grinning like an idiot whenever i’m playing this but i’ll reserve my yapping for my actual review that’ll hopefully be way in the future because i don’t want this game to end any time soon but!

i just came here to say that yötön yö is an absolute banger. this whole game is. i’m truly grateful to witness this piece of art. kiitos sam. it’s 4 am and i’m shitting my pants more often than i’d like to admit but i’m having the time of my life. top 3 easily.

sorry for rambling, thanks for reading. have a good start into the new week

I know I’m being a little generous with my rating but this game is exactly my cup of tea… or should I say coffee?

The setting, the vibe, the story, the characters and the music are just amazing to me. I especially love how creative this game gets in its way of storytelling.

The only thing that it’s lacking in is gameplay and I understand that it might impact someone’s experience with the game as a whole, but I thoroughly enjoyed it despite its repetitiveness. The focus for me was the story and exploration and they definitely delivered on that end.

I’m going to let this one sink in for a while and check out the DLCs and American Nightmare, but I already have Alan Wake II installed and I’m very excited to see what awaits me there.

extremely surreal to see that a prevalent consensus on this is that it's an OBVIOUS uberbleak nihilist exercise in cynical ultraviolence when I feel like it's Very Clearly shooting for (but emphatically not always flawlessly succeeding at) humanist themes exploring mercy, kinship, and absolution: The last spoken line/thesis of the game is literally "I don't know if I can ever forgive you, but I'd like to try" which basically mirrors the bubbly final sentiment in Steven Universe of all things... like come on people the game clearly has a lot of faith in human compassion and optimism that we can be (and are) better than our worst impulses. We can (and should!) totally debate the efficacy of the way the game communicates these ideas. I think there are plenty of areas to criticize or outright condemn in terms of execution; the pieces written about the games fraught zionist inspirations and the discomfiting misogynoir on display in regards to a specific moment are especially vital reads--but framing this story's outlook as intentionally nihilist, player-blaming pain porn about the inescapable cycle of violence is just.. totally disingenuous to what it's clearly trying to do, imo. A story about empathy without a soft and tender pastel veneer does not render it ineffective or worthless. I would probably argue that the game's refusal to over-sentimentalize the repugnance of its deuteragonists' actions (or make their realities easily accessible/justifiable) lends more integrity to the challenge of conveying the inherent worth and potential for change within them... I feel like the game makes it extra clear that Abby and Ellie are not universalizing prescriptive ciphers for the human condition / our inescapable URGE 4 VENGEANCE and are instead very specific / detailed character studies of damaged people whose emotional processing is expressed through borderline surrealist New French Extremity interactive dream logic in a world that also presents a variety of individuals with approaches and outlooks that are direct foils to these self-destructive coping strategies!!!

lots and lots of thoughts about this game, might revisit and explore further at some point

(also feel the need to say that Naughty Dog's crunch culture is a blight on the industry and this game could have been just as affecting as a more contained and less needlessly sprawling experience)