janusz_gg reviewed The Last of Us Part II

I played about nine hours and stopped, and I've thought about why for long enough that I'm comfortable writing it down.

I did not enjoy a single minute. Not in the way where a game is bad — it's obviously not bad, it's made to a standard almost nothing else reaches. I mean that the experience of playing it was relentlessly unpleasant by design, and somewhere in hour eight I realised I was doing homework. Every encounter is grim. Every story beat takes something away. There is no relief anywhere in it, and after a while the absence of relief stopped feeling like craft and started feeling like a lack of range.

I know this is the point. People keep telling me it's the point. I'm not sure "the point" is a defence when the result is a thing I actively did not want to pick up.

A D is me being honest about the experience rather than the achievement. Plenty of people will rate this an S and I understand exactly why.