I’m going to start this one off by gushing over some details that I loved, before getting into the meat of my thoughts on it. It’s rare nowadays for a game to impress me with realistic graphics, but as with the first game, The Last of Us Part II has managed to do it again. Combined with outstanding performances by every actor in the game, the graphics allow for characters to convey a certain subtlety in their expressions which no other game at present can match, and do things naturally which previously would have been firmly in uncanny valley territory. Also, whatever they did to model these characters at different ages is equally impressive, as the changes are subtle enough to notice, but not at all overly dramatic, and lends a greater sense of realism to the game. Additional kudos to this game for having one of its two protagonists be a muscular woman who actually manages to look like a real person, which is all too rare in video games. Dina is also a great character, and everything with her Jewish heritage in the synagogue scene is very well done. One last little detail that I adored: Abby having acrophobia and having a visual effect to show her vertigo when she gets near a ledge, and having her character react appropriately, is really well done. As someone with acrophobia I feel seen.

Alright so those are the little details I loved that really helped this game be something special, now time for me to delve headfirst into the discourse. There’s been a decent amount of criticism of this game for just being “one big guilt trip” and I don’t really agree with this take. The overarching plot of the game is a classic cost of revenge story, and I think what this game excels at, is putting you in the shoes of its two protagonists. Throughout the game, I was never personally on the same page as Ellie as to what the right course of action was, however, I was so engrossed in her perspective that I could absolutely understand why she would do what she does. For me, the game was an excellently told character story. However one thing the more regressive discourse around this game shed light on was, a lot of people did agree with Ellie’s quest for revenge, and for those people, I could see this game being a well needed guilt trip, because it makes the bold choice of having you play as Abby halfway through, the character Ellie is hunting, and empathize with her. And it seems like this game is a much needed lesson for many players about the dangers, and ultimately the emptiness of revenge and factionalism.

I played this game on the hardest difficulty, which for me was perfect, as it was the difficulty which most reinforced the tone and themes of the game in my playthrough. I could see playing this on a lower difficulty and getting too much of a power fantasy vibe from it. However for me, I always felt like I was searching for just enough resources to get by, and the enemies were threatening enough that it wasn’t in my best interest to try to overpower them at every turn. Also the dark realism of the game’s world had me making choices as a player that weren’t forced on me, but I naturally made as I thought about the morality of Ellie and Abby’s journey. For example you get molotovs and a flamethrower, but I made the conscious choice as a player to never use these on anything other than the infected, the game’s zombie equivalent, because it felt too cruel to use on a human character. I would’ve never made a choice like that if I felt like the game was a power fantasy.

Anyways, between this game and the first game, this series now accounts for two out of the four times I’ve ever cried at a video game. Ultimately it was how the game tragically portrayed forgiveness, specifically forgiveness given too late, that brought out emotions in me that few games do. The fact that this game managed to generate so many different thoughts and perspectives is indicative of how, in many ways, it isn’t overburdened with giving players what they want, which is a rare thing in big budget AAA games. All of this is why this series remains one of my favorites, and gets a high recommendation from me.

This is the first time I've ever really been thoroughly disappointed with a mainline entry in the Halo series. The easiest way to tell this is just by the fact that it's the only campaign in the series that I played for a bit, put down, and then didn't return to until months later. Usually I binge the campaigns of these games in a couple of sittings. A lot of this is due to the fact that rather than having a carefully curated series of levels, they gave this game the dreaded Ubisoft Open World treatment. So many hours of going around a very bland open world that isn't even nice to look at, and fighting to take over very samey feeling bases to capture, before I engaged with anything even slightly interesting in the story. Not that Halo Infinite has much of a story to offer at all.

Apparently the story of Halos 4 and 5 weren't crowd pleasers, but I liked the arc they were headed in. While the original trilogy had a lot to do with religious fanaticism and the evils that can be perpetrated under such faith; 4 and 5 dealt a lot with the evils that could be perpetrated with unethical science. This all culminated in Halo 5's ending, in which Cortana, a military created AI, decides to take over the galaxy in what she views as an attempt to use superior AI intelligence to govern peace across the galaxy, and exterminate anyone who resists. Also in the ending of Halo 5, we are teased with Master Chief encountering Dr. Halsey for the first time in who knows how many years. A doctor who oversaw the Spartan program which kidnapped children and experimented on them in order to transform the ones who survived into rebellion-crushing super-soldiers for the UNSC.

