Okay, so Abby bites off Ellie's fingers which means she can't play the guitar and be reminded of her adoptive father. That sucks. But why does Dina and her child leave them? Did they just want to put it in as a fuck you to the protagonist and/or the player who has undoubtedly become attached to her. Is there any reason why Dina would have abandoned Ellie? I thought they were supposed to be in WUV or something?
So, yeah, they just wanted to be super bleak for its own sake. That is not good writing. That is, in fact, very bad writing.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure it's possible to play the guitar less two fingers. Assuming Ellie is right handed, if the two lost fingers are the first two fingers on her right hand, she could use a pick or a pick substitute between ring, little finger, and thumb to play. If it's on her left hand, she could retrain herself to play left handed in a similar manner.
I know this is glurgy, but there was a story about a man who lost both his legs in a car accident, He kept upbeat about it by saying that before the accident there were 10,000 different things he could theoretically do that day, and without his legs there were 9,000. That's a reduction of only 10 percent.
(Of course, if Druckmann wanted to be super bleak, he could point out that the human mouth is absolutely crawling with pathogens and this being the brave new mushroom zombie world, the bitten off finger stumps are probably likely to get infected and it's a race to see whether sepsis kills her before a passing shroombie or marauder gets to her first because I doubt she's got an IV drip of amoxicillin in her pocket. But he's not bright enough to have thought of that.)
