Right there with you. (Uh oh, accidentally spawned a rant lol)

It's definitely a game that put way more thought into clever artsy storytelling and "subversion" above most else. I didn't enjoy the "forced" element either.

I liked that it tried something different. I like that it tried to be a bit meta, but it did so in a "high on their own farts" kind of way.

All the clever storytelling is really good though! The "You always seem to keep going down no matter how high you start from, past points of no return" aspect, lots of spirals (I think?), the voice lines becoming more unhinged. (He goes from "Target that tango!" to "KILL THAT SUNNOVABITCH!"), their gear gets gradually more destroyed. A lot of really deep thought put into those aspects!!

But yeah, the infamous "Whisky/(Willy?) Pete"

For the WP part, the creators themselves say something like "At that point, you could have just turned off the game, but you had to keep playing."

Which I feel felt SO CLEVER in the writing room, but it is rather insulting. Like, man, how pretentious can you get?? Basically to them, it would have been some kinda moral achievement if their game product had a 95% refund rate and their studio got shut down because players refused to follow a forced narrative to hurt digital people in a video game they bought with very real money.

So, yeah, it felt clever, but also like some really dark prank that kinda just cheats the player and calls them a horrible person for having the good faith to expect a good time out of a videogame. If "There's always a choice" and quitting is an ending, why wasn't there a cutscene-credits ending there? THEN you have slightly more ground to berate your player's choices.

HOWEVER, I also think there's a valuable commentary here on how, unlike players, soldiers can't just walk away. They're oath-bound to be blunt instruments of their handlers, and, like the player, they might be compelled to keep making horrible decisions that help nobody, hoping some heroic good might come out of it.

So uh, the moral is "Don't pay recruiters any mind if you value your personal autonomy, kids."?

BioShock I felt did a much better job with making the player consider the "follow the objectives to progress" assumption, and Metal Gear Solid was a fantastic anti-war game without beating you over the head for it.

I'm as sick of US-Mil funded propaganda games as the next person, but I feel like a game designed to emotionally manipulate players and berate them for giving it a chance is ultimately...cheap.