The End of Firewatch

Duncan Fyfe
The Campo Santo Quarterly Review
9 min readApr 1, 2016

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[This article discusses Campo Santo’s Firewatch in great detail, with particular attention to its ending. If you’re avoiding spoilers, you should come back to this once you’ve finished the game. But quickly scroll down to the end of the page first, because of the high value of page views in this economy.]

Firewatch is the rare video game in which the most significant events in its character’s life occur not only off-screen, but almost outside the narrative entirely. For most of its length, Firewatch is about a fire lookout called Henry stumbling upon a sinister conspiracy in the woods. But by the end of the game that conspiracy has amounted to very little. Then, the ending itself puts the narrative in a new perspective: would Henry be out there in the woods investigating conspiracies at all if his life outside wasn’t painful and fraught? Would he have taken the job if his wife hadn’t succumbed to early onset dementia? Probably not. But he can’t forget her by running away and hiding in the woods; that’s not going to work. That’s what Henry has to learn. Ultimately, the plot of Firewatch is irrelevant to what he’s struggling with in his life.

“That was pretty disappointing,” concluded the YouTube star PewDiePie, as the credits rolled on the video of his playthrough. “What the fuck was that ending? That was so bad. How is that a fucking ending? ‘Oh, by the way, nothing changed. And a kid died.’ I’m really upset right now.”

Firewatch’s critical reception has been largely positive — it has a Metacritic score of 82 — but you don’t have to look far to find players unhappy with the game’s ending. “I’m drunk now and I just want to say I hate the ending of Firewatch so much. … Fuck you Firewatch”, the screenwriter Max Landis tweeted.

“I’m really upset right now.”

In Firewatch, events conspire to leave Henry underwhelmed and sad. Since the game puts players in Henry’s shoes, you can see why players might feel the same. You, the game says outright in its prose prologue, are Henry. You see Julia. You approach her. You date for over a year. You get mad. You call her selfish. You spend your days following Julia around the house. You can’t do anything without her and she can’t do anything without you. You see an ad in the paper for a job. You take it. You, Henry. You, Henry, don’t get the girl; you, Henry, are told to face up to your responsibilities; you, Henry, don’t feel like a hero; you, Henry, are disappointed.

“I don’t feel,” Landis added in a later tweet, “like anticlimax’s [sic] are ever something that should be wilfully attempted.” Given how far and wild Henry’s imagination runs with the early rumblings of conspiracy, I can’t argue Firewatch’s conclusion isn’t anti-climactic. What I would argue, though, is that it’s exactly through anti-climax that Firewatch achieves resonance.

Here’s what happens in Firewatch: Julia’s sharp descent into dementia and increasing need for full-time care return her, as if a child, to her parents in Australia. Henry doesn’t go with her. His shame and grief push him to take a solitary post as a fire lookout with the Forest Service. Here, Henry doesn’t have to talk to anyone except his boss Delilah, and even then only by radio. The two become close, but a potential relationship is distracted by disappearing teenagers, a break-in at Henry’s tower, a mysterious forest fire and a research station of unknown purpose with research reports on Henry and Delilah and transcripts of their radio conversations.

What’s going on? Who’s stalking Henry? Are Henry and Delilah under surveillance, and if so, by whom? Is the government spying on them? Are they research subjects in some unfathomable experiment? Why isn’t there anyone else around? Is Delilah lying? Where did the teens go? Is any of this really happening? Henry’s paranoia comes to a crescendo and presently evaporates when he finds the body of a twelve-year old boy, killed in a climbing accident. Brian Goodwin had been staying in the Shoshone with his father Ned, a fire lookout from a few years back. Delilah knew Brian wasn’t allowed to be out there, but she didn’t snitch because she’s cool.

When Brian died, Ned didn’t go home — how do you tell the world that you let your child die? — but stayed in the forest and went into hiding. Nearly every bit of weirdness and hostility Henry and Delilah experienced was an effort by Ned to keep them from finding Brian’s body — or exposing Ned’s shame at Brian’s body lying alone in the crevasse.

Everything else that happens has a rational, innocuous explanation, too. When Henry overhears Delilah saying something cryptic on the radio, it turns out to be something about utterly mundane; the research station of unclear purpose is there to track elk; the teenagers who disappear do so because they are wild and hard-partying teens, and also they stole a tractor.

Everyone in Firewatch has something to do that they aren’t doing. Everyone’s avoiding what’s hard.

In some cases these revelations could have been better delivered. Every question in the mystery has an answer located somewhere in the game, but many of those answers are easy to miss, even for a player who wants to find them. I don’t think players are meant to be left with much ambiguity about what occurs in the plot, since all the connective story tissue is there in the game — but a lot of players have been, and I think on that basis the game has caught more flack than it deserves on its merits as a piece of writing.

It also just doesn’t feel right, in terms of role-playing a character, to leisurely wander the woods in the idle hope of coming across a fun secret when Delilah is regularly assigning Henry one urgent task after another. Firewatch certainly rewards exploration, but its narrative rarely encourages it. (And there’s definitely a more elegant way to convey a lot of information than having Ned dictate it to Henry on an audio tape, although this produces the best line of dialogue in the game: “Sorry about your wife,” delivered like a haltingly sympathetic, impersonal pat on the shoulder.)

“Stop avoiding your responsibilities” will never be advice anyone wants to hear.

