TheQuartering [12/12/2020]
I don’t like this game, maybe one day I’ll give it another chance and likely should.
Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part II is one of those video games that’s pretty much destined to win Game Of The Year, whether or not it deserves the award.
There’s so much heft and gravitas and industry-wide groupthink with this sort of game. People say it’s super deep and so it is. People say it’s a masterpiece and so it becomes the critical darling, swept up in a wave of praise. It ticks off all the right boxes with all the right people, to the point where saying it’s not the best game of the year is almost verboten.
It makes you one of them. You know the type. Those neckbeard basement dwelling types who rail against SJWs and think women have no place in video games. If you don’t get into line and act like The Last Of Us Part II isn’t basically Schindler’s List or something, you must be one of them. If you do like it, on the other hand, you’re probably a Social Justice Warrior of the very worst stripe, or so the endless, tired internet outrage warriors tell us. With us or against us, amirite?
I’m not sure I’d classify Naughty Dog’s ultra-violent, ultra-bleak, ultra-dark revenge fantasy focused on two white chicks who want to kill one another as “woke” exactly, though it seems that much of the woke scene has embraced it as such. If anything, as Kotaku’s review put it, “The game’s diversity, which I appreciated at the beginning, just felt like an equal opportunity for different kinds of people to suffer as the game went on.”
They make you kill a dog, man. A dog.