Jack Kerouac spent 63 days as a fire lookout in the summer of 1956, and he was bored out of his mind. Unless you’re constitutionally disposed to the solitude and mild anxiety of endlessly surveying a silent landscape for wisps of smoke, it’s probably not the job for you. But it might be the entertainment for you. A new indie videogame studio, Campo Santo, has made fire-watching the premise of its debut title, Firewatch—and it looks riveting.
But true to the spirit of the job, we really have no idea what in blazes is going to happen.
Here’s what little we do know: In the game, which comes out today, you play as Henry, a lost soul who signs up to scout for flames in the Wyoming wilderness. Out on watch, your only point of contact is Delilah, a supervisor you communicate with over a handheld radio; it’s a relationship that gets more mysterious as time goes on. Other than that, the team behind Firewatch—which includes Campo Santo founders Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman (Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead)—has kept its collective mouth shut. Even the 17-minute demo served mostly as a gameplay tutorial, revealing little about how the story might unfold.
As graphic designer Olly Moss and environment artist Jane Ng explain over a conference call (Moss is based in the UK, while Ng works out of Campo Santo’s San Francisco office), the secrecy is all about preserving a feeling of mystery and discomfort. Moss likens it to spoilers in trailers—if you know there’s a massive car chase in the movie you’re watching, you’ll anticipate that moment, which kills the element of surprise.
“For a narrative game, that is the death of a good experience,” Moss says.
“And it is a quiet game,” Ng adds about Firewatch. “It’s not about a spaceship exploding or saving the world. A lot of the dramatic moments will only stay dramatic if you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
