[The winner of this award is The Last Of Us Part II]
[Voiced by Duke]

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. For three console generations, Naughty Dog established themselves as frontrunners of both ground-breaking technical achievements and cinematic mastery. However, while The Last of Us made quite the splash when it dropped towards the end of the PS3’s life, the praise it received was largely directed towards its story and graphics, NOT gameplay.

Riding the tail end of the “zombie survival” trend, The Last of Us earned a slew of praise, and a mountain of awards, in large part due to Naughty Dog's attention to detail: through subtle world building and visual storytelling, they delivered an affecting character drama set against the backdrop of a gritty, depressing world that made everyone feel like shit. In other words: it was the vidya-equivalent of Oscar bait.

Seven years later, however, Neil Druckmann managed to go a step beyond making us feel just how horrible their world was by… making us feel just how horrible their world was. Just, you know, in a different, unintended way. In the end of this 25-hour slog of self-induced misery, Druckmann’s penchant for torture porn really put the player in quite an uncomfortable position, one that could only have been even more awkward for the developers who had to sit there recreating the company-mandated Liveleak gore videos he probably emailed around the office. “Check out this manga,” Neil probably texted the mocap director, who had been awake for 35 hours at that point, “at the end, a dude puts her baby in a blender lmao.”

While The Last of Us as a series has never really been defined by its gameplay, at least the sequel has a solid story and well-written characters to fall back on, right? Well, what do you get when you take a game with mediocre gameplay and a great story and strip away the story while simultaneously taking a dump all over the original? You get… this. A game that sits you down and shovels an entire day of misery down your throat with no payoff. A game that goes out of its way to destroy the main appeal of its predecessor. A game that sets up the most hateable character imaginable, and then forces you into her shoes for the next ten hours. A game that revels in making you do horrible things and then chastises you for doing them. A game that /v/ voted the most hated game of 2020.

So to Neil and his three remaining employees, good job. Add this award to your pile, you didn’t even have to pay for this one.