They aren't up on the hill in the first place. The biggest spoiler regarding Firewatch is that it actually plays things straight. This is a simple domestic tragedy that actually played out long before you arrived, with no need for lights in the sky or government spooks in the bushes. Paradoxically, to know all that is to ruin the game entirely, because the narrative is not all that's really going on here, I suspect. This is a game about plotting, and about the way that plotting can foul you up as a player. To me, Firewatch is all about the dangerous assumptions the player makes as they play - the writable way we approach readable games. We work through the text-adventure backstory sequence at the start and think: sick wife, childless - Oh man, what a burden this must be for Henry. What a terrible thing to happen to him! The girls down by the lake go missing. Poor Henry - are they trying to frame him? Or is it something worse? We go home and ponder Delilah's tower, bright in the distance. What is her deal? What is she hiding from Henry? Is she watching him? The answer that suggests itself - it's the answer that suggests itself at almost every stage - is: of course she is. Henry's special because he's the main character in a narrative video game. Everything that happens must, in some way, be happening to him. Another day, another sense of impending doom. This is the fallacy that makes Firewatch work, I think. It's the reason that its huge red herrings aren't really red herrings at all, but crucial elements that the developers need to trick you into maintaining your certainty that Henry is at the centre of it all. Those kids just went off and got in trouble somewhere else.
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