What a great breakdown on your thoughts, thank you for sharing. I’ll admit it’s not a perfect game but I think it worked for me much better than for you. When the game switched to Abby I had this sense that the writers were going to try and make me feel something besides hate/contempt for her and my immediate reaction was “Good fucking luck.”
But it really worked and as the narrative unfolded with Abby I found her to be a very sympathetic character and by the ending I was more worried about her than Ellie.
When I realized this I felt super conflicted because - who didn’t care about Ellie going into Part 2? And I think that message about having empathy for people you hate was such a powerful theme to make a whole game about that I was willing to let a lot of the smaller narrative mistakes go.
Have a good day.
This trailer is my favorite even though it’s old now.
It’s when they added pipes to the game.
To be fair I’ve had a similar thought after finishing a couple of games. Both were indie games though and I thought they were underpriced relative to the value that I got out of them. I mostly felt that way because I really really want to encourage good behavior from studios rather than see it all go to microtransactions and subscriptions.
I unsubscribed and started boycotting it when I watched a video one day and it wasn’t clear to me that the whole video was a sponsored ad until the very end when they dropped a line like “Oh and thanks to our sponsor XYZ for giving us all of the hardware we showed you today.”
I was watching multiple reviews on products I was a shopping for and realized they were an unreliable source if they didn’t disclose this was basically a shill video until the last few minutes.
Rock and stone!