I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I’d try it with the Steam summer sale.
Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that’s interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn’t stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I’m checking this shit and it was released in 2018!
If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the “settling of the west”, a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can’t more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with good dialogue a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.
The story being at odds with the gameplay is such a common thing in a lot of these big budget popular games that I just sort of look past it now. Joel is a man who struggles with his morality while he’s racking up a triple digit body count and throwing Molotov cocktails at people’s groins. Am I doing the right thing? He wonders as he single-handedly wipes out a hospital full of people to make sure there’s no cure for an apocalyptic disease
Well he didn’t care if it was the “right thing” because he wasn’t given any reasonable information to ponder about.
He was lied to, had a gun pointed to his head by his employer after keeping his end of the deal, and denied the chance of seeing his surrogate daughter before a vague, ominous medical procedure. Given that context, I would say he was a horrible person if he reacted any other way than killing everyone and rescuing Ellie.
Does Joel ponder about his morality at all? Maybe in the show but I can’t remember in the first game. He kind of stopped giving a shit about everything after his daughter died, and only regained his humanity in a handful of moments. Not to mention, it’s not completely unrealistic. How many soldiers have killed dozens of people and wondered if they did the right thing, then kept doing it anyway?