignette, and even in Ned's bunker I took three photos there. I had three left, and did get a couple of nice ones of the orange forest. And, as I suspect most people did, I also took a nice one in the aspen grove.

Also:

Brian's death was not intentional. Ned wanted his son to fit an image Ned had in his mind. Brian, the imaginative, smart kid wasn't that and did not like climbing. Ned forced him to, and the fall was an accident born out of that. Ned's actions in the game are a mix of wanting to be caught and fearing it. And being, in general, rather unhinged.

I think Ned must have placed the alarm bagback with the intent to lure Henry away, because otherwise Henry should have noticed the beeping of the scanner when he arrived at the tower. And this also means that a tracker was intentionally put in the bag and then turned on.

I would want a Miasmata version of Firewatch so very badly. With perhaps actual being on watch for fires even :-) I was very happy the game had the no map pointer/no objectives option.

0451 container had a cap, after which I assume Henry wore two caps.

I loved the moment where Henry contemplated whether he was utterly delusional. For a brief moment I even considered it.

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There was a moment for me some time around finding the boy's body that I became very (wrongly) paranoid about Delilah's involvement in the affair. It felt like she jumped to the conclusion that Ned was responsible for his son's death, so for a while I just stopped talking to her. However, it never really felt like Henry and Delilah's relationship deteriorated. I was wondering, how far can you push it? Do the two always remain pretty friendly to the end or is there capacity in the choices to fall out a leave on bad terms?

 

The only real sense I got of this was a moment earlier in the game when Delilah steps away from the radio for a time because she is annoyed with you, and the game pops up words to the effect of "Delilah will remember this". I think it was around the time you overhear a conversation between her and someone else on her radio.

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I would love to know when and how the intro came to be.

 

 

(Long time listener, first time poster)

 

You should listen to this interview of Sean Vanaman and Rich Sommer by Giant Bomb's Austin Walker : http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/talking-firewatch-with-sean-vanaman-and-rich-somme/1600-1503/

 

They explicitly talk about the intro and how it came about as well of a lot of other stuff. The whole interview is great an funny. Rich Sommer seems like an incredibly cool and down to earth dude - and is also apparently a massive board game geek.

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The only real sense I got of this was a moment earlier in the game when Delilah steps away from the radio for a time because she is annoyed with you, and the game pops up words to the effect of "Delilah will remember this". I think it was around the time you overhear a conversation between her and someone else on her radio.

 

Just to clarify, it says "Delilah is annoyed." 

 

There are a couple times in the game the radio can be disabled, but the one you're referring to is optional. It only happens if you bring up the overheard conversation.

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Just finished the game, and I rather enjoyed it! I'm reading other impressions and there are a lot of people upset that it wasn't a horror game?? Or that there are too many plot holes or things otherwise left unattended. I didn't really mind, I liked what I played, and I wasn't bothered by the ending. I'm very much a "the journey is the destination" kinda guy so even the most atrocious of endings wouldn't really mar an otherwise good experience. My only real complaint is how often Henry would get stuck on geometry of rocks and branches; character movement is one of the most important things in a game to me since that is my direct interaction with the game. Also, in hindsight maybe I should have been playing with the subtitles on, since I think I missed a few things here and there and was actually confused about Brian's relationship with Delilah (just for a while).

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Just finished the game, and I rather enjoyed it! I'm reading other impressions and there are a lot of people upset that it wasn't a horror game?? Or that there are too many plot holes or things otherwise left unattended. I didn't really mind, I liked what I played, and I wasn't bothered by the ending. I'm very much a "the journey is the destination" kinda guy so even the most atrocious of endings wouldn't really mar an otherwise good experience. My only real complaint is how often Henry would get stuck on geometry of rocks and branches; character movement is one of the most important things in a game to me since that is my direct interaction with the game. Also, in hindsight maybe I should have been playing with the subtitles on, since I think I missed a few things here and there and was actually confused about Brian's relationship with Delilah (just for a while).

