[Itse]

I'm always a bit annoyed that the Last of Us gets hailed as this great achievement in game writing.

It's got an extremely stock zombie apocalypse setting, with mostly pretty generic characters and gameplay that's okay at best. Is the dialog and voice acting good for what it is? Sure I guess, but... Meh. I mean, the storyline about that kind of bonding should definitely be up my alley, but it's just so generic. It feels like the kind of writing that gets praised by people who don't usually play games with an emphasis on the writing.

Maybe it gets good at some point, but honestly the gameplay itself is also so generic that after multiple attempts I've always just moved on to something more engaging. I'm currently I guess about halfway through? If the story takes that long before it actually gets good, that's not stand out excellence in writing. If we're talking about the best writing of the decade in games, to me Last of Us doesn't even register as a competitor.

Then there's the whole "I'm a game that wants to be taken very seriously but also I'm a game where you routinely kill dozens of people with your bare hands" thing going on. But not even in an entertaining way, you just keep sneaking up on people and doing the same thing over and over. At times you use a shiv, wow.

I'm currently on a mission to go through my bought games backlog and play through every game I've bought that I still think I want to play through. Mostly it's been very much worth it. (I didn't expect much of Doom, it was bloody awesome. Senua's Sacrifice was really impressive and interesting even with it's faults etc.)

And now I'm currently back with Last of Us, and it's still pretty boring to actually play.

If I want a game with good characters and story, I'll play something in the Life is Strange series. Sure there's very little actual gameplay there, but at least what it has makes sense in the context of the story. If I want to make hard decisions in a crap world with a grumpy bearded protagonist, I'll play the last two Witcher games.

And really just off the top of my head, games that IMO have better writing that the Last of Us: Senua's Sacrifice, Life is Strange, Banner Saga, Disco Elysium, Witchers 2 and 3, Tides of Numenera... Heck I'd even put Vanishing of Ethan Carter up there. (Easily my favourite of the "walking simulator genre", it really drew me in and actually scared the crap out of me at one point, which is hard to do.)

Good writing is just so much more than just dialog and voice acting.