I'm not gonna deny it sounds cheap on paper, but again, story elements have to be judged in the greater context of the plot, the tone, and all the corollaries of a story.
It drives me nuts when people complain that characters are just turned into "tools" or "objects", because that's what a character, within a story, is supposed to be.
And that's where a lot of these stupid "tv-tropes" style complains usually stem from, you extrapolate the character as separate from the story, when really, it's all just gears in the same mechanism.
Again, as far as revenge plot goes, i think killing your love interest is about as trite as you could go (maybe next to killing off your kid
.. even John Wick had to deviate on "puppy"
) but we'll see how they go about it.
After all humanity's been telling the same couple of stories with different frosting on them, for a while now.
There are ways you could go to make it not as obvious.
For example use the past game's experience (of the other girl dying) to blindside both Ellie and the audience into expecting something, and then pull the rug from under them.
It's not like the repetition of a theme can't be used to good effect.
Or you could go like Jonathan Glazer's Birth, where you find out the idea of a person, and the reality that comes out after their death, clash on the protagonist and their delusion.
Of course if they just use it to move through the usual stages of "revenge is a poison blah blah", i'm skeptical they'll be able to extract much juice from that angle.