While the answers Henry finds are more mundane than he expected, he does get answers. He actually closes two missing person cases. But this mystery game doesn’t end with Henry — or the player — receiving any recognition for solving the mystery. Delilah is too unsettled about her culpability in Brian’s death to commend Henry for his investigative work. When Henry and Delilah are ordered to evacuate the burning Shoshone, Delilah bugs out on an earlier flight to avoid meeting him at all. On the radio, she tells him he should go be with his wife: “You gotta go see her.” Maybe he will; Henry and Delilah, on the other hand, will clearly never see each other again.

“Stop avoiding your responsibilities” will never be advice anyone wants to hear. And while it might be smart advice, it’s frustrating to hear it from Delilah, who, although funny and easy-going, is a complete flake. She doesn’t tell on Brian when she knows his safety could be at risk, she lies to the police about encountering the missing teenagers to avoid the hassle, and although it happens in a moment of high tension, she is a fire lookout who orders Henry to start a fire in the forest. It’s hard to say if Henry is as unsuited to his job, because he barely does it. His job is literally to sit in a chair and tell someone if he sees a fire, but, enabled by Delilah, he spends his office hours trying to scare teens and break into government facilities.

Which may well be the point: there’s always something more desirable than just sitting in a chair; there’s always something more desirable than providing full-time care for your wife who has Alzheimer’s. Henry might be a chronic procrastinator — leaves wife for job, leaves job for adventure — but everyone in Firewatch has something to do that they aren’t doing. Everyone’s avoiding what’s hard.

Some players admitted being taken aback by Firewatch’s it-is-what-it-is ending because they were anticipating a big twist. A lot of games and popular fiction that deal with a character denying his problems will do this. Something along the lines of Delilah, the lookout tower, and the Shoshone all being dreamy constructions in Henry’s head, coping mechanisms for an uncomfortable reality: like maybe he is the one with dementia, or smothered Julia with a pillow in her hospital room, and Delilah is a nurse and Brian Goodwin is a candy bar that fell out of a vending machine in the hallway.

But I like Firewatch’s more prosaic take: that running away from your problems isn’t just a psychological flight of fancy explored in a daydream or a mind palace, but a real thing you can do, and if you do it, there are consequences. Firewatch is a story about real people who take the easy way out and end up making a mess.

I saw one person wonder if Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 was an influence on Campo Santo, which I don’t know, but I see the comparison. (Although they’re not that similar — in Pynchon’s Firewatch, Henry would be perpetually stoned and named Zott Birdhouse, and he’d engage in elaborate and unusual sex with Delilah, a.k.a. Veronica Strontium. The number of puns, though, would be basically the same.) Both Firewatch and Lot 49 — in fact, much of Pynchon’s fiction — deal with the disappointment and frustration in trying to unravel conspiracies that seem very important, but in execution they’re almost opposites.

Conspiracies exist in Pynchon’s fiction, and they threaten to be grander and more profound than possibly conceivable, but his characters and readers are permitted only to glance at their margins. Pynchon’s bizarre conspiracies manage to encompass and connect kidnappings with drug rings with secret societies with thermodynamics with primal, atavistic chaos. Sometimes the conspiracies feel laughable and implausible, but when Pynchon’s characters dismiss them as such, is that maybe just one more way in which they inevitably fail to understand what it all means?

Pynchon’s characters deal in different ways with the madness: they shirk understanding, or they resolve to disbelieve, or they struggle to make familial bonds to hold against waves of apocalyptic entropy, or they are driven insane by crashing too hard against the unknowable and dissolve into the fabric of reality itself. That they all fail to comprehend the mysteries of the universe feels real; an acknowledgment that there are limits to human understanding. For as weird and goofy as Pynchon’s conspiracy fiction gets, there is authenticity as its heart.

The same authenticity is in Firewatch — a commitment to treat conspiracy realistically — though the execution is radically different. In Firewatch, because the conspiracy actually is so minor, Henry and Delilah are able to work through it, grasp its dimensions and identify the rational, boring answer to each of its questions.

There is no government experiment, there are no aliens, they’re not in Purgatory, and Delilah is exactly what she appeared to be. There is no conspiracy, only a sad man who probably killed his son. It’s so much smaller than what they thought. So it’s an anti-climax, but the fact that Henry deals with it and finds it to be an anti-climax is significant. It forms a corollary to Delilah’s message that Henry isn’t dealing with his problems. No, she says, he’s not dealing with his problems— and by the way, your problems aren’t always as bad as you think they are. Or as interesting, for that matter. Henry can deal with his problems; it’ll be tedious and stressful and nobody’s going to think he’s a hero for doing it, but it’s nowhere near as insurmountable as he thinks. There’s optimism there, in the ending, if you want to take it.

It’s advice that Delilah could well take herself — to say nothing of Ned Goodwin, holding himself in abject terror of human civilization — but I don’t get the sense from her parting with Henry that she will. My guess is that at the end of Firewatch, Ned has learned nothing and will not change, and Delilah has new embarrassments piled on top of old ones but will never turn to look back at them again.

And what does Henry do? Go see Julia? It kind of feels like it’s up to you — in the sense that it’s open to interpretation, not that it’s your choice to make as a player. You can express a preference, but Firewatch ends before you can commit Henry to anything. There’s something to it ending where it does, I think, to Firewatch decoupling the player from Henry where it does. You are with Henry only as long as he distracts himself from his actual life. He grew close to Delilah and will never see her again, and the same is true of you.

Contrary to what Firewatch says in its opening, you’re not Henry. Not really. Henry has his problems. They’re not yours. Henry has to face them on his own. Maybe you do too.

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