Myra Orgain

As devastatingly sad as this game's story is, it's one of the best games I've ever played. This is a game that pushes the video game medium to it's limits where it starts to transcend into great art because of the risks it takes and executes masterfully, especially in it's storytelling. It's certainly not going to be for everyone. An important thing to keep in mind if you decide to play this game is that it is at it's core a horror game. Like many good horror movies, this game is divisive because it confronts, through the art of storytelling, hard, terrifying truths about the human condition — in the case of this game, how violence can perpetuate as a means to placate tragedy and how hard it can be to forgive and heal deep wounds. One of the biggest and most important risks this game takes is placing you in the shoes of "the enemy". This could have been a horror game that phoned it in and given you, the player, emotional permission to disconnect from the violence you commit through these characters. Instead, it does everything in its power to make you empathize, and realize that that enemy you're fighting is just like you. That enemy has a name, dreams, and loved ones just like you, and their reasons for their actions, even if morally questionable, are deeply human. There's so much fantastic world building in this game to support this story, but for the sake of time I'll point out one of my favorites — Ellie collects new comic cards (mirroring the first game's comic books) with various, creative superheros on them. Each card's character has a meter at the bottom of where they fall on the spectrum of good to evil. It's such a wonderfully stark contrast to the multidimensional characters in the game who are never pure, fictional representations of one end of the spectrum or the other. Every character is flawed and each of them are trying their best to survive in a world that has dealt them the worst hand imaginable. I could go on about how impressively layered the game's narrative elements are, but that would be spoiling it. If you have a high tolerance for horror and graphic violence and the time to spare I couldn't recommend this game more because it's a worthwhile story that will make you think and question your own moral boundaries.