![]() ![]() ![]() The violence is extreme, sometimes uncomfortable, and consequential. This game pulls the occasional horror trick on you, sending you falling through a floor into a dark basement full of zombies or confronting you with horrendous Resident Evil-inspired new variants on the infected, but the scariest parts for me were when I was probing through seemingly empty buildings, or hiding in a corner praying that guard dogs wouldn’t sniff me out. But more often it feels intense and dramatic immense relief descended on me every time I made it through a scene unscathed. Very occasionally this felt slightly farcical once I was stuck hiding on top of a shipping container, having exhausted all my ammo for every weapon, waiting for an opening to dash to the door I needed to get through to end the scene. More often, I was forced into desperate, scrabbling combat, trying not to get overwhelmed, wasting bullets in a panic. The violence is extreme, sometimes uncomfortable, and consequential It is usually difficult but possible to sneak past undetected or run away from fights, but good luck finding the best paths through knots of soldiers or navigating a subway station full of zombies on your first try. Ellie can take care of herself, but I spent much of this game feeling horribly imperilled. This isn’t a game that makes you feel powerful. There is shooting and molotov cocktails, and even a flamethrower at one point, but there is also an awful lot of hiding, running away, and creeping through long grass, desperately hoping not to be found. Before long, she comes into contact with the remaining human residents of the city: the remnants of a well-equipped militia and the unsettling followers of a brutal cult, whistling creepily to each other as they hunt Ellie down. Abandoned storefronts and apartment buildings might hide notes from doomed former residents, scrap with which to fix up Ellie’s weapons or craft improvised explosives and health kits – or dormant infected ready to tear her to bits. Vegetation grows through the cars rooted to the highway and rusting skyscrapers preside over ominously empty streets. The city has been ravaged first by the military, then by the infected, and finally by nature. But a traumatic event drives her to leave the relative safety of Jackson on a revenge mission that takes her to the remains of Seattle. Since the events of The Last of Us (2013), she has been living in a stable community of survivors, making friends, learning the guitar, kissing girls at dances. We play as Ellie, a 19-year-old born a few years after a fungal illness devastated human civilisation, turning the afflicted into shambling, deformed husks and the world’s cities into overgrown relics. It is difficult to explain how exactly it does this without robbing players of the chance to experience it for themselves, but I will say this: no video game has ever gone to these lengths to humanise the enemy, or to interrogate the violence that it asks the player to perform. ‘B efore you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” So goes the saying popularly (if spuriously) attributed to Confucius – a proverbial truth that The Last of Us Part II explores, unflinchingly and sometimes gruesomely, for 30 hours. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |