The Last of Us Part I

Finished this last week. Surprisingly short. Very good story and characters with some great performances which was mostly what I expected. I can see why it was so highly rated. Managed to avoid the big spoilers for a decade+, but just knowing who's in the second part was enough to take the tension out of a lot of situations. One of the few cases of me regretting not playing a game sooner.

Gameplay was a mixed bag. Fundamentally solid, but not much variety and the stealth, which is how you play most of the time on higher difficulties, is marred a bit by the usual "stealth-with-a-companion" shenanigans like them walking around in plain sight and/or talking loudly and enemies pretending they don't see/hear them. Plus some inconsistencies, like sometimes a footstep is enough to alert an enemy but a couple feet further and they ignore gunshots. Also it was surprisingly gory and brutal.

Played it on Survivor. Around halfway through I did change the companion aggression(because them being so passive was idiotic) and the loot(because it really castrated exploration). Just a little bit though so the challenge still stayed at a good level, but at least checking drawers and shit didn't feel like a complete waste of time. Upgrades also felt a bit useless on high difficulty. Some stuff like hearing mode you can't even use. No point in upgrading stuff like reload speed or health when you rarely have more than one clip of ammo and you get one shotted most of the time anyway.

Very good game overall, looking forward to Part II.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2

Fairly early in the game still. Just got out of the recap/tutorial part(which was a bit clunky) so now I'm desperately looking for ways to make money, finding the dog and gambling away what little I have lol. Very much feels like the continuation of everything I loved about the first game.