SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers for Firewatch follows.

Recently, while browsing video games, I noticed a game called Firewatch was on sale. I’m not sure what drew me to it, but I did a little research on the game. The reviews were largely glowing (including some who considered it one of the best games of the year), and so, completely on a whim, I decided to give it a try.

I’m incredibly glad that I did.

Even though I found the ending completely disappointing.

Even though I’m not quite sure I had fun playing the game.

In fact, I’m not even sure it’s fair to call it a game.

Is it a game?

This post isn’t intended to be a review of the game, but considering what I said above, I feel some explanation is warranted. Before I start, though, it’s worth addressing the controversy around Firewatch (and its developer, Campo Santo). I had no idea any of the controversy surrounding the developer before I purchased the game or while I was playing it, and I frankly have little interest in diving into it or discussing any of it in this post. As far as I’m concerned, this is all about a game and how it made me feel and nothing to do with any cultural or political statements. I only bring it up in case anybody looks into the metacritic user reviews (or something similar) and wonders what is going on.

But before I can talk about how the game made me feel, I want to talk about whether or not it’s a game at all. It turns out that Firewatch is in the genre of games that are sometimes called “Walking Simulations” (a term sometimes used with disdain and sometimes not). In a nut-shell, walking simulations are games that are lacking in any traditional aspects of actual gameplay. Players walk around the world while experiencing things. Hence the term, “Walking Simulation”.

In Firewatch, the player controls the main character, Henry, as he roams around performing mundane tasks that are often accomplished simply by pushing a single button. There are no puzzles. There are no enemies to defeat. There is no way to die. There’s no score, no way to do better or worse. On the Xbox, the majority of achievements are earned simply from playing through the game. And while the game will occasionally present choices to the player, none of them appear to have any lasting impact at all beyond a changed line of dialogue or two. In many ways, it is virtually indistinguishable from watching a movie. At a high level, all the player can really control is how fast to experience the story and how much chatter is involved during the course of it. Player control is basically reduced to the fast forward and mute buttons on a DVD remote1Am I dating myself too much with that reference?.

Because I like a good story in my video games, I largely didn’t have a problem with this, although I do wish the developers embraced this fully and hadn’t included so many mundanely traditional game elements. I wasted far too much time searching for supply caches, hoarding pine cones and cleaning up empty beer cans in the vain hope any of it would matter. Additionally, what tiny amount of gameplay Firewatch has is incredibly clunky and overly frustrating. Firewatch eschews the normal useful mini-map that many games use and instead forces the player to use a less functional combination of an actual in-game map and compass (see image to the left). Using them involves an awkward combination of button presses and is virtually impossible to do while still moving. I suppose it’s somewhat realistic and helps keep players in the world, but I found it incredibly annoying. More times than I can count, I would be walking for a minute or two in one direction before checking my map to find that I had a missed my turn. After turning around and backtracking, more often than not I would end up overshooting the turn yet again. Having to stop moving every 10 seconds or so to re-check my map got old really fast.

But I digress. Gameplay issues aside, do I consider Firewatch to be a game?

Barely. And if somebody wanted to argue the opposite side I wouldn’t disagree with them.

I think there’s something to be said about how it being a game makes it more than the sum of its parts. If the gameplay elements were removed and Firewatch was turned into a motion picture, I believe it would make a below-average movie. But whether it’s the first person perspective, or the illusion of choice, or even just the simple fact that we the player are controlling the main character (even if we ultimately have no control over what happens), there’s something about Firewatch that really resonated with me emotionally. Even though it’s incredibly short (I beat it in around 4-5 hours despite getting lost a lot due to the aforementioned clunky gameplay), the game left a pretty lasting impact on me. The night that I started playing it, I had an extremely vivid dream (clearly inspired by the game) of being in a forest and encountering an out of control forest fire. The night that I beat it, I had trouble falling asleep because my mind was racing trying to process the ending and the conflicting emotions that I had about it.

Interestingly, the game I played right before Firewatch was the 2017 version of Prey. That game tried really hard (mostly successfully) to create a tense atmosphere with lots of jump scares where the threat of death was constant. And yet, no moment in Prey caused as much heart pounding terror and dread as the scene in Firewatch where Delilah comments about watching you in your tower…. when you’re not there. I even started getting paranoid when scaling steep hills on a rope since I convinced myself there was somebody out there waiting to cut the rope or ambush me at the top. Somehow the space station full of shape-shifting aliens of Prey couldn’t match that level of fear.

In short, I was amazed by the strong emotional reactions that the game was able to evoke in me, and especially with how deeply I found myself caring for the characters despite practically never seeing any of their faces.

Julia

My emotional attachment started off extremely early in the game, when playing the “Choose Your Own Adventure” section detailing Henry’s life with Julia. I typically play role playing games as the goodiest of goody-two-shoes. I’m the Lawful Good Paladin. The Paragon Shepard. So when I was presented with the choice on how to deal with Julia wanting to move across country for her dream job even though Henry didn’t want to move, I immediately knew what to do. I would obviously give in and move across the country. So imagine my surprise and disappointment when I was presented with two equally inconsiderate choices. I could either (A) try to convince her to turn the job down or (B) make her travel back and forth on her time off. I legitimately paused in shock when I first encountered the choices, unsure as to how to proceed. This was my first hint that Firewatch was going to be a different type of game when it came to player choice. It was by far not the last.

