You are not wrong. Cuckmann even stated that his driving force when writing the game was to make the game be "Anti-fun" and to make the player miserable while playing it. My guess would be that Cuckmann thought that would have made him be "profound" and "thought provoking". There are plenty of great works that are depressing. 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Heart of Darkness, Lonesome Dove, etc. However, there were a few things that made these writers masters of their craft and Neil a hack and that is:
- They didn't insert their fucking degenerate fetishes in their works.
- The morals and messages of their stories were ones that humans can relate to.
- We actually like many of the characters in these works that I mentioned.
- The characters struggles in these books are ones that humans can sympathize with.
- The characters in these books feel like real people and not self inserts.
No human being who isn't a terminally online Twitter user with their list of mental illnesses on their bio can relate to Ellie or Abby. There is nothing about them that makes the average human understand them and their struggles. They are just self inserts of Neil's ideology and fetishes. If Neil made the Last of Us 2 as a book and it came out 70 years ago he would have been one of the biggest laughing stocks in the literately world. Tolkien and C.S Lewis would have had contests where they would see who can read Neil's work the longest without laughing. Now in today's postmodern world Neil is considered a genius and "the master storyteller of our generation." If that doesn't tell you how dumb and far we have fallen as a species I don't know what will.