Halo Infinite drops all of these themes that had built up over the previous two games in order to shove in a cartoonish (even for Halo) villain who leads a faction that you have not heard of unless you had played Halo Wars 2. The game starts in media res with Master Chief getting utterly destroyed by a character we do not know, in the midst of an attack we know nothing about. And it's with this jarring introduction that we realize that everything interesting we had expected to follow-up Halo 5, has already happened off-screen in between games. So yeah, Cortana had gathered every AI in existence to launch a successful coup against every government in the galaxy, took control over the Halo rings, and had planet destroying weapons at her disposal, and she just got taken down between games. The player has no part in it, nor do they have any part in any kind of confrontation between Dr. Halsey and Master Chief. This is like if they had ended Halo 2 with "What are you doing, Chief?" "Sir, finishing this fight." and then in Halo 3 you discover that they finished the fight in between games and now the Didact is whooping your ass and you never got any buildup as to who he is. This game leans a lot harder into the emotional relationship between Master Chief and his new Cortana than any of the previous games did. But again, this would have been much more interesting had it been done with the Cortana we already know and who already had an unfinished arc set up for her to complete in this game.

One last quick thought on the primary antagonist you spend most of this game in competition with, and his astonishing levels of one-noteness. When you finally beat this guy in a boss fight, Master Chief kind of gingerly sets him down and is asked to "Tell them, I died well." and when your companion who you were rescuing sees this, he asks you why you treated him with respect in death, when he was so monstrous to you. To which Master Chief responds: "Yes. But at the end he was just a soldier. Hoping he'd done the right thing. Questioning his choices." and all I can say is that's a hell of an assumption to make there, Chief! We as the players really only know this guy as a genocidal maniac who is willing to let countless of his own men die bringing us to him. If I'm being generous I guess I could say that at this point we know that Cortana had death-starred his home-world and so perhaps he views exterminating humanity as an act of protection for his people, but that's being really generous. If the game had given us literally any indication that this dude was not twirling his figurative mustache every moment of the day, then Chief's words might have landed with any impact at all, but as it is that was just a incredibly weird thing for him to say.

Apart from the story and the Ubisoft Open Worldification of Halo, I've only really got one major thing to say about the mechanics and difficulty balancing of the campaign. The reason I've only got one big thing to say, is that the fully upgraded grapple hook is so unbelievably broken that once I got it, I could melee my way through all of Heroic difficulty. It feels good to use but it's detrimental on a larger scale because it also makes every encounter feel very one-note as I rarely had to use any other tactic to win a fight. It actually turns grunts into the most threatening enemy for a large portion of the game oddly enough, only because they will sometimes whip out a plasma grenade as you're zipping towards them.

Multiplayer in this game is fine. I come back to play fiesta whenever I need to kill some time and it's fun enough because Halo mechanics have just always felt really good to play with. But there's not a whole lot of innovation here I feel like, especially when you're comparing the leap between other games in the series. The equipment is there and as everyone will tell you, the grapple hook is a standout that turns you into Spartan-Spider-Man, but it's not like you have that equipped most of the time in multiplayer. Multiplayer also lacks a lot of the more fun and unconventional modes I loved in previous games. Aside from fiesta, you're not going to find anything like shotty-snipers or rocket race in here as of yet.

I like this one for many of the same reasons I liked Secret Little Haven. It's got a lot of nice queer stories that I haven't really seen explored before, especially when it comes to Spring Leaves No Flowers' story about an asexual and aromantic character discovering that about themselves. All the stories have very sweet and positive relationships which I loved. I almost expect for something awful to happen in these kinds of stories as a sort of "look how awful the world is!" and so when you expect the awful thing to happen and it turns out that characters are more understanding than you might have feared, it's real nice!