Firewatch, aka the best adventure game since 2016, sets the Switch on fire soon

Firewatch is coming to the Nintendo Switch sometime "Soon(TM)." Over two years ago now, Firewatch [9.5 out of 10] pretty much changed the atmosphere for adventure games. It starred Henry, Delilah, their walkie-talkies, and a whole lot of grown-up problems to sort out. It was at times lonely, at times magnificent, and altogether quietly thrilling to be out in the woods with a secretive-yet-frighteningly-open woman on the other end of the radio as campers and transients went about their business in a travel-poster-esque national park.

But Henry took on this job at a lookout tower during the dry season—like it or not—and those drunken skinny-dipping teenagers are making poor choices about shooting fireworks off at the height of fire season. They're playing their music too loud, too, grumble grumble. Couple that with a Dungeons & Dragons subplot, a wedding ring that Henry put put on and take off whenever he wants, and you've got a tinderbox plot ready to set itself off.

Developer Campo Santo is making tweaks to Firewatch's code on the Switch, like faster loading screens, and other low-level optimizations and tech clean up. But Campo Santo also wants to bring those fixes to all of Firewatch's other platforms, too: PC, PS4 (and 4 Pro), as well as Xbox (and One X).

Firewatch is coming to the Nintendo Switch!

When will it be out? All we can say is “soon!” Reengineering the sprawling meadows and towering trees of Firewatch’s wilderness to play perfectly on new hardware is no small engineering task. We’ve been hard at work stripping much of Firewatch’s tech down to the studs and rebuilding it to render the world more quickly, to stream and load faster, and to generally be more responsive. Nearly everyone in the Campo Santo office has a Nintendo Switch (and the rest want one). We know what a good Switch game feels like, and want to make sure Firewatch feels like one too.

Plus, we’re hoping to throw in a couple surprises just for the Switch release.

For more information about Firewatch’s release on Nintendo Switch, keep an eye on this blog and on the Firewatch Switch website (sign up there to receive release date information and other Firewatch news by email)!

And for our other players, take note: The optimizations we’re doing to Firewatch aren’t just for Switch. They’re for Firewatch’s future as well. For the many people out there who haven’t played Firewatch yet, as well as the millions of existing fans who may go back and revisit the game some day, we want the experience to be as good as it can be. We expect to bring the low-level optimizations and tech clean-up we’re doing for the Switch to all platforms eventually. That means if things go to plan, we’ll see performance improvements on PlayStation 4 (and 4 Pro), Xbox One (and One X), Mac and PC.

We’re lucky to be able to keep investing in and supporting a single player game that came out over two years ago, and we’re more proud of Firewatch than most things we’ve made in life. We want it to be found and enjoyed by as many people as possible. Thanks to you—and everyone, past, present, and future—who has played Firewatch for making that possible!