The story of Firewatch is odd. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it, but my gut feeling is that it suffers from trying to be two things, or trying to frame itself as one thing when really it's another. Of course I don't know what the developers were thinking when they made it, but I get the feeling they wanted to tell an entirely mundane and realistic story, but were afraid (perhaps rightfully so) that it would sound boring as hell to a large swath of the "gamer" demographic, so they spiced it up a bit. And, you know, hey. Not a bad idea from the point of view of trying to make a buck, and games ain't cheap. But I'm not sure it pays off artistically. Firewatch is basically the story of a lonely sad dude trying to escape his problems in the woods—and imo that's all it needed to be, gamers get rekt. But because the creators lacked confidence in that story, or felt it was insufficiently grabby, or whatever, Firewatch ends up being something weirder than that, and not in a super good way, I fear—but, you know what, at the end of the day, tree prety