Well, that’s that then. Overall I really enjoyed it, without doubt the best videogame adaption so far. I was surprised just how faithful to the game the show stayed, it really does follow the main story (and DLC) pretty much scene for scene. There were a couple of bits inserted to flesh some characters out, and some sections of the game were skipped, but overall it was very faithful. In fact, maybe too faithful.
Spoilers Below
My main complaint about the ending was that to me it felt a little bit rushed, but also that it seemed to lack the ambiguity of the game’s finale. I think this is partially down to the TV show not having the constant escalation of violence that the game has. Out of that context Joel’s actions in the Firefly hospital seem very extreme. But crucially you also don’t experience things from Joel’s point of view, running through the halls of the dark hospital desperately trying to find Ellie before it’s too late. It’s only afterwards that it dawns on you that your actions were maybe not the correct ones (insert the “are we the baddies?” meme). This is also crucial because it forms the foundations of the second game. I think in the TV show it’s much more apparent that Joel has done a very bad thing in a way that’s less clear in the videogame.
I think this is slightly ironic, as one criticism of TLOU TV show has been that it’s basically just adapting the cutscenes, what with TLOU being such a filmic experience anyway. However when it came down to it the TV show struggled to adapt the game’s most crucial scene because it just couldn’t put the viewer into Joel’s shoes in the way the game could. I think this is why the story of the TLOU is actually a very good videogame story.