An enemy warrior poke their heads over the fence they were hiding in. With just one shot, they fell to the ground, dead. As their companions scrambled to attack or flee, they were quickly dispatched as well. In just a few minutes, dozens of formerly lifeless creatures sprawled across a room. This scenario plays out across dozens, if not hundreds, of video games. And in most of them, it’s fun.
Of course, art does not have to be fun to have merit. Lots of movies (Requiem for a Dream), TV show (Leftovers), and novels (American mentality) are unpleasant to experience but are still recognized as excellent works. The same principle applies to video games, but the nature of the medium creates complications. A movie only holds an audience’s attention for a few hours, but video games have to keep players engaged for much longer, which can last for tens of hours. And while performances and physical arts can be passively engaged, games require active participation.
Video games have been popular with the notion of putting fun aside for many years making players uncomfortable. Special Activity: Line request players consider the cost of war in its retelling of Dark heart, but its gameplay is indistinguishable from their violent shooters. Horror games like Resident Evil and Longer use horror traps to startle players, but only superficially, open to players towards the next suspense. Few games even try to make the player feel really bad, and with less success. However, it is completely possible and no game series has done it as well Our lastSpecifically Our Last Part 2.
To keep the audience engaged while making them feel uncomfortable, any piece of narrative media needs to have separate text. There’s no secret Our last shine in that respect. For nearly a decade now, Naughty Dog has received rave reviews for the story they create, and the story of Joel and Ellie (Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson