The best casual games like Firewatch are What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home and Oxenfree. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to casual costs you.
Filtering to casual means you want something you can put down. That is the whole definition, and it says nothing about how deep the game is.
What you get: A game that fits around a life. Short sessions, save anywhere, no penalty for a week away.
What made Firewatch worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the casual part of that answer, and only the casual part.
The best short narrative game there is, and every chapter reinvents itself.
The other defining game of the genre, told through a house.
Two-way conversation as the core mechanic, with real chemistry between the characters.
Slow, strange, and beautifully written.
If the relationship at the centre was the reason you played.
Wandering a landscape with no combat and time to look at it.
By people from the Firewatch and Gone Home teams, and short.
Wordless, but the same intent — connection and landscape.
Momentum, sometimes. A game designed to be left is also a game that is easy to forget you were playing.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Firewatch that are not casual games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Firewatch — 9 picks, no genre filter.
What Remains of Edith Finch. The best short narrative game there is, and every chapter reinvents itself.
No. Firewatch released on the PC & Modern Multi-Platform, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
No. Several of the deepest games there are — Tetris, Balatro, Into the Breach — are playable in twenty-minute pieces, and some of the shallowest demand an entire evening.
Often the opposite. Many are built around daily timers and streaks, which means stopping does cost you — the one thing a casual game is not supposed to do.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Firewatch list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is casual — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the casual guide for where to start in the genre generally.