Firewatch, the recently-announced first game from developer Campo Santo, is refreshing. That’s the word I keep coming back to when I think back to the three hours I spent with the team a few weeks ago, hearing them talking about inspirations and goals, seeing prototypes and concept art. We told you about the talented crew Campo Santo when Firewatch was announced last week, but now we're going to dive much deeper into the actual game.

Firewatch is refreshing because of the new ground it’s exploring and the way it respects the player’s intelligence and commitment. Set in the lush Wyoming wilderness in 1989, a year after massive fires claimed the lives of dozens, Firewatch presents a first-person exploratory adventure game with a heavy emphasis on narrative and dialogue, all presented through the colorful and stylish abstraction of artist Olly Moss.

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You play as Henry, a park ranger who sits perched atop his watchtower and views the beauty of the world from this lonely, yet safe vantage point. His only point of contact is his boss Delilah, who resides in another tower off near the horizon. As with any good story, something happens that compels Henry to climb down from his pearch and begin exploring the dense wilderness around him, and that’s where the game begins.

From everything the team told and showed me, Firewatch sounds like a marriage of the original BioShock and Metroid Prime, minus the combat but doubling down on the narrative, dialogue, and environmental storytelling. Campo Santo co-founder Sean Vanaman expressed his admiration for 2007's journey into Rapture, sharing, “The first BioShock still stands out to us...I’ll never forget hearing Atlas in my ear for the first time, and then seeing him for half a second near the sub...but at the same time, I always wanted to be able to respond to him. But I never could.”

Campo Santo wants to fix that with Firewatch. At any point, the player can pull up their walkie talkie and enter a dialogue with Delilah. Stumble across an abandoned campsite? See what she thinks about it. Find something terrifying in the wilds? Talk to her, and maybe she can calm you down. Campo wants Firewatch to feature real conversations, and ultimately have the player build a real relationship with Delilah. Over the course of the game, you’ll learn to inhabit Henry and evolve your relationship with her. You’ll be able to dictate who Henry is, and how he deals with real concepts like guilt, fear, and intimacy. As Vanaman simply put it, Firewatch is about “the relationship between a man and a woman in isolation.”

The team brought up a specific situation from Firewatch to address how the game would play out. “You come across a group of campers whom you’re worried will burn the forest down. The way you interact with them and their things especially is observed by the game and produces meaning for who Henry is and how he feels about himself. That stuff’s really difficult to write, but it’s the story we want to tell. It’s not a linear story. It’s set up more like a Metroid or a Castlevania game. Even though it’s outside, you’re exploring at your own leisure and finding chunks of story as you go...you and the game share the responsibility of piecing the story together. If you find Clue A before you find Clue B, the way you discover those things is reflected in the story and the dialogue.”

Of course, all good things must come to an end. The relationship you build with Delilah won’t all be sunshine and rainbows. As Vanaman put it, “It’s a game about exploring and talking to this other person, but the more things you find, the less you trust this person.” The team also kept alluding to a much larger, more menacing mystery that begins to make you question if you were brought to this specific place at this specific time for a reason. I pressed them on whether or not there would be supernatural elements within the game, but they remained tight-lipped. They want players to go into Firewatch as clean slates and really feel like anything is possible.

The team also showed me some early footage of what player movement is going to look like. They're adding another member of the team who specializes in "realistic" animations and camera movements. Think Mirror's Edge or Breakdown, and you're in the same ballpark. Henry's hands will be visible, and when he bends down to grab a rope, ties it around a tree stump, and uses it to shimmy his way down a ravine, it will look like all of those things are actually happening from a first-person perspective. The team's emphasis on visual storytelling not only exists throughout the environment, but in Henry's actual movement as well.

It was also great to hear how different players can experience the same events through very different lights. Co-founder Jake Rodkin explained, "Say three players arrive at the same point in the story. Because of the breadth of freedom we’ve given them in how they explore the world and how they interact with this woman, different players could arrive at the same point and have the moment mean completely different things. Even if all three hear her say the exact same line of dialogue, the past experiences might yield different responses. One might take her line as love, while another one takes it as hate, or that the line is coming off untrue."

I asked Vanaman what he and Rodkin learned from their work on Telltale’s The Walking Dead. He replied, “People spent less time talking at Clementine and more time worrying about her in the conversations they were having. In Firewatch, we want to make sure that the characters they’re talking to responds to them in predictably comfortable, but surprisingly entertaining ways.” The team’s honesty is also remarkably refreshing. When I asked what the biggest lesson each has learned so far, Vanaman was quick to remark that he was coming to terms with how tough it is to write something not based on existing source material. You rarely hear developers express honestly like this.

Again, the word refreshing keeps coming to mind. On the topic of risk-taking and never becoming content with being comfortable, Vanaman told me, “Nobody wants Gone Home 2. Gone Home’s biggest fans want them to do a different game.” This is what I want to hear from developers more. This willingness to eschew industry standards and emphasis on treating the player like adults is something that I’m craving from video games. Over the course of three hours, I went from not knowing what Campo Santo’s first game was, to having it become my most anticipated game of 2015.

Marty Sliva is an Associate Editor at IGN. GDC is easily one of his favorite weeks of the year. Follow him on Twitter @McBiggitty