Suman Sebastian

I went in blind, never watched the spoilers, didn't stayed on the internet much before it's release, and as soon as I finished it I wanted to talk about it so badly, so naturally, I went to Reddit and oh my god I couldn't believe what the heck happened because personally I really loved the game and everyone seemed to hate it. Now one week later, as more people actually played (or watched walkthroughs on youtube) the game, I noticed more and more positive feedback as each day passed, predominately on the PS4 sub and the main TLOU one, also the Metacritic score raised up to 5.0, from a 3.2, leading me to believe that the initial reaction was mostly composed of online troll with nothing better to do. That's not to say that there aren't persons who genuinely don't like the game, but usually, they came in as more civil and respectful to other's opinions. From a technical point of view for me this game is a marvel, from graphics and sound design to incredible attention to details it's just perfect. I didn't enjoy so much the gameplay of a game in a long time, HZD was the last game I think to leave me in a state of "wow this **** is so fun". Regarding performance, I don't understand how they did it but the game runs even smoother than Uncharted 4 for me, as with that game I witnessed a few nasty fps drops a couple of times, here I didn't encounter any sequences with noticeable frame rates drops. I play on a ps4 slim from 2017. With that said I really loved the story as well, the (big spoilers ahead) midway switch to Abby clicked with me, eventually, I ended up liking her, by the final chapters I was seriously hoping Ellie won't kill her, not only because I liked Abby and Lev as characters, but because it would mean the definitive downfall of our protagonist in my opinion. The sudden pop of Joel's memory as she was suffocating Abby to death was a representation of how Ellie acknowledged that she was using revenge as a coping mechanism to escape guilt because she didn't make amends with Joel before he died, killing Abby wouldn't fix her issues on the long run. And I think at that moment came some great character development for Ellie, as it takes great willpower to control your rage and spare the murderer of your beloved in an attempt to move forward and heal. So for me, the ending was actually bittersweet, touched by a note of hope, showing us that the main theme was actually forgiveness. Maybe it hit me differently because I'm trying to leave aside my toxic "solutions" and attitude towards some personal issues I have All in all, this is a 10/10 for me, the pacing at times could have been better, but other than that it's a really good game. Definitely a must have at least when it's on sale.