Arctic Awakening Review

Episodic Firewatch

Written by Dallas

Posted on: September 17th, 2025

Developed by Goldfire Studios

Published by Goldfire Studios

Released on September 18th, 2025

Reviewed on PC (also on PS5, Xbox Series X|S)

There’s nothing more important to me than a good story. I can usually overlook a lot of problems as long as the story delivers. I’m a big movie fanatic, so when a game is able to provide something on that level, it’s truly special. But on the other side, if a story fails to capture me, I’ll most likely drop off. Usually because games are much longer in comparison to something like a film (which I’ll sit through regardless of quality). Arctic Awakening has some shortcomings but got me by the end. It’s far from perfect, but it’s episodic nature kept me on the hook enough to push me through.

Alfie looking at me like I crashed the plane on purpose!

Right out the gate, you need to know that Arctic Awakening is a game broken up into an episodic format (think Life is Strange) but delivered to you all at once. So as you progress and reach the end of each episode, you’re given the choice to continue on or head back to the main menu and call it for the night. I have mixed feelings about this, as it both helps and hurts the game, just in different ways.

See you play as Kai, a former pilot of the Navy, out on a supply run with an old colleague named Donovan and your “therapy AI bot” Alfie, when things go wrong and your plane crash lands. But not before Donovan bails out while you try to save the plane. And so the story begins with you trying to survive, work through your past, and try to find and save your missing pal Donovan. But with any great mystery, none of this is so simple. Each episode will push you towards your goal, only to have you questioning things further. Episodically it works, leaving you with heightened endings that leave you wanting more and ready to push that “Next Episode” button as the credits roll. Unfortunately this format also leaves you with a lot of padding before hitting another big story beat, with the beginning episodes feeling like they drag on longer than they should.

It’s in these filler sections where a lot of the dialogue is exchanged and choices are made between you, Alfie and Donovan, while you walk to next section. I take no issue with chances for character development and letting the narrative build, but it gets to be quite boring just walking around. Granted you do have to watch your hunger and sanity meter, which you’re able to refill by scavenging food items on the ground and by doing breathing exercises at conveniently placed cairns throughout the level. But I never felt like I needed to do any of this, besides a couple of key moments in the entire playthrough. It ends up feeling like busy work and less of a mechanic.

At least I’ve got some pretty views being stranded in the middle of Alaska.

There are other gameplay sections, that deal with climbing, picking up certain items, and light puzzle solving but none of it is satisfying. You’re able to pickup and keep almost every item in your inventory, but other than the food it serves no real purpose. And the puzzles are mostly just having to find the right way to go or item to interact with next more so than solving something. I almost wish that the game just showed you what to do next (using waypoints and such) instead of giving vague objectives and figuring out what you need to interact with next. But this is just a personal gripe.

I felt this way more as time went on, because the only thing that mattered to me in end was the narrative. And sometimes being directionless left me spending more time away from continuing the actual story.

To quickly break things down, Episode 1-2 deal with a lot of setup and walking that make it drag. Episode 3 is probably the best in terms of pacing, 4 falters a bit, and 5 sticks the landing. Thankfully each episode is still relatively short, and allow you to complete one in a sitting as they average around the 2hr mark.

I never came across this map.

It probably would’ve been helpful…

I bring all of this up, because at the end of the day they hooked me, I wanted to push on, I wanted to see what happened next. I had issues with the characters at the start, but felt attached as we neared the end because of the time spent with them and the way I responded to them.

Now most of the choices made I felt were pretty similar, just with a mildly different way of saying the same thing. And choices I made in terms of moving through the environment didn’t seem to make a difference. For example, I could go left or right, went right and looped back around and so I had to go left. These sort of choices felt odd since it made you feel like it was important but ended up just being trivial. So don’t go in expecting a Telltale like experience. The choices here seem to just shape your story a bit with no major changes, with the only choice that seemed to matter was the end, but I’ll leave it at that.

Now since it is advertised that choices will affect your story, I wish the dev team would’ve taken it a step further to at least have a statistics page at the end of an episode or even the entire playthrough to show what choice I made in comparison to choices I didn’t make, because as it stands I don’t have any desire to go back and try for a different outcome.

In terms of performance, I had no issues playing at 4K 60FPS on my personal rig. I did have the occasional visual bug or glitch, but nothing that hindered my experience. And just a reminder that this was a review build and not final. I also received many updates during my review period as well in the lead up to the launch date.

Arctic Awakening has my recommendation with some caveats. If you’re into the walking sim genre, if you crave a great story, or a mystery to unravel, then pick it up. Because while I took issue with some of the gameplay mechanics, it didn’t detract from the main focus which was the story. I thoroughly enjoyed the thrill of seeing what was going to happen next and coming up with theories of my own. I personally pushed through one episode to end my night and it was lovely over the course of this past week.