It had taken Sam a little while to get the hang of the game. He was an excellent shot with a real gun in his hands, and the situations that avatar-Nate was put in were not unlike situations he himself had been in-- situations which he would have handled capably in real life. Translating his instincts into pushing buttons, however, was an entirely different set of muscle memory skills, and even though he had played a video game or two before, it took some getting used to.
Her dramatics didn't help, but they didn't hurt much either; after he'd gotten into the right mode, the right mindset, he was able to listen to her helpful directions and register the rest in the back of his mind. He did feel more than a little bit guilty when Nate died, partly for Chloe's sake and partly because he felt his own responsibility towards keeping the man alive, even if he was only a virtual one.
It occurred to him as he played that the video game differed from all the other types of source materials that way. Movies and books didn't require coordination or skill to get from beginning to end, aside from basic comprehension, but it was possible to have a character die in a video game long before they were actually supposed to. What that meant, he didn't know, but he filed it away as something to think about later.
Finally, he got properly into the rhythm of the game, and with her help, completed it. He sat back to watch the final scene, vaguely amused by the conversation between Nate and Elena. "It was," he agreed. He almost felt as though he ought to be wounded the way that Nate was after going through all of that, even though he knew it had only been a virtual experience.
Aside from that, he'd gotten a peek into her life, with her permission; despite the differences in the video game medium, they'd still managed to tell a fairly fleshed out story with relatable characters. And he'd seen quite a bit more about Chloe than he'd known before, even in the brief glimpses they'd shown. Everything she'd said to him when she'd first arrived was now in an entirely different perspective. But it was obviously even more unsettling for her, since she'd lived it, or most of it.
Deciding (for the moment, at least) that he'd let her be the one to initiate any more serious conversation about it, he leaned back on his hands and said lightly, "He's absolutely right about the clowns, you know."