Done with The Last of Us 2. Good, but has the same problems as the first one, namely:

A lot of non skippable gameplay-as-story moments (walk around this area while we exposition you slowly). These could just be cutscenes. I’m bored. This is why it’s a 30 hour game.

The gameplay railroads you a lot of the time, and doesn’t feel like it’s ever serving the story. It’s just there.

You’ll get in an encounter with a bunch of enemies. Oh cool I can figure out my own way of dealing with this. Except the point of this encounter is to escape to a section and get captured. But I don’t know that. Why would I? Why does anything I do here matter?

Why can I die 5 seconds before the cutscene trigger where I get captured anyway? That doesn’t make any sense. Death/failure conditions in this game are all like that. “Sorry, that wasn’t supposed to happen...yet.”

Why am I even playing this section then? Just make the thing you want to make happen.

This feels incredibly bad and robs me of any agency I have. It feels like you are watching a movie of Ellie where you occasionally get to decide how you will go about murdering someone.

I will compare TLOU to MGS3 forever because I think they are similar in their focus on story and survival gameplay elelemts, and yet while TLOU wags it’s finger at you when you try to do something you aren’t supposed to because of the plot, MGS3 separates them just enough.