a lot of people point to 2007 as “the year gaming started to decline” due to dumb and frankly odd reasons but when you can really start to pinpoint when modern gaming started to lose the plot with the last of us.

i don’t hate it, but you start to notice a lot of the gimmicks and nuances that would plague a lot of single player story driven AAA games in the future, like how it tries to blend cutscenes and gameplay together in a bit of an awkward way, or how the gameplay takes a backburner to show of the plot that you have to take VERY seriously cause SAD things happen and obviously that makes a plot good cause it made you feel an emotion. the plot also has to have a lot of semi obvious twists that have to be their cause… cause it just has to ok???

it didn’t really help that a buch of san fran art school drop outs started to take notice at the rise of gaming after the 2010s gave way to a new found interest in gaming as a sub culture thanks to the retro gaming community and the popularity of titles like halo and portal. to that kind of crowd, this was the first game that “took itself seriously” despite being the video game equivalent of the later walking dead seasons.

either way, i still don’t hate it as a game, but i hate what it did to gaming as a whole.