A game permeated with shame: not just through the course of the story, which is fine, but in its very design: there is a disgraceful amount of self-hatred in modern videogame storytelling, as if they would much rather be movies or television shows, but organization gatekeeping forces them to an interactive medium. The Last of Us is a game designed in a manner not dissimilar to the worst of early 2010s prestige TV (think, like, Low Winter Sun) but with lazy video game time-filler like "collect 40 dog tags."

If you like zombie stories, it's a good zombie story. But if you like good video game stories, it is very much not one, and the praise for its narrative is antithetical to the development of gaming as its own medium capable of rich, emotionally fulfilling tales.