Here are two people who have isolated themselves from outside interference and who expect to spend the long days and nights with no company save the sky, the trees and the occasional bear. (sorry, Chris)įirewatch, with its two characters cut off from the rest of the world and (physically) from one another, is the perfect setting for romance. I completely forget to tell the guy I'd been drinking with that I was leaving. Take the time I met my better half – we were strangers in the same bar, and after a few drinks I was so completely caught up in the moment that I joined her and her friends and went to a different bar on the other side of the city. The obliviousness can be charming or amusing. Take the massive tosser in Richard Curtis' toss-a-thon, Love, Actually, who secretly unburdens his love for his best friend's wife onto her so that she can feel weird around him FOREVER while he gets to pat himself on the back for keeping everything private and being chivalrous. The same is true of infatuated individuals. That doesn't mean every romance has to be wild and dangerous, as in this particular example, but it does mean that those involved tend to not care about the impact of their love on anyone but the immediate target of their affections.Ĭouples in love are often knowingly or unwittingly oblivious to the things that are happening around them. And that's because love affairs are self-involved and uncaring. It's a side effect of their tragic ending rather than a result of their togetherness. Romeo and Juliet's love brings their families together but that wasn't the intent of either participant in the romance. Everyone in Verona seems to ignore Paris' corpse so he shouldn't weight too heavy on our minds at any rate. And poor slaughtered Paris, who was trying to protect Juliet's tomb from vandals. Of course, the Montague and the Capulet lying dead in a tomb, killed by each others' kisses and the feuding of their families (plus a knife and some poison) brings everybody closer together and everything ends on a happy note. Having committed a couple of murders along the way, he plays up to the audience as he prepares to take his life, eroticising the act of suicide and recognising that young, dead “star cross'd lovers” are far more romantic than long life and domestic bliss. He's flighty and fickle, and would probably have fallen in love with the next person he met if SPOILER ALERT exile, subterfuge and suicide hadn't been quite so attractive to his melodramatic mindset and vanity. Take Romeo and Juliet, the archetypal idiot lovers. And that single entity is almost certainly the most selfish creature in any room it enters. Cupid's arrows have a sort of grapple function though, connecting their targets by a bond so powerful that new couples often behave like a single entity. We don't always think of them in that way because the word 'selfish' tends to suggest a single person, absorbed within their own self. It avoids many of the potential pitfalls that games can spend their entire running time trying to climb back out of and, more importantly, it can focus on one of the essential traits of romantic entanglements. There's no possibility of smooching, even if things were to move in that direction.Īnd that's why Firewatch is such a wonderful setting for romance, comedic and otherwise. Added to that, the lead characters are miles apart. In Firewatch, there's a whole forest to fry so there's little danger of any romance taking centre stage. They're attracted to one another but there are bigger fish to fry so we're never forced to play gooseberry while they smooch and have lovers' tiffs on the screen. I was reminded of George and Nico, Broken Sword's danger magnets. There are non-specific but definite spoilers for Firewatch. This, I thought to myself, could be a tragedy-tinged comedic romance and I hadn't realised how much I wanted to play such a thing until I was playing it. There are bright, cheery moments, genuine laughs and a warmth that has nothing to do with any burning threat. When I first started playing Firewatch, I was delighted when the melancholy opening gave way to a lightness of touch. And there's very little that would fall into the rom-com category. There are exceptions, of course, but there are few great romances in gaming, doomed or otherwise. A relationship is the reward at the end of a quest chain or a gift-giving minigame of sorts, or it's the fulfillment of a character's potential and meaning.