Just grabbed it tonight and beat it in about 3 hours. Two major motivators for picking it up was some of the positive talk from some Giant Bomb staffers on their Game of the Year podcasts, and the weekend sale -- almost picked it up during the winter sale and then started to feel a bit of regret about not grabbing it, so pretty grateful for the weekend sale again.
I enjoyed it for the most part.
However, I immediately began to think back to things I heard said about the game's narrative and I'm not sure why it doesn't resonate with me as much.
A few personal points about myself before I proceed:
I've been single my entire life. I got rejected a couple of times in high school and once in college, suffered some depression, and at some point in my life kind of just decided I am going to rough it alone -- classic "forever aloner," I guess, though I don't think I really carry the desperate attention-seeking chip-on-my-shoulder about it as seems to be the case with genuinely despairing lonely people. I don't have a point of reference for the difficulties of being in a relationship, and instead have a different set of challenges to take on. I do most things by myself. In fact, some coworkers found me eating by myself at a restaurant and they came to me at work a few days after and asked if I was okay, and expressed that they thought it was super weird. For me, that didn't feel super weird -- it happens all the time. I think a truer "forever aloner" type has a point of reference and is maybe seeking to find the comforts of a relationship again, but again, I guess I wouldn't know for sure.
That said, I see this game get talked up all the time as sort of a game about loneliness, but I think it's a game about loneliness from the perspective of loneliness being abnormal in the person's life. For me, it's perfectly normal.
From the very get-go, at the beginning when you're selecting the various little texts that define Henry and Julia's earlier life, I found myself kind of picking a path that I felt gave Julia space to be her own person, and implicitly by extension, gave Henry that freedom too. I tried my best to get as close to that as possible. Throughout the actual interactions with Delilah, I responded to her amicably but never really in a way that suggested romance -- despite the opportunity to kindle a relationship presented through the Firewatch job, I still imagined in my head that if I were Henry, I'd still be loyal to Julia really without question -- it felt like despite the illness creating a clear rift in their ability to communicate and interact with one another, I felt that myself in Henry's shoes would've still come to appreciate the story he was able to share with his wife, and that the firewatch assignment was really just him being able to take the same type of self-serving break that he maybe already had the privileges to experience on a regular basis even before Julia was ill. I was passive about her career far away -- again, space for both of them -- I was as passive as possible about her late return home drunk one night -- space -- etc... Firewatch assignment was just the same space Henry would've always had, and he took it under the notion that Julia would've granted him that space anyway, and it was always his intention to return by her side.
So yeah, wasn't too frustrated with Delilah at the end. My immediate response when she suggested that she was going to leave as I was making my way to her tower was "go." The thought in the back of my head was "I'm grateful for this time we shared together as friends, I'm sorry you had to learn this tragedy, I wish you well." And when she was like "Go back to Julia," I was like, "that was the plan all along, thanks."
So yeah, good game. I didn't feel hollow, empty, or let down by the ending or anything at all... I just didn't perhaps feel like "best ending ever because it's so flat and normal despite the romantic tension."
