Seriously, every description of TloU I heard it sound like misery porn, the gameplay sounds partially made to be stressful and trying to avoid power fantasies.
I think I already said a variation of that, but it felt like having your cake and eating it, it's a bit of an oxymoron to have a game where you kill a hundred+ goons not be a violent power fantasy. The game had some options for stealth but just like Metal Gear Solid (which does a better job with this but still) it's a bit moot when confrontation is basically as viable as a game approach. Some Resident Evil games, despite how cornball the writing is, might be doing a better job there since you can't kill every enemy with the total ammo available (unless going to autist levels of using the knife I guess).
I think Naughty Dogs really took to heart the whole debate over the notion of ludonarrative dissonance* and addressed the tone of the story, but it's only half the battle. They "missed" that an extensive TPS game will, inherently, be a bombastic action romper with plenty of lurid violence that is supposed to be gratifying for the player. That's never gonna jive too well with an intimist, sober character drama. In truth it's probably not that they missed it but rather that Naughty Dogs can't, for commercial and brand purposes, just deliver a Journey or Invisible, Inc for an extravagantly funded flagship game. You can't really have the camera modestly look away for each kill. So I think the writing (and depiction) has to be heavy handed to compensate for the gameplay.
* Which is a very interesting debate but I don't think it's a game breaking flaw in most cases, especially not for good games. I mean, yeah, Uncharted story presentation has some issues with that but it's not a whole lot dumber than most action films in that aspect, though maybe heightened because games have by design crazy bodycounts.
