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TLOU2 is basically Spec Ops: The Line, but more miserable and less grim. Which is fine. It does the Tomb Raider thing of pretending gameplay juxtaposes narrative. An extremely good recipe that comes about every 4 years or so.
It's about as dark as a Metro game but has less fun with it. But it's less profound than something like The Road. It's all a bit The Walking Dead. But with the gameplay loop of a Lars Von Trier Uncharted adaptation.
It's a technological marvel and clearly an astronomical feat (it's long, and dense, which is really saying something for a AAA narrative game) but it should have been darker. Not more violent, but darker. It's much more violent than it is dark.
Thematically it's about love and loss but so is everything. It should have been about the courage of hopelessness. You can take it further.
The characters are likable. I liked all of them. They're human insofar as they are bold. But they are intense. All the time. I don't know why writers do this. Non stop intensity. Even during mellow moments. Everybody shits. Even during an apocalypse.
It's a good game. A masterfully crafted game. I would love to see a TLOU2 where people weren't telling them to tone it down - across the board. From gameplay to themes. It feels very Disney in that sense. Not even close to it's cinema brethren.
You can't both publicly fight for video games as art and seriously claim that TLOU2 is dark in any meaningful sense. It's a very violent game and in many ways a very human game, but it's no darker than Tomb Raider. The gore just has good graphics.
If anything I salute ND for just bringing AAA narrative games to the level of any ok TV show. Enemy characters react to being shot, and their friends dying. There's good pacing. Characters are believable. This should be normal but it's not. Games have so far to come.
It says something about games media that they conflate darkness with violence. Darkness is conceptual. Tortuous. It is not violence. Disney films are dark. They are not violent.
