The Last of Us - My Thoughts

Well today I finished the Naughty Dog game The Last of Us. I can't say I enjoyed it, as it's not really a subject matter one can enjoy. Instead, I'll say that it was great at what it was trying to accomplish. The gun play was shaky and imprecise, which is what you want from a game that makes you feel that you are constantly on the verge of  horrible death, and the hand to hand often left you exposed, as did stealth executions.
What the game does kind of well and poorly at the same time however, is play with expectations. As a player who's played many games, I have certain expectation of how the storyline will play out. While being brutal in the first few minutes, it's kind of expected. Later on though, the game will not give you what you expect, the storyline starts taking turns.
The biggest turns of the story however, do exactly what is expected. Sometimes the ambiguity of who lived or died lasted for only minutes, others for an entire "level". I would have preferred certain events to have played out as they seemed to at first, disliking how it eventually turned out.

Spoilers on how I thought things should have gone.
I would have preferred it if Joel died at the point he was impaled, and had Ellie finish the story. I think it would have been far better. I really like Joel, but to have the player think he's dead, hope he's not, then reveal he is in fact still alive is too expected.
Again at the end, I would have liked it if Ellie had been given the chance to except her fate and become a kind of martyr. She had the cure within her, and she should have given her life in order for there to be a cure. It would have been upsetting as I really bonded with the character, but it would have made this game truly a game of a generation to kill off all the protagonists.

Those are my honest thoughts on the game.

JG