Lost in the Work

Firewatch & Return of the Obra Dinn

Warning: this contains spoilers for both Firewatch and Return of the Obra Dinn

I assumed I had come here to die.

The forest seemed a fitting place for it, amidst the leaves and the quiet; the mountain’s embrace like a hollowed out coffin to rest and fade away in.

Empty days spent watching the horizon, fading from ocean hues to smokey storms of blood. An endless routine of eyes scouring the landscape for potential fire. Because out here in the untamed wilderness, fire was a scourge in equal parts terrible and beautiful.

It took a short time and a little guidance to acclimate to life as a fire lookout, purging all semblance of life before, away. But it worked in my favor, you see:

Because the person I love has Alzheimer’s,

And so, if anything, filling myself with the emptiness of the forest allowed me to let go of that fact, if only for a short while.

Each stroll into the wilderness had a tinge of finality to it, each step taken slowly shedding the burden that seeped forth. From the crumbling of love-forgotten; from failed attempts to fill space between that initial hint of recognition, and the endless gaze of empty recall that came after.

The burden of figuring out what was next was so unbearable; the helplessness so untenable; that I fled to the forest, to the wilderness instead.

I filled my day with empty tasks: chasing stray cans tumbling like pebbles down the hillside; reconstructing imaginary stories of people from the garbage and relics left behind; finding reasons to be paranoid, to mistrust the few people left.

All the while ignoring the question at hand, trying to escape the hard truth. That the person I loved was gone.

And that everything that had come afterward was just an attempt to escape that fact.

The sea spray lapped against the grain of the rowboat, the gentle ocean spray like tears in mourning. The Obra Dinn swayed alongside, a wooden mass grave, floating at sea in quiet solitude. The trade ship lay deserted, stranded amidst the waves and salt; her crew long dead aboard, a mystery aching to be revealed.

The East India Company wanted me here to determine damages liable to the families and heirs of those lost aboard.

I just wanted to know how they all died.

As I traversed the wooden husk, sifting through bones and tatters of one of the corpses, there was a morbid fascination, an obsession for truth, that clawed at my skin; that needed to know.

In that moment of desperation, I drew forth a cursed pocket watch, humming and jittering in the presence of death. Before my very eyes, it reconstructed bones and time alike. In the corpse’s place: a vignette made flesh and anguish; that crew-member’s final moments and the presence of more death; of further corpses to reconstruct and relive.

Like a cascading nesting doll, I traversed space and time, opening each capsule of events-transpired through the lens of a singular death. Like a car crash in slow motion, I bore witness to the crew’s demise in reverse; corpse by corpse, death by death, unveiling the truth, however grotesque, however disheartening.

There was a twistedness to it, reveling as the list of unaccounted-for grew smaller and smaller: scratching names off the crew manifest and slowly approaching the truth; even as the crew was falling apart amidst violence and desperation.

But the hunger for understanding pushed me ever onward.

These ways we work: looking for escape; feeding an obsession for truth, for completeness; channeling these unsavory needs into productivity, into action. When does it come time to ask what the cost is to ourselves?

Only when the flames came, did the time for running away seem to draw to a close.

The blood red smoke of the evening sky descended upon the valley, bringing ash and dust and embers and flames.

My world, my work, my escape, was burning around me, and it seemed the world itself had forced my hand. A need to return: to face the unknown of what comes next when your lover has forgotten your face; came calling.

But even in the end, despite knowing the right answer, I wanted nothing else but to keep running, to delay, for just a little while longer...

Safely at home, the hearth crackling aside the desk: a sigh of resignation; in the end, the truth could only be drawn out so far.

Crew fully accounted-for as far as the pocketwatch and reason could attest to, there was a sense of emptiness and hesitation that lingered.

What if I was wrong, with the limits of the pocketwatch leading me astray? Was the truth I settled on good enough?

Of course not.
But there were no other corpses to defile, and all leads had run their course.

It would be up to me to come to terms with that.

Even in the end, when there’s no other choice but to change and move on, we linger. The clawing need to escape still; the dissatisfaction of uncertainty; the practice of channeling our worst parts toward the whims of productivity day in and day out maintains a hold over us.

Somewhere along the way, or perhaps, right at that point of inflection; when the very thing that poisons our brains allows us to eat well; it may be in our best interest to ask:

Is what makes me productive, keeping me from getting better?

~

Maybe.

These twisted delights have twisted ends!

Hey! Thanks for reading, and leave some claps or follow if you enjoyed what I wrote. Or, if you’re feeling spicy, you could roast me for grammatical, logical, or totally subjective perceived errors… I’m always looking for feedback!

I absolutely love Firewatch and Return of the Obra Dinn, and so, I wanted to use the thematic framing around the self-inserted main characters in these games as a larger framework for understanding work, productivity, and a recognition of how one might go about sacrificing themselves at the altar of being “better” at their job.

Hopefully this doesn’t reflect poorly on these games, because this thematic framing provides a interesting backdrop for what makes these games so interesting. Both of these are beautiful, masterful works that are fantastic examples of “shorter-form” gaming that is worth experiencing for yourself if you have the opportunity.

Firewatch by Campo Santo @ firewatchgame.com
Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope @ obradinn.com