Fucking hell. Kotaku and Polygon have both trashed it, even though they were lining up to fellate Druckmann for muh inclusivity beforehand.
The burning question - are the reviewers at those organs still employed? There was a lot of the same talking points about "a queer woman" as the protagonist in both which implies they were probably given a fat press release and loads of "notice this" pointers, so they probably fellated it as much as they could in order to retain their jobs. Also none of them mentioned Abby. I'm guessing that Sony know that forcing you to play as a character who throttles to death the previous well developed protagonist and beats her father's brains out with a sand wedge isn't going to help with sales. Or they are still deluding themselves that this subversion of expectations will make people gasp, "oh my god, how profound" with one hand perched over their mouth as they stare at Druckmann's narrative genius.
Yet despite this, Harlan Ellison of all people did far better at a cynical, bleak world in 1996 with the adaptation of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. In it, you could only win that game and defeat AM (voiced by the man himself) by having your characters develop, identify the reasons why they were hand-picked as torture victims (Ted's narcissism, Benny's bloodlust, Ellen's inability to move on from past trauma, Gorrister's feelings of guilt, Nimdok's evil past) and then consciously guide them to change. Yes, IHNMAIMS is also a misery simulator (each character's story is designed to trigger them at every turn) but it features I. hope, and II. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.
All I get from this is that The Last Of Us: Part II must be really, really, bad to get criticism even at this stage from the access media. There's probably some utter shotgun-blasts of fail that they aren't allowed to tell us about.
