Firewatch's map isn't the biggest among the new open world games, by a long shot, but it manages to conceal that fact with its striking, stylized natural beauty and the fact you must use an honest-to-gosh map and compass to navigate. Conor Kearney, video gaming's nature-walker extraordinaire, set out to traverse it all at once yesterday.
Ordinarily we'd show the time-lapse video for this, but as the full walk is just 14 minutes, it makes more sense to show the whole thing. Incidentally, this is about as long as it took Kearney to walk across Grand Theft Auto 3's map (14 minutes, 20 seconds). That's not too bad! It might not be as large because the route isn't a straight line (and some obstacles have to be scaled and descended) but that's a respectable hike for Firewatch, which just launched on Tuesday.
Kearney has a bunch more video game walks on his YouTube channel, with Just Cause 3 coming in at a whomping 8 hours and 40 minutes, nearly double of the second-place holder, which is Just Cause 2, nearly double the walking time of Grand Theft Auto 5 in third person.
And for more on Firewatch — which will actually print and physically mail you the pictures you take — see Polygon's review. We scored Firewatch an 8.5, calling it "the video game equivalent of a page-turner."
