Weirdly, Firewatch gave me a bigger sense of freedom than a whole lot of games I've played recently, even though it was basically on rails.

I think that a lot of that feeling was caused by how my choices had no mechanical affect on the game. Not worrying about how my decisions would affect gameplay gave me more ability to choose what felt right.

In a related way, the world being basically empty helped with that too.

Not a perfect game, but I'm glad I played it.

I didn't get the same feeling from Gone Home or Dear Esther. Part of it is those games don't have nearly as many verbs, and part of it is the open-world design of Firewatch.

Gone Home gets a lot of points for the way environment, narrative, and metanerrative interacted to build mood, though.

Also it has the best jump scare I have ever seen.

Because it isn't.

Oh, another thing I liked about Firewatch: dialogue options don't have any morality tagging in the UI. No "this is the nice option, this is the mean option". There is no niceness tracker. Again, letting you make choices free of gameplay constraints.