Immediately after, the game didn’t even bother providing choices between two bad life decisions. I felt helpless and out of control as Henry started going out to drink in the evenings instead of staying home to take care of Julia. This was not the type of responsibility shirking character I was used to or comfortable playing as. My characters take time out from saving the world to save kittens out of trees or hunt down lost books. By the time we learn that her parents had taken her to Australia, there was almost a sense of relief that at least Henry had probably hit rock bottom.

Delilah

The lack of player control is less obvious with Delilah, but the signs are still there. Early on, when asking Henry to describe himself, she goes a bit too far and Henry becomes apprehensive. She makes it clear that no matter what the player thinks of her drawing him, she’s going to do it anyway.

It doesn’t get any better from there. When I said she should tell the truth about the teenagers’ disappearance, she initially agreed with me that it was the best idea, but then completely disregarded what I said and lied about them anyway. She asked me to name the fire, and then laughed off my suggestion and named it herself.

Most damning? At the end when Henry asks her to wait for him, she leaves without him.

That’s when it finally hit home to me: Firewatch had flipped the script on romantic NPCs (non-player characters) in video games.

Let me back up a bit. I mentioned before how I like to play the white knight type of characters in games. Even after the brutal beginning where Henry basically abandoned Julia, I still figured the game would involve Henry learning to be a better person and eventually reuniting with Julia at the end. To that extent, I largely tried to ignore the obvious flirting from Delilah early in the game. I was determined that my Henry was going to stay loyal to his wife, even if his track record so far was a little lacking.

The more the game went on, though, the harder it got to ignore the licentious interactions between Henry and Delilah. Firewatch is basically all about the relationship between Henry and Delilah. Delilah is the only person the player interacts with (outside of two teenage girls Henry yells at from a distance and some written notes from a few other people). And if you’re at all friendly with her, Delilah comes on very strong. By the time the aforementioned scene about naming the fire happens, she talks about wishing she was over there so that you two could do unspeakable things (literally, she alludes to something and the scene ends before she explicitly lays it out). This is even after she acknowledges that Henry is “not really available”.

At that point I thought that maybe I had the point of the game wrong. Maybe the story wasn’t about Henry learning how to cope with Julia’s illness and instead was about him finding companionship with a similarly flawed individual. It helps that the two are forced closer together from that point forward by the accelerating paranoia of the plot.

So I allowed Henry to start falling for Delilah, and that just made it all the more crushing when she abandoned him at the end.

Which brings me back to my comment about Firewatch flipping the script on romantic NPCs. In all previous games I’ve played where there are NPCs who act as potential romantic interests for the player, none of them have done nearly as good a job as Firewatch in making those NPCs appear to possess agency: the free will to make their own decisions. If Commander Shepard pursues Liara, then her acceptance of his advances is a foregone conclusion. Ditto if Ethan pursues Madison or if the Warden pursues Morrigan or any number of other examples. Sure, the player can screw up the ensuing mini-game and miss out on the romantic connection, but outright brutal rejection no matter what the player does, especially on the heels of such obvious flirting like Delilah does throughout the game, is incredibly rare.

Normally, when a developer puts so much time and effort into building up a potential romantic relationship, it’s in service of some sort of satisfying pay-off or plot advancement. Oftentimes it means the guy getting the girl (and maybe even living happily ever after). Sometimes it’s a sadder conclusion. To have a romantic subplot end in such a sudden and unsatisfying way, and to have it coincide with the end of the game itself, is something I had never experienced before.

Delilah isn’t just some prize to be won if the player puts in the requisite time and effort to win her over. She comes across as her own person with her own (changing) wants and desires. She seems interested in Henry at the start, but something changes by the end and there’s nothing the player can do about it. Delilah is the one in control. Henry is just along for the ride.

In fact, sometimes I felt like I had so little control as Henry that I did wonder if the game was setting me up for a “Would you kindly” type of plot twist. I was keenly aware that Delilah seemed to be calling all of the shots, both in terms of sending Henry on fetch quests by virtue of being his boss, and in terms of initiating and being in control of whatever relationship (romantic or platonic) existed between the two.

The thing is, all of the warning signs were there that Delilah was a flawed character who might be commitment-phobic. She lies multiple times over the course of the game, including about important things like the missing teens and Brian’s presence. Even if her relationship with Javier is taken at face value, she was somebody who shied away from being with her boyfriend in his time of need and when he broke up with her, she lied to everybody about it and ran away. She seems to have a drinking problem.

In fact, despite it being incredibly disappointing from an emotional perspective and surprising from a game perspective, Delilah essentially getting scared and running away from the idea of a serious commitment with Henry makes total sense from a character perspective.

All of this is why, despite never seeing her or even ultimately spending much time with her, Delilah feels like one of the most realistic depictions of an actual human being that I’ve experienced in a video game. She’s imperfect and flawed in the same way that real humans are. She’s not a prize to be won or a device to advance the plot or an NPC to help the main character. It’s almost as if somebody forgot to tell her that she isn’t the main character and that Firewatch isn’t her story.

Or maybe it is.