Firewatch Alternatives and Similar Games

You come back to your family home for the first time in a while, only to discover that no one is home and your only clues as to what happened to them are serious of notes scattered around your dark childhood home. ‘Gone Home’ is an intense first-person adventure game and creates an atmosphere like no other with its ambient sounds, great graphics, and deeply engaging storyline. If less is more, then ‘Gone Home’ is quite a lot. While the game has no real dialogue to speak of, like Firewatch does, it makes up for this with an intense story that left critics raving.

A detective with a troubled past who was killed while investigating a crime, your soul will not be allowed to rest until you find the serial killer responsible for your death and bring him to justice. To do this, you will explore both the physical and supernatural landscapes of the city of Salem, a city that has deep roots in the occult itself. Gather clues, find evidence, and help other lost souls come to terms with their deaths along the way as you put together the pieces of your own murder.

Another game in which you play as a wandering detective, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will take you through stunning landscapes and eerie abandoned towns in your search Ethan Carter, a boy who was kidnapped and remains missing. This game is entirely first-person and has been praised for revolutionizing the way games approach immersive storytelling. This game allows you to take your take, allowing all of you completionists out there to scour every landscape you come across if you wish, as long as you are careful enough. If you enjoy vast, complicated mysteries to unravel, this is the game for you.

There is no grand mystery in Journey, no murders to solve or criminals to catch. However, when you play this, you will be able to see how this similar this game is to Firewatch. It focuses completely on puzzle solving and exploration, as well as working together with another real player to solve these puzzles. You will quickly find yourself building up an unspoken bond with this other mystery player, who you will never know the identity of and will likely never meet again after your journey has come to an end. If you are looking for a truly unique experience, like what you got from Firewatch, try this game out!

Embark on a mysterious and hilarious narrated adventure playing as Stanley, a lone employee in a big, empty office, who has his adventure narrated for him by a mysterious, seemingly omnipotent man. Stanley can either follow the narrator’s instructions and see what he has in store or choose to risk defying him. This is a first-person game similar to Firewatch, and with multiple paths and endings, this game has incredible replayability.

With incredible audio and visuals, in Oxenfree you play as your typical angsty teenager, with one huge distinction: you also have to battle with supernatural forces set on stopping your journey. This beautiful, fun 2-D, retro-style game will take you through exciting locales, and comes extremely well-reviewed by critics everywhere. One of the most noted aspects of the game in these reviews is its incredible storyline and how well it engages with players.

Everybody’s gone to the rapture is another eerie, first-person mystery game, revolving around an old English town whose inhabitants mysteriously disappeared. Explore this town, find as many clues as you can, and discover exactly what happened to make the locals disappear the way they have. This game is incredibly similar to ‘Gone Home’, in that it is a mostly no-dialogue game that focuses on you finding text-based notes, visual cues, and the environment to provide you with meaningful gameplay instead of having you interact with other characters.

If sci-fi horror is more up your alley, however, you will certainly love SOMA. SOMA takes place in a secret, remote research facility that almost reminds you of Rapture from Bioshock. When the machinery at this research facility begins to take on human characteristics, things start to go very, very wrong. You play as Simon, someone forced into the facility against his will and under mysterious circumstances, and you must uncover what happened here if you have any hope of escaping.

Life is Strange has a host of games just like it on its own, but it also fits right in here on this list,. It is very Telltale-esque, coming in various episodes and relying on the player chooses to impact gameplay, much like in Firewatch, but to a much larger extent that you normally see in games of this kind. You play as Maxine Caulfield, a teenager who acquires mysterious powers to roll back time whenever she wishes, allowing her to gather information and take second chances in order to try and stop an impending disaster from destroying the town she lives in.

If you are into urban exploration and interesting, fun puzzles, ‘Homesick’ would be a great choice for you. This game combines intense ambient sounds with amazing graphics that are vaguely reminiscent of ‘The Last of Us’. This game features entirely on exploration and puzzle-solving, making it a great for when you want to sit back and be engaged in a story without having to run about the place talking to people. You must try to escape an abandoned building while fleeing from horrors, both in your nightmares and in the real world.

An amazing 3D puzzle game, as soon as you start ‘The Witness’ you will recognize how incredibly similar the graphics are to Firewatch. It will almost make you feel as though you never left the first game at all. In this game, you wake up alone on some kind of remote island, and you need to solve various puzzles and uncover the mystery of this place if you want to ever find a way home. The things you will see, and the challenges you will face, will almost certainly surprise you.