Firewatch Launching on Nintendo Switch on December 17th
The Nintendo Switch port of Firewatch finally has a launch date. It’s going to come out on Monday, December 17th; two weeks away as of writing this article. You’ll be able to pick it up in eShops in Europe, Australia, Japan, and the Americas. According to the developers, they’ve basically rebuilt the game from scratch for optimal performance on the new platform.
People that have been following Campo Santo, the developers of Firewatch, have known that the game is coming to the Switch since April. At the time, the company published a blog post promising that the port will be coming “soon.” Well, now we know when exactly that soon is going to be. As it turns out, Firewatch is coming to Nintendo Switch on December 17th, according to the Campo Santo Twitter. The tweet says that you’ll be able to pick the game up in eShops in Japan, the Americas, Australia, and Europe.
Now, one might wonder why it took so “long” to port Firewatch to the Switch. Well, the blog post linked above provides an explanation. It reads: “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.” There you have it. Campo Santo has all but rebuilt the game from the ground up, which, of course, takes up a lot of time.
If you don’t want to wait those two weeks to play Firewatch, you can play it on several platforms. Specifically, it’s available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, iOS, and Linux. Many have called the game a walking simulator, but I’d argue it’s much more. It’s quite an emotional journey, wrapped around a mystery that you have to solve. The superb visuals and voice acting further sell the whole thing. It’s definitely worth a spin.
