So much for the human race

I could tell, in my relatively short time with The Last of Us Remastered, that it isn't a "bad" game; but it is bad for me. Or, I'm bad for it. Maybe both.

Naughty Dog has become quite good at writing sympathetic characters and engrossing stories; and the world of TLoU did a great job of pulling me in, at first. But the same controls and encounter designs that I hated in Uncharted are present here, and in a big way.

I'm not very good at sneaking, and I'm not very good at shooting. The Uncharted games - at least, after the first one - got me through these sequences on the strength of their Hollywood-style set pieces. I wanted to see what came next; I wanted it hard enough to continue trying to kill the ridiculous bullet-sponge mercenary in front of me.

But The Last of Us is set in a bleak, depressing world. It's magical, in its own way, but I have no particular desire to see what's beyond the next fungus monster. (I suspect that it's only more death and decay.) And so since the gameplay itself isn't compelling to me, there isn't really anything keeping me going.

I know that people will tell me that I'm an idiot for giving up on The Last of Us, and maybe, in time, enough of them will do so that I'll pick it back up. On its own, the game hasn't convinced me to return to it.