San Andreas's achievement lies in performing what Rockstar has never managed to do before or since but has flailed for its lifetime to monopolize: the cinematic game. Yet it elides their usual trickery: long, laborious cutscenes with facile gesticulations of composition and montage, acting that mugs the eyes and ears to no particular end or effect, lightweight ideas imposed by the heaviest-handed touch. No, San Andreas chances upon its fertile relationship to cinema by accident, stumbling into a rich moving image tradition and by the vulgarity of its non-intention, dressing itself in those films' aesthetics and arriving at a place only a video game could reach.

In what tradition has Rockstar done it? Rockstar has tried its luck with the gangster film and the Western. Shock of shocks, it makes it with blaxploitation. The linear story of GTA games, often criticized for conflicting with their open world charm, is hardly so linear here, per the rhythms of that tradition. CJ's return to Grove Street and family and friction with corrupt police is interrupted by the betrayal of your annoying friends. After that comma, CJ gets bondage tortured by a psychopath lady in the countryside, torches weed farms, invests in upstanding businesses in Las Vegas, and robs a bank that indirectly leads to the catastrophes of GTA III. Then, with the help of a CIA agent that put you through hell and even worse, flight school, CJ returns to his neighborhood, to the police station where his brother was all this while kept, and upon hearing his traditionalist, slightly ungrateful brother instead chastise his disloyalty to the hood, erupts, "What did the hood ever do for me?" You are supposed to feel that line as though it is a culminating moment in Boyz in the Hood, a powerful, steadily building drama about the troubles of boyz in the hood. But you never really stayed in the hood. You jacked your first bike, did your street crimes for less than a third of the game, and some hours before your reunion with your brother, you infiltrated a military base and jacked their experimental jetpack. I used it to get to the police station faster.

It is at this reunion that something greater is reconciled than CJ and Sweet: CJ and Sweet Sweetback, something that people point to when they feel the "spirit" of the GTA games have been lost following this game. What is unified is the blaxploitation film and the open world game in the one narrative ethos - incredible, explosive, ridiculous distraction with a destiny: family, the hood, police corruption, resilience.

Yet here's the most important part of this case: one would argue - rightly, that San Andreas is not really about these things. I am not saying this is a political (read: politically interesting) game, which may be its most serious divergence from blaxploitation. But that's the crucial, kingmaking difference, what makes one remember and look back with longing. Every Rockstar game afterwards would attempt to deal with gravity, suffering, pain. In their vanity, they once again import film: Heat, High Noon, Rio Bravo, the entire hodgepodge collage. But even at their most ironic, such as Trevor's tirade about torture on the ride to the airport after pulling the shmuck's teeth out, they are deathly sincere about the important ideas they have and more importantly, the projection of the fact that they have important ideas. Not necessarily moralistic, but even at the peaks of satire, always too pointed in the way an accusing index finger or a flippant middle is brandished at the most obvious grotesqueries of modern/frontier life, and about as insightful. But what remains is insecurity. What remains is pointed certainty that video games believe it must negate video games to be serious. What's at this point moving about San Andreas is its stark, lonesome stance athwart all of this, no less as a blockbuster game from a blockbuster studio. Its lightness of feet and mind allow messages to not sound as thudding monologues but resonant echoes, easily drowned out by K-DST, possibly the greatest rock radio station in any video game. That is not passivity; that is confidence, grace, style, fun, and art.

The dreaded storygamer, Youtube analyst, or some unconscious industry poptimist asks, if not a message, though, what is there to hear? San Andreas is not a game of questions but it is a game of one, polyphonic answer. No "morals", no "satire", no thoughts, head empty. Pathos in the close periphery, lethally large dildo in hand, Ballas in view, sunrise in Grove Street, sunset in Mt. Chiliad, guns, muscles, fat, stamina, lung capacity, sex appeal, two number 9s, gang wars, martial arts, katana fight, the Truth, Samuel Jackson is in this, boats, following trains, nosediving jets, girlfriends, hot coffee, it's OOOOG Loc, all we had to do, one, two, three and to the four, ah shit, here we go again.

in the place of a message, music: gaming's most badasssss song.

Before delivering on any of its digital impressionist vistas, Firewatch throws us into a black screen where we get to choose how we fail our loved one. We can only fail them, however hard we try, and that is our introduction to the game. It's a brief section, but it sets player expectations for narrative decision making in Firewatch, and demonstrates how even the smallest piece of player agency can make for something emotively charged when done well. As with Telltale's The Walking Dead it's not about mechanical branches, but about the player participating in the drama, providing the human angle to the game's events. As blockbuster games become more elaborate with the way they deal with cause and effect, indie games isolate moments of reflection, forcing the player to consider their own values as they work through what's happening on screen. Kentucky Route Zero does this with free association such that the player begins unconsciously drawing out their own fears and anxieties, but in Firewatch we simply participate in constructing Henry's bullshit. He's doing the wrong thing, reasonably or unreasonably, and when called out he's unlikely to tell the truth, because he himself has lost his mooring. Whatever we say is the right thing, because anything we could say would be wrong.

Firewatch has received widespread praise for its visual style, and for good reason. Where similarly expressive works such as Inside and Shelter are so commanding in their style that the player can only act in accordance with their logic, Firewatch holds back for an openness that makes it feel conventionally navigable. Its colour palettes draw on the jarring experiments of Proteus but its forms and textures are staunchly mimetic, and its pastel finish draws it back into stylisation compared to contemporary The Witness. This last point is critical, as the diffused colours and light effects make the game feel like an echo; like it's happening in past tense. Whatever narrative reason frames the game, there is a wistful quality to Firewatch that brings with it a knowing melancholy that this is all a fabricated memory. Even when outside influences threaten this rose-tinted utopia, when the developers employ cinematic ellipsis to have the world of Firewatch step down in favour of character-centric drama, the player feels it calling back through time. The parallel here to Henry is obvious, as he clearly needs to get back to the responsibilities of his life outside of Firewatch, but as the mysteries of the game grow more pronounced and even dictate our engagement in the dream-environment, the player's affective link to it is broken in favour of someone else's enacted drama. Prince Avalanche, another work in the wake of the Yellowstone fires of 1988, better handled this temporal unease, allowing the viewer to wander around Alvin and Lance's narrative instead of being chained to it. The story in Firewatch is good in the sense that it's well paced and often frightening, but a stronger work would have been made if it had been pushed into the background, allowing us to become one with the environment, and with loss itself.

There is the sense that Campo Santo are well aware of this, and opt for a balance between the much derided 'walking simulator' and a more obvious narrative compulsion to satisfy all potential parties. Rather than feeling lost, we come to watch someone else being lost, and the most compelling embodiment of isolation (the environment) becomes the stage for dialogue-driven storytelling about precisely this. I'd opt for an inverse balance of narratological and ludic components (in order to enhance the emotional significance of both), but can't begrudge how well the developer goes in the opposite direction. The dialogue is perfect, the performances uniformly tender when tender counts and guarded when it doesn't, the map circular enough for linear storytelling. The story is a con, the conclusion invariably a betrayal, but where the game's scripted 'moments' and role-plays subside are the small instances of individual panic and satisfaction that the player takes with them into the day, the week, the month. I can't wait to see what Campo Santo will do without feeling the need to compromise.