WIRED: "The Last of Us Part II tries to be profound. It fails"

Yet the ironic thing is that Kotaku and Polygon gave out the most negative reviews for this game of any major outlets. If anything they're associated with "woke culture" more than anyone else. The scores line up but I don't buy this being the case

There's two reasons this game got universal praise. The first is perceived confirmation bias. Reviewers I feel are often afraid to give a game a score that's too different from what they think audiences expect. Quite frankly they have good reason to be, there have been plenty of people who have been harassed for not buying into the unanimous praise for fan favorite games. In this case I think they misread the room here. The second is there has been a push for games to be a "serious artistic medium" by both critics and certain developers ever since TLOU was called the "Citizen Kane of gaming" in 2013. I believe someone important on twitter described TLOU part 2 by saying: "when every other game is John Wick, The Last of Us Part 2 is Schindler's List". Critics are desperate to praise any major game that "proves" that gaming is a "profound" and "serious" medium. Ironically it just shows how little people seem to think of games when they feel games need to emulate other storytelling mediums to have any artistic value.

/r/Games Thread Parent Link - ired.co.uk