Has anybody else's stomach hurt through the entirety of a single-player campaign before? Because this was easily the most emotionally taxing story I have played through. I couldn't get a moment's rest throughout the whole thing. And only at the end did I finally receive a small moment of relief before I thought it about it some more and felt like s**t again.

Seriously. Did this game have such a large effect on you too?

Absolutely. And I'm sure that it was intentional.

... one of my favourite movies of all time, if not my favourite is Requiem for a Dream. It is a movie that by the end of it, I felt emotionally wrecked and I'll probably never have the heart to watch it again.

I feel exactly the same way about The Last of Us - but it wasn't an overbearing, fist to the stomach type feeling like Requiem for a Dream, it was more... intellectual. More insidious. The ending took me a while just to get my head around how I felt about it, and even longer for me to respect just how fucked up it is (depending on how you look at it).

While playing TLoU, I couldn't play it for long before I just had to put it down, simply because the game was so grim. Despite how much I like the core gameplay of it, this game is not fun. It isn't inviting. It isn't even enjoyable a lot of the time. But it is masterfully done. I actually think that in terms of story and some of the core mechanics, The Last of Us has pushed the whole medium forward.

So yes, I certainly had a near constant emotional reaction to it.