Firewatch is a game about life. It’s a meditation on the inescapable human experience of avoiding the hardships of your life because to confront them is to confront yourself. It’s a story about the lie of a life without worry, because there will always be something unfinished in your life, picking at your brain and burrowing into your thoughts to lie dormant until your inevitable breaking point.

It explores these ideas through its two protagonists, Henry and Delilah, as they get to know one another during a summer spent working at a national park. Henry is one of a few volunteer fire lookouts in the area, while Delilah is responsible for coordinating him and his colleagues, all of whom barring Henry go unnamed and unvoiced because presumably they had a boring, uneventful time while the story of our main duo unravels before them. The pair never meet in person, only ever speaking over their radios, which is where most of the game’s interactivity resides. The player can choose from a number of dialogue options in any given conversation and decide how they would like to play the character of Henry, what to reveal about his past, how open to be about his feelings towards Delilah, and so on. There are also a huge number of optional observations Henry can communicate to Delilah regarding the different sights and sounds of the Wyoming wilderness, which plays stage to some wonderfully funny and sweet naturalistic dialogue between them. Both Henry and Delilah are deeply, unmistakably human. They have their fair share of flaws, but also many qualities, and the way they riff on each other’s tunes as their relationship blossoms over the course of the game is beautiful to behold, and it’s all baked into the mechanics of the game so naturally.

Simplicity is definitely part of Firewatch’s design ethos. The visuals are somewhat simplistic but nonetheless gorgeous to behold. You won’t see anything like the photorealism of many modern games but you absolutely will enjoy a beautiful sunset, a skyline caked in deep purples and greens, a night filled with myriad shining stars you could only enjoy in a place hundreds of miles removed from civilisation. The gameplay is similarly striaghtforward, asking only for single button presses, utilising as little of the controller as possible. Even the opening sequence, wherein the player decides the details of Henry’s backstory exists entirely as text, synced to Chris Remo’s excellent soundtrack. That backstory, incidentally, is primarily concerned with Henry’s relationship with his wife, Julia.

In broad strokes, the couple have their lives sent into a spiral as Julia is suddenly diagnosed with early onset dementia at the age of 41. The players reads about the gradual deterioration of this once happy marriage as Julia begins to lose herself, and Henry feels an ever-strengthening compulsion to escape the hand he’s been dealt, even if feeling that way makes him feel awful. He takes the fire lookout job as an excuse to avoid the despair of watching the woman he loved disappear from his life before his eyes. Delilah is sympathetic to Henry’s situation, and will reassure him if the player decides to express regret for Henry’s taking of this job.

However, Firewatch makes it clear that Delilah is just as flawed and victim to bias as Henry and the player. She too is, in her own way, using this job as a way to avoid responsibilities in her own life. She explains at one point that what motivated her to take this job in the first place was heartbreak. The man she was dating suddenly broke up with her without much reason, and rather than confronting that, she escaped to the wilds, isolating herself from almost every person in her life. She values her personal comfort over everything, and anything that might threaten that is avoided as often as possible, be it a lookout bringing his child to the summer job with him despite it being very illegal, or reporting to the police her and Henry’s involvement in the possible disappearance of two teenagers.

But as the game’s plot unfolds, it becomes clear that this temporary comfort begets potential disaster later down the line. Delilah gives the cops false info, then the pair find about their conversations have been written down and recorded by a mysterious entity somewhere nearby. By not reporting the child present at this job despite knowing the dangers of not doing so, that kid ends up falling to his death in a cave. By ignoring the situation with his wife, Henry ends up embroiled in a possible conspiracy where he almost dies a number of times, and all the while he is haunted by dreams of speaking to his wife like things are normal. No matter how much he ignores it, he is incapable of escaping the past. Nobody ever is.

