Fire-Watching and Sad Backstory Simulator

Believe it or not i don't hate all walking simulators, just the crappily written, pretentious ones, which happens to be most of them. I know for a fact i've played good ones but it's always the annoying crappy ones that get all the praise. Does Firewatch fit into that craptastic category for me? Umm... yeah kinda, i mean pretty much, not like it's terrible or nothing but uh... ya know?

You can tell what kind of game this is right away. The game doesn't even bother to start before immediately shoving a sad backstory questionnaire in your face. I'm all for games handling scary mature themes, but there's a limit to my patience. I do, on some level play games to have fun, and therefore it's hard to think of a string of words less appropriate for the first 5 minutes of a game than "early-onset alzheimers". Oh yeah, just the kind of thing people loooove thinking about when they get off work and wanna explore a virtual forest. 

I'm pretty sure I remember this game winning a crapload of awards in 2013. But that was also around the time Gone Home came out and playing that one left me too traumatized from boredom to want to jump into another one. 

Firewatch has some cool stuff, there's some good nature and nice music and a neat little camera feature. But ultimately the story falls flat due to the very same fatal flaw that plagued Gone Home, Soma, and so many others in this morose genre, a thoroughly unlikable, obnoxiously annoying, douchebag, loser protagonist who sucks.

Someone should tell the people who make these kind of games if your story only works by the main character having the personality of a toilet, then it doesn't work. Cool people can have emotions too, and we should get some representation once in a while. Give me a Duke Nukem walking simulator, explore the depths of his unknowable pathos a little. I'd buy that for a dollar.