Well, for me what did it was that this is one of the first adult looks at violence that I've seen in a video game, played straight...

So far it's either been one of two things: A clearly good protagonist blasting away aliens or nazis or zombies or splicers driven insane by EVE, enemies who are either clearly bad or clearly mindless. You know, cowboys vs. indians shit, the type of black-and-white mentality of infancy. They're bad, I'm good, they're dead. No further questions necessary.

Or, a clearly indifferent protagonist mowing down nameless civilians, cops, bystanders, targets, hookers, what have you-- GTA, Red Dead if you play it that way-- hell, I shot a man in Armadillo for catching me out as a poker cheat, and there he was the very next day working behind the counter at the general store. I went from killing in a black-and-white world to killing in a purely grey one, every kill blurring together until it just doesn't matter, very adolescent, very uncaring.

But here... these men were just other survivalists. For a couple moments I got the sense that maybe they were morally inferior to our hero Joel, perhaps fantasizing that they were plunderers and rapists, or that they had hurt his family. That fantasy faded when Joel emerged with his gun to one of their heads and the other stopped shooting... Why would truly heartless men care if their compatriots died? The captive was old... maybe he was the other man's father? Uncle? The man who taught him how to scavenge and survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Didn't matter. Joel splattered his brain across the wall three seconds after he hesitated, and knocked his captive out. That left me feeling like they were all simply trying to survive and Joel just happened to be the one who did. Nobody was clearly good, nobody was clearly bad. And I got to see their faces close enough for long enough that I felt like they were individuals, not just stick figures I mowed down in my stolen Lamborghini.

I also felt like when Joel peeked around that corner and choked that first man out, he made a choice, and he taught Ellie that such a choice was acceptable... he could have tiptoed past, or left altogether. Maybe those choices would be fatal cowardice, in his world. Maybe they don't have the luxury of living like that anymore, maybe there aren't enough resources left to just avoid others, they have to kill or be killed.

Why did he do that? Why did he kill those men? I was left wondering. I never wonder why Master Chief kills an elite, or why John Marston shoots a bandito. An elite never looked back up at me in terror as I held a shotgun to its bleeding mouth, and it never managed to get off half of the word "Don't!" before I embedded its teeth into five square feet of a hardwood floor. And it certainly never made me cringe.