This is probably the most beautiful game I've ever played. Both in scenery and story.

I love how you walk around in the woods, just exploring and looking at everything. There's no "set path", you're free to wonder around even if you have some direction. I love how you grow this relationship with Delilah even though you don't see her. Hell, at one point I felt like I wanted to spend long nights drinking tequila with her.

I don't wanna spoil the game too much, but let's just say I liked it's simpleness. Not everything in life is a complicated mystery. I totally recommend this for everyone, no matter what kind of games you like or don't like. Tbh I would even recommend this game to people who usually don't play them.

Far more incisive than I remembered it being back upon release in 2016. Like most at the time I found myself disappointed in the game's narrative development leaning more towards genre trappings and red herrings as it went along rather than the central relationship between Henry and Delilah. This time around I found a lot more poignance in the game's eventual veering from the prickly and morally gray dynamic between them and into more eerie, unsettling waters that it ends up in with its conspiracies and figures in the dark. Both sides of this game deliberately reflect one another thematically but the latter half manifests this trickling of tortured interiors into a seedy reality and throws it back onto our protagonists for them to parse and exercise collective paranoia (footsteps, rustling leaves, and a distant but encroaching forest fire only add to this effect for the player). There's something to say about the consistent voyeuristic gaze the player adopts as we peer and engage with the insularly designed tedium of Henry's guilt and subsequent grief transposed into the vast forest in which we explore. We never see Julia, his wife who struggles with early onset Alzheimer's, nor even Delilah, who he shares a long distance friendship that increasingly skirts the line between clever banter and explicit flirtation. As the player controlling Henry, we are as plunged into the unknown as he is; left to fill in the dotted lines with whatever fantasy we can conjure and how little is actually in our control by the end. The game's treatment of this is accessible and charming for a while but anyone willing to break down the story's elements will find the forced proximity between Henry and Delilah to be just as sadly vacuous as the unnerving 'mystery' that ends up overtaking the game's second half; in itself a concealed study of how grief exacerbates our avoidant tendencies. So much of this game's haunting effect is not about what's seen in front of us- but what is heard, what is implied, and in some ways what is imagined. Occasionally cringy quips and snarky self-congratulatory dialogue aside there is a confounding quality to this that's stuck with me all these years and I expect it to for a couple more.

Firewatch probably made me feel the most immersed in a story I've ever been, as far back as I can remember. I felt feelings of joy, surprise, sadness, and so much tension. Despite being a walking simulator I couldn't stop peeking over my shoulders because of how tense everything was. Although the story itself is full of plot holes and obscure character motivations (as I discovered after beating the game and reading some discussions), the way the story is told makes you really immersed. The dialogue in this game (most of which you control for your character) feels really natural and genuine, and really makes you connect with the characters.

As for the gameplay itself, it's as complex as walking simulators go, but at least the game allows you to run.

One thing that I absolutely hated was on the technical side: the frequent fps drops. Every time some terrain would load in the distance, I would lose anywhere from 10-50 fps for a split second, so be warned if that kind of thing is a turn-off for you.

I really enjoyed my time with Firewatch, but due to its short nature and really impactful story, it's probably a game that I would never play again.