NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flamestrike" data-source="post: 8032255" data-attributes="member: 6788736">No, it's really not!The game is not a revenge arc, where the protagonist has something bad happen to them, then murders their way through a series of mooks and minor Bosses before confronting the BBEG and riding off into the sunset.You're used to that arc. It's used in literally nearly every action movie ever made, ever, from Commando to Rambo II, to Taken to the Punisher to whatever.And never once, in all that time, have you humanised the protagonists victims. The protagonist is always the 'hero' and 'justified' in their murderous quest. The antagonist (and their cronies) are always the 'villains' and dehumanised and deserving of murder. The protagonist is the good guy. The antagonist is the bad guy.This game is not about following that worn out story. What it does is cast a light on the hypocrisy of that story, and shine a light on how we dehumanise people. It shows the so called 'hero' from the POV of the people he or she ruthlessly murders. It shows you there is no 'hero', and there is no 'villain'; those things are subjective labels placed on people by other people, and they vary from person to person, depending on that persons perspective.That is the entire point of the game.Abby is clearly (generally) a good, kind, merciful and nice person, who had a loving, kind and caring father brutally murdered, her world turned upside down, and doomed to spend her entire life in the zombie apocalypse by a terrible murderous man (Joel).It's no co-incidence that Abbys story mirrors Joels. She loses someone she loves (her loss of her father mirrors Joels loss of his daughter), regains that connection when she bonds with Lev (in the same way Joel does with Ellie), is forced to make a terrible decision (murdering her own WLF comrades to escape with Lev), and escapes to find peace.Joel followed the same arc in the first game, but he was also a murderous, torturing monster. Abby on the other hand generally speaking (other than her murder and torture of Joel) is not.If you played the game, with no knowledge of Joel or Ellie, just as Abby, as a standard revenge arc for her (track down the man that murdered your father, and destroyed any chance of a cure), you would feel the same connection with her as the 'hero', and the 'just' character of the story, and would see Joel as the evil villain deserving of what he got.The fact you couldn't empathise with her, is the whole point. It should have you questioning why?The answer is you made her into the villain in your mind the instant she killed Joel. You dehumanised her and hated her. Her feelings, her ambitions, her life; none of that mattered anymore. She was the 'other' - the 'villain' - and someone who now only exists to be confronted and killed.It was a confronting and bold choice for a game to make. To shine a light on this uncomfortable truth, by making you play someone who - despite being a good person - is someone we have already labelled as the 'other' and can never stop hating.Even at the end of the game, I found myself unconsciously pushing the Square button hoping it would kill Abby.If I could critique the game, it's that it was too smart for its own good.</blockquote>

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