I hate this game so much.

The early story is told in with in-game "this is how you walk", "this is how you interact" mini-segments that alternate with text-adventure-style texts and prompts. Which is okay, I guess. It kinda felt annoying and interruptive the way it was done, if you ask me. I don't really know why.

But more importantly: the first prompts already gave me options that I couldn't sympathize with *at all*. So what do I choose: bad option A or worse option B? AND THEN the game has the nerve to sort-of tell me: "Uuh, you chose to give your girlfriend the small dog instead of the big one. Well, guess what: she's gonna get mugged in the streets and live the rest of her life with an ugly scar on her leg-or-whatever. Nice job, asshole." … or some such shit. Great way to do "choice in games". Idiots.

There were further prompts and texts but at that early point already I was so anti-interested in that story of theirs that I kept skipping the text until the actual gameplay began.

And then what did I get? A visually colorful and beautiful landscape that encourages explor-- but with lots of invisible walls and other gates; an unlikable protagonist that got more and more unlikable over the course of the game when I heard him talk about the shitty life decisions he made during the shit I skipped; and a fairly linear story.

And it's empty. Visually empty. Empty! Basically no animals, no other people, no jack! The story is full of bad guys allegedly but you never really see one. I counted one character model in the entire game. Apart from bad cut-out silhouettes, sound fx and plenty of voice over stuff, the game provides a pretty weak illusion of immersion.

Why bother making an open-world game when it's so restrictive and linear? At least you got to live the life of a firewatch- / forester-adjacent-person. That was kinda interesting to me.

Ugh! Garbage.