Here’s what happens in Firewatch: Julia’s sharp descent into dementia and increasing need for full-time care return her, as if a child, to her parents in Australia. Henry doesn’t go with her. His shame and grief push him to take a solitary post as a fire lookout with the Forest Service. Here, Henry doesn’t have to talk to anyone except his boss Delilah, and even then only by radio. The two become close, but a potential relationship is distracted by disappearing teenagers, a break-in at Henry’s tower, a mysterious forest fire and a research station of unknown purpose with research reports on Henry and Delilah and transcripts of their radio conversations.

What’s going on? Who’s stalking Henry? Are Henry and Delilah under surveillance, and if so, by whom? Is the government spying on them? Are they research subjects in some unfathomable experiment? Why isn’t there anyone else around? Is Delilah lying? Where did the teens go? Is any of this really happening? Henry’s paranoia comes to a crescendo and presently evaporates when he finds the body of a twelve-year old boy, killed in a climbing accident. Brian Goodwin had been staying in the Shoshone with his father Ned, a fire lookout from a few years back. Delilah knew Brian wasn’t allowed to be out there, but she didn’t snitch because she’s cool.

When Brian died, Ned didn’t go home — how do you tell the world that you let your child die? — but stayed in the forest and went into hiding. Nearly every bit of weirdness and hostility Henry and Delilah experienced was an effort by Ned to keep them from finding Brian’s body — or exposing Ned’s shame at Brian’s body lying alone in the crevasse.

Everything else that happens has a rational, innocuous explanation, too. When Henry overhears Delilah saying something cryptic on the radio, it turns out to be something about utterly mundane; the research station of unclear purpose is there to track elk; the teenagers who disappear do so because they are wild and hard-partying teens, and also they stole a tractor.

Everyone in Firewatch has something to do that they aren’t doing. Everyone’s avoiding what’s hard.

In some cases these revelations could have been better delivered. Every question in the mystery has an answer located somewhere in the game, but many of those answers are easy to miss, even for a player who wants to find them. I don’t think players are meant to be left with much ambiguity about what occurs in the plot, since all the connective story tissue is there in the game — but a lot of players have been, and I think on that basis the game has caught more flack than it deserves on its merits as a piece of writing.

It also just doesn’t feel right, in terms of role-playing a character, to leisurely wander the woods in the idle hope of coming across a fun secret when Delilah is regularly assigning Henry one urgent task after another. Firewatch certainly rewards exploration, but its narrative rarely encourages it. (And there’s definitely a more elegant way to convey a lot of information than having Ned dictate it to Henry on an audio tape, although this produces the best line of dialogue in the game: “Sorry about your wife,” delivered like a haltingly sympathetic, impersonal pat on the shoulder.)

“Stop avoiding your responsibilities” will never be advice anyone wants to hear.

While the answers Henry finds are more mundane than he expected, he does get answers. He actually closes two missing person cases. But this mystery game doesn’t end with Henry — or the player — receiving any recognition for solving the mystery. Delilah is too unsettled about her culpability in Brian’s death to commend Henry for his investigative work. When Henry and Delilah are ordered to evacuate the burning Shoshone, Delilah bugs out on an earlier flight to avoid meeting him at all. On the radio, she tells him he should go be with his wife: “You gotta go see her.” Maybe he will; Henry and Delilah, on the other hand, will clearly never see each other again.

“Stop avoiding your responsibilities” will never be advice anyone wants to hear. And while it might be smart advice, it’s frustrating to hear it from Delilah, who, although funny and easy-going, is a complete flake. She doesn’t tell on Brian when she knows his safety could be at risk, she lies to the police about encountering the missing teenagers to avoid the hassle, and although it happens in a moment of high tension, she is a fire lookout who orders Henry to start a fire in the forest. It’s hard to say if Henry is as unsuited to his job, because he barely does it. His job is literally to sit in a chair and tell someone if he sees a fire, but, enabled by Delilah, he spends his office hours trying to scare teens and break into government facilities.

Which may well be the point: there’s always something more desirable than just sitting in a chair; there’s always something more desirable than providing full-time care for your wife who has Alzheimer’s. Henry might be a chronic procrastinator — leaves wife for job, leaves job for adventure — but everyone in Firewatch has something to do that they aren’t doing. Everyone’s avoiding what’s hard.

Some players admitted being taken aback by Firewatch’s it-is-what-it-is ending because they were anticipating a big twist. A lot of games and popular fiction that deal with a character denying his problems will do this. Something along the lines of Delilah, the lookout tower, and the Shoshone all being dreamy constructions in Henry’s head, coping mechanisms for an uncomfortable reality: like maybe he is the one with dementia, or smothered Julia with a pillow in her hospital room, and Delilah is a nurse and Brian Goodwin is a candy bar that fell out of a vending machine in the hallway.

But I like Firewatch’s more prosaic take: that running away from your problems isn’t just a psychological flight of fancy explored in a daydream or a mind palace, but a real thing you can do, and if you do it, there are consequences. Firewatch is a story about real people who take the easy way out and end up making a mess.