The message of the game is clear as day by its conclusion. There was no grand conspiracy, and Henry and Delilah are left no more significant in the grand scheme of life as they were at the start of the summer. Henry yearns for a life where he is the main character – where he’s at the heart of something bigger than himself – so even if the situation he’s in is scary and sometimes threatens to be deadly, it will always be preferable to the devastating state of reality. A knock over the head and a tumble down a ravine is quicker and easier than witnessing your closest loved one break away from you, one tiny piece at a time. By the end, Henry is confirmed with the truth that no matter what he chooses to do – whether he visits his wife or decides to move one – he cannot exist in this limbo anymore. He must make a choice. He must free himself from the prison of his own making.

I remember playing Firewatch back in 2016 and feeling a little underwhelmed by the end. My issue wasn’t that there was no conspiracy, but rather that the game seems to just… end. There’s no deceleration of a lesson learned, nor is there an assurance of a future set in stone where once there was none. The player solves the mystery, then meanders their way to the conclusion. I understood what it was going for well enough, even as a dumbass 16 year old with limited media literacy skills, but it all felt a bit pointless in the moment. The disappointment was the point; all of it lead Henry right back to the uncomfortable truth that he must confront.

I then began to consider Firewatch as a part of my life. Video games are a form of escapism for me; a way to avoid thinking about the shittier parts of my existence by allowing myself to get lost in another world for a while. Indeed, this was my second playthrough of Firewatch, and what inspired it was a yearning to return to the orienteering mechanics of the game. I really like the feeling of getting a bit lost in the woods and using landmarks and signposts to find my way back to the path, and Firewatch captures that experience perfectly. I work a full time job that often leaves me exhausted with not a lot of free time to take my mind off that, so games like Firewatch operate as a method of filling a void by stimulating my brain a bit before returning to the grindstone, so to speak. Using video games as escapism is by no means unique to me. In fact, I imagine it’s the main reason anyone plays games at all.

As such, I’m confident that Campo Santo, the developers of Firewatch, are keenly aware of this too. Therefore, what does it mean for a game about the dangers of escapism to also function as a form of escapism? Is it a contradiction, or is the game making the sincere point that you, the player, should not be playing it until you have your house in order? Well, I say no to both of these interpretations, because Firewatch is about something else too. It communicates this message wordlessly, through its mechanics, in such a way that permeates throughout its entire playthrough. Yes, Firewatch is a game about time wasted, but its also a game about time spent.

From the beginning, Firewatch tells the story of Henry and Julia not by simply explaining it, but also by allowing the player to choose the minute details by which that story is told. The player chooses Henry’s first pickup line, which dog the couple adopts, whether or not he’s keen to have kids… none of these moments are especially important to the game itself – they don’t affect the events of the story to come – but instead it posits that what makes those moments special is the little things. The game even narrates its opening in a 2nd-person perspective, imploring the player to involve themselves in this life. They, the choices they make, and the experiences they have, are as such a part of this story as Henry.

Once you start playing the game proper, these little choices, these moments of optional joy, persist, not just in dialogue but everywhere else as well. My Henry adopted a turtle, named it Shelly Duvall, then set her free. He picked up all his books on the night someone broke into his tower and carefully placed them back on the bookshelf before going to sleep. He kept his wedding ring off his finger for almost the entire summer, but couldn’t bring himself to leave it behind right at the end. Henry is an individual with his own unique experiences, but my Henry will be decidedly different to your Henry, or any other Henry that exists.

That’s the true meaning of Firewatch to me. Avoiding your problems is wrong and can only only make you suffer more, but the experiences you have in between those problems and their solutions are no less valuable. These beautiful little beats can inform your life in so many wonderful ways. Everything that happens in your life is important, because it all culminates into what makes you you. It’s always worth fixing what’s broken in your life, but there’s no shame in taking the long way around to that. No individual experience is necessary, but experiencing anything at all is essential.

I have to be awake in about five hours for an early start tomorrow, but I’m nonetheless happy I stayed up writing this. I might regret this by tomorrow when I’m falling asleep on the bus into work, but it all means something, so it’s okay. I’m going to sleep now.