 

I made the mistake of reading a bunch of the Firewatch subreddit around the time the game come out and it seemed to be nothing but people complaining that the game wasn't what they expected. Grievances ranged from "I was able to speed run the game in X number of minutes, therefore the game is overpriced" to "this game is focused on story and dialog more than I expected therefore it is overpriced." It made me feel for anyone who makes a creative thing and send it out into the world only to have people complain that it isn't exactly the kind of thing that they usually like.

 

EDIT: Which isn't to say I think Firewatch is above criticism or without flaws. I just don't think it's too helpful to complain that one genre of game isn't more like another.

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Does it let you board it up like that?

We actually considered this at length but it just introduced way too many weird technical issues that aren't worth going into. Oh well!

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I really liked this game.

  • Loved the beautiful and unexpected Twine intro, both the contents and the implementation of it.
  • I had high expectations from hearing James Benson doing (all of?) the animation, and I was not disappointed. Lots of little touches, and the way stuff moved is unlike anything I can remember seeing in a video game.
  • Between this and The Witness, I bet I'm not the only one having caught a glimpse of what looked like a secret puzzle, stopping and starting to back up to adjust the camera for half a second before realizing they were playing the other game.
  • I never really got used to the controls, always trying to run with shift
  • I (think) I would have loved even more stuff in the «several months pass» montage, as it felt a bit brief to me. I am very bad at paying attention to title cards with dates, so at least I'm glad they counted the days for me.
  • I also found myself meta-managing my fear at points, thinking no way would they spend a ton of time and money on a scary monster coming out of those bushes.
  • I love creepy stuff and things that are a bit off, and there was plenty of that, with the sometimes weird radio conversations, dream sequences, fenced-off areas, abandoned cabins and camps, etc.
  • Even though I was expecting more of an explicitly open world game, I never really explored a lot, and usually headed for my next mission target goal. Not sure how much optional stuff I missed, but regardless of my linear playthrough the world really felt vast and open, which added to the experience. I always assumed I was taking one of several available paths.
  • Almost needless to say, the game was very beautiful. The camera integrated with that fact very well.
  • Now I'm just wondering what Campo Santo's next game will be.

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Loved the game mostly but found the pacing to be rushed. The cuts between days work wonders in the early and late stages of the game, initially doing an excellent job of settling you and in the end creating a great tension, but I wanted a bit more time to breathe in the middle. I guess I just never felt like a fire lookout, or that it was a long hot summer. The montage of days in the middle was a great way to show time passing but I wanted to live that time more than I got to. It sounds like an odd request but I wish the game had more repetitive mundane tasks to do as a lookout, but it would have to walk that difficult line between routine and boring a la Papers, Please, but maybe that just isn't this game.

 

+1 on this sentiment.

 

In retrospect, at the bittersweet end, I appreciated how FW evoked that feeling of maybe-idle summertime flirting. But that's just "in retrospect." In the moment-to-moment, I wasn't sure what to make of it. Henry's wife feels like such a heavy element in his life and Henry's interactions with Delilah are so weighted toward her giving him assignments and him asking her about features of the park, learning the ropes.

 

The flavour in those interactions carried that flirty feeling pretty well, but I can imagine the feeling being improved by adding (like you say) more breathing room in the middle, where the long hot summer might be filled with idle chatter. Like just killing time by hailing Delilah on the radio and saying, "hey, so what are you up to?" A moment or two like that would have gone a long way.

 

… But then maybe that's just what I got from the game, or maybe I didn't pick the right choices to pursue the elements like that that exist in there.

 

Anyway, it's easier to go on at length about criticisms than it is to go on at length about praise, of which I have no short amount. Suffice to say, what a beautiful, intriguing game.

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There is no possible application of Forest Byrnes that is not creepy.

 

This steam trading card is the worst offender

 

Firewatch_Card_2.png

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