With Firewatch, Campo Santo tries to solve the issues of "walking simulators" where players arrive in an empty space, way after the game's story took place. Here, the player is interacting in real-time with another non-playable character far away, through his walkie-talkie and multiple dialog options. Problems:
1. We still have the impression that the game's action happens disconnected from us, and that the systems put in place to advance and interact with the world are poor. Maybe the story hasn't already taken place, you don't just roam around an environment while audio logs activate, but it still feels disjointed through time and space. The abrupt cuts, long loading screens and very shorts scenes destroy the game's supposed "immersion" and, most importantly, its rhythm. The game's environment is - much like many of its contemporaries - a beautiful but artificial and contrived mess. It's not enough to move your game outside, in a wide open space, only for this space to be just as empty, cumbersome and claustrophobic as the impossible mansion of Gone Home.
2. The character's writing is mediocre throughout, and now impossible to ignore, since one of the only systems in the game is based on the interaction between Henry (the player) and his superior Delilah. It is a script too preoccupied with filling empty silences, with trying too hard to be funny and endearing, much like every bad Sundance flick described as "honest" despite their flagrant lack of credibility. It comes to a point where one doesn't want to participate to conversations in the game because they're so hollow and awkward.
3. It's hard to make a game about human emotions without meeting a single human in said game. The only human characters Henry actually "meets" in the entire game are the silhouettes of two drunk, stupid naked girls - that's some great human interaction for you. Firewatch wants to share with us the feeling of isolation one can sink into following grief - because of the sickness of a wife or the death of a child, and yet the game never bothers to shows us that grief. It describes it, though those first minutes similar to a text adventure version of the intro montage of Pixar's Up, but never does it actually show us Henry's sadness, what he's lost and left behind. In fact he seems more upset about running away to the forests of Wyoming than his wife's condition. More importantly, when everything is revealed to us about the true events of the game, specially the fate of the previous lookout and his son, questions of grief and compassion are thrown out the window - Ned has no sympathy for his dead kid, Delilah has no sympathy for a father who's lost his son. For Firewatch, there are good griefs and there are bad griefs, there are good guys and there are cowards. No need to distinguish the two, or to connect them for that matter. Why such an narrative-driven game would not explore this subject and instead choose to waste its time with a mystery of missing people and government conspiracies that amounts to nothing? I do not know.
One day, people will need to understand that the problem with walking simulators is not that they're not games, it's that they're bad games interacting with bad stories.