Yes, but as a theme goes it’s like putting too much salt in some food, at least for my taste. Don’t get me wrong, I do like a good flawed cast of characters, the theme in general is good, but the execution just didn’t land for me.

I think if I could empathize with the characters a bit better it might have landed a bit better? As an interactive medium I think the character you control and yourself needs to have some level of shared goals, or at least the ability to understand their actions. I didn’t feel that for 90% of the game, it was like watching a soap opera where the characters don’t act like people. I can forgive that of the main two in concept, who are powered by bloodlust, but frankly they don’t act enough like maladjusted revenge golems to make it believable to me that they’d continuously make these terrible decisions.

Something else was that the theme got a bit muddled towards the end in terms of revenge. The theme is that revenge bad, violence begets violence, violence corrupts you etc, but after Abby does her thing she gets such a glow up over the course of her campaign, both as a character and in her situation, that the theme feels mixed. Hell, for most of the time you could kind of forget that it’s Ellie doing all of this because there’s the internal politics and fighting completely unrelated to what’s going on. Very little of Abby’s issues actually revolve around the revenge issue. Without the theme being clear on this stuff it becomes muddy exactly what the point is, and it feels like violence for violence sake. Like someone was out to prove that humanity is garbage, instead of being a warning against doing garbage things.

I also can’t help but feel it pulls the assassins Creed 2 problem with forgiveness being learned. I think it’s a good theme in concept, but after spending an entire game mercing a bunch of people both tangentially related or unrelated, it’s a little hollow. Even then though, I could see it working, but the fight at the very end kind of ruins it for me. If she lets Abby get on the boat immediately, that works better because she made the conscious decision to forgive. If she actually kills Abby, funnily enough I think that also works. Seriously, for where the game has been the entire time I think her doing it, but the audience knowing it was wrong would actually go a long way towards making the game as a whole feel more cohesive. Hell you could have done a player choice at that point, and even that could have worked.

It’s something I’m still kind of thinking over to this day because it’s such a unique problem to encounter in a game like this. Again, I do want to like the game, it does a lot right, it’s a good game. But yeah, bit of a yuck thinking about it.