Like an idiot, I've only just got around to watching that Firewatch trailer and, holy wow, everyone was right. However, a recent livestream from developer supergroup Campo Santo managed to improve on that by showing twenty-odd minutes of in-game footage. Probably don't watch the following video if you want to go in completely cold, but if you're on the fence or if you think last week's trailer was maybe a bit serious, know that Firewatch is a lot funnier in-game, at least in this early segment of the "first-person mystery". There's some terrific writing/characterisation in evidence here too: after only a short time, I feel I know Henry and Delilah pretty well as characters, and there's a great sense of chemistry between the two leads.
The archive of the Twitch stream, below, gets started at around the 2 mins 30 mark, but it's a few more minutes after that before the action starts. The segment shown appears to be the same one displayed at PAX the other week, but I doubt this take plays out exactly the same. I love that you can use the radio to call in about so many objects in the game world, particularly when the responses are so witty and well-delivered.
Firewatch is set for release next year. Here's a bit of it in action:
Watch live video from camposanto on Twitch
Ta, RPS .
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.