Ellie is not the hero from the big studio game, but your brain keeps making that connection anyway, and the game knows it. It pokes at it in a cheap, dirty way. You are walking through this ruined world, everything fucked, buildings broken, corpses of society everywhere, and instead of going full survival horror, it slows down and asks how horny you can get when the world already ended. It feels wrong in a way that is kind of the point. She is skinny, she looks young, she talks like some brat who grew up on broken TikTok clips and old world stories, and your choices keep dragging her into sexual trouble or out of it. Sometimes the story pretends you are protecting her, other times you can push her into situations where protection is clearly not your priority. The game does not lecture you. It just sits there, showing you this girl with sc*** knees, cheap hoodie, hungry eyes, and lets you poke around her morals and clothes.

The visual novel format makes it all sharper and somehow more cruel. You tap, you read, you choose, you wait. In one scene you reach an old quarantine checkpoint where a couple of raiders turned the place into a porn dungeon. They trade food for favors, and the game gives you that fake “hero choice” moment. Do you walk away with her starving and pissed, or do you tell her to get on her knees and earn their rations. The writing does not hide what is going on. Cock in face, tears, humiliation, the whole hentai mess, but still in this pretend-serious post apocalypse frame. And then in the next scene you two sit by a fire, she tries to joke about it, you get a dialogue option to act like nothing happened, and it somehow hits harder than if the game tried to moralize. I liked that it lets the dirty stuff be dirty. At the same time, some dialogues feel written by someone who learned English from Pornhub comments and PlayStation subtitles, which is funny, then annoying, then funny again. There is one bit where an infected encounter turns into a weird tentacle-ish fantasy and the game treats it like just another bad day, and here I realized: ok, this is not about realism at all, it is just leaning on the parody of that famous story and ripping off all the emotional weight to feed your dick. In a strange way, it works. In another way, it is trash. I still bookmarked it.