Backfirewall_

Every few months your phone nags you to install something you didn’t ask for, and something you liked quietly stops working. Naraven Games built an entire video game inside that grievance.

Backfirewall_ is a first-person narrative adventure and puzzle game set within the guts of a smartphone. You play the Update Assistant, a low-level program with exactly one job: install OS10. You fumble it in the opening minutes, corrupting the process, and get press-ganged into a partnership with OS9 — the outgoing operating system, fully self-aware, extremely sarcastic, and about to be deleted. What follows is a road trip through the phone’s internal districts, played for laughs and then, unexpectedly, for keeps.

The premise puts it in a small, strange lineage: The Stanley Parable‘s meta-comedy, The Magic Circle‘s software-as-setting conceit, Wheatley’s chatty escort-companion structure from Portal 2, and the personified-internals whimsy of Wreck-It Ralph. What separates Backfirewall_ from tribute acts is that its comedy has a target. Planned obsolescence. Data harvesting. Forced updates. Right-to-repair. The satire is specific, informed, and occasionally sharp enough to draw blood, which is not something that can be said about most games that traffic in fourth-wall gags.

Market-wise, this is a mid-tier indie in a genre — the walking-sim-adjacent narrative puzzler — that is crowded and unforgiving. Backfirewall_ found its audience anyway, with critics landing at 82 on Metacritic since its January 30, 2023 release. That’s a solid number for a game with no obvious elevator pitch, and it reflects the thing that stands out immediately: the writing is genuinely good. Not “good for an indie.” Good.

The caveats are equally clear. It’s brief. The humor sometimes reaches for the easy meme when it has the chops for something better. And puzzle veterans will coast. None of that erases what Naraven pulled off here, but it does define the ceiling.

• OS9 as a Companion Character: A running, reactive commentary track with actual comic timing and a genuine arc. OS9 is the game’s spine — funny early, defensive in the middle, quietly devastating by the end. Voice performance and writing carry roughly half the experience.
• The Cheat-Code System: Your core verb. Rather than switches and keys, you rewrite the world’s rules — spawn or exterminate bugs, prune binary trees, delete data outright, and manipulate music-driven moving platforms. The puzzle vocabulary is drawn from real computing concepts and used as mechanics, not decoration.
• Personified Districts and Apps: RAM terminals swarming with error messages, an exclusive nightclub run by the Speakers, Wi-Fi rendered as pure bureaucratic hell, and residential blocks where apps live as anxious workers with jobs, side stories, and dread about the next patch cycle.
• The Email Collectibles: Scattered messages that assemble a parallel human narrative about the phone’s owner. This is the quiet load-bearing structure of the whole game — skip them and you get a comedy; read them and you get something else entirely.
• Localization Breadth: Nine languages, which matters more than usual for a game this dependent on wordplay and delivery.

The Gameplay Loop

Structurally, Backfirewall_ is a corridor of comic set pieces stitched together by light environmental puzzles. You arrive in a district, meet a personified system component with a problem, learn or apply a cheat code, solve two or three spatial challenges built around it, and move on while OS9 heckles the scenery. It is a well-worn shape. What keeps it from feeling like a slideshow is that the puzzle grammar keeps recontextualizing itself.

The cheat-code system is the smart part. Spawning bugs to break a process on purpose is a delightful inversion — the early game teaches that malfunction is a tool, not a failure state. Trimming binary trees turns a data structure into architecture you physically navigate. The music-driven platforms are the most conventional element, and the most visually inventive. Each mechanic is taught cleanly and then complicated exactly once before the game moves on, which is disciplined design — and also the source of the game’s main limitation.

Because that discipline reads as restraint to some players and shallowness to others. If your reference points are Portal 2, The Witness, or Talos Principle, you will solve most rooms in Backfirewall_ on sight. There’s rarely a moment where you stop, back up, and stare at the geometry. The hint system is generous and well-implemented, which is a kindness for the narrative-first audience and an irrelevance for everyone else. This is a comedy with puzzles, not a puzzle game with jokes, and how much that bothers you is the single biggest variable in your enjoyment.

The Writing, and Its One Bad Habit

The script is the product. OS9’s dialogue is dense, quick, and — crucially — characterized. He isn’t a joke dispenser; he’s a piece of software rationalizing its own death, and the writing lets that curdle at the right moments. The supporting cast of apps do real work too. A calculator with impostor syndrome shouldn’t land. It lands.

The bad habit is meme-reaching. Every so often the script pulls a reference that’s cheaper than the material around it, and because the baseline is high, the drop is audible. It’s not frequent enough to sink anything, but it’s the difference between a very good comedy game and a great one.

The Emails

The collectibles deserve their own paragraph because they are the argument for the game’s existence. While you’re inside the phone laughing at Wi-Fi’s paperwork, a human story is unfolding in the message logs — one you assemble in fragments and out of order. It reframes everything. The satire about disposable hardware stops being an abstract industry critique and becomes something specific about the person carrying the device.

The ending earns its weight because of this scaffolding. It’s the rare narrative payoff where the emotional turn isn’t a tonal betrayal of the comedy — the comedy was doing the setup the whole time. Games that pivot from funny to sincere usually lurch. Backfirewall_ walks.

Pacing and Length

Short, and no filler. That’s not a euphemism for thin — the density is high, and a longer runtime would almost certainly have meant repeating puzzle mechanics past their welcome. The pacing sags exactly once, in a mid-game stretch where the environments start visually rhyming with each other and the puzzle rhythm becomes predictable. It recovers. Zero replay value, though: once the jokes and the reveal have landed, they’ve landed.

The art direction is the game’s second-best asset. Naraven had to solve a hard design problem — make a phone’s interior legible as a place — and the answer is a stylized, saturated, slightly cartoon industrial look that reads instantly. RAM is a chaotic terminal district. Wi-Fi is a beige nightmare of desks and forms. The Speakers’ nightclub is the best-looking district, all chrome and bass-heavy lighting. It’s skeuomorphism inverted: instead of digital things pretending to be physical, physical spaces are built out of computing metaphors, and the internal logic holds.

Where it wobbles is variety. Several districts share a palette and a set of modular props, and by the back third you can predict the geometry of a room before you enter it. The budget wasn’t wasted — you can see where it was concentrated — but the seams show.

As a design, it’s a clean, undemanding first-person build — a 2D-styled game of this scope is light on hardware, and the modest system demands suit the short runtime. Camera and movement are standard-issue and unremarkable, which in a game like this counts as a pass. UI is minimal by design — the cheat-code interface is the only real HUD element, and it stays out of the way.

Steam is the only place this exists, and mouse-and-keyboard is clearly the native configuration. Precision look-and-click is what the cheat-code targeting wants, and the puzzles are built around fast, accurate cursor work.

Controller support is functional but second-class. Aiming at small interactive elements with a stick introduces friction the game wasn’t designed around — nothing that breaks a puzzle, but enough to notice. If you have the choice, use the mouse.

On Steam Deck, the low hardware demands leave comfortable headroom, and the trackpad partially rescues the targeting issue. The bigger caveat is text: this is a dialogue-heavy, subtitle-dependent game with a lot of small on-screen reading, and the email collectibles are built for a larger display than the Deck’s. It’s playable handheld. It’s better on a monitor.

The nine-language localization is worth taking seriously if English isn’t your first language. Comedy is the hardest thing to localize, and the effort invested here is above what this budget tier usually manages.

Backfirewall_ is what happens when a small studio has one excellent idea and the taste to not overplay it. The concept could have carried a game for two hours on charm alone; Naraven instead built a real structure underneath it — a companion character with an arc, a puzzle vocabulary drawn from actual computing, and a hidden human narrative that reframes the whole joke in its final act.

It is not a difficult game and it is not a long one. Those are real limitations, not framing devices, and if you measure games by hours-per-dollar this will disappoint you. Wait for a discount if that’s your calculus.

But originality this specific is rare, and comedy writing this sharp is rarer. Most games about technology gesture vaguely at “screens bad.” This one knows what a binary tree is, understands why forced updates are a business model rather than a favor, and builds an entire emotional climax out of the fact that the software you rely on is designed to die. It’s a funny, affecting take on a firmware update — flawed in ways that matter, and worth your time if its particular blend of comedy and melancholy sounds like yours.

We recommend it to the right audience. Read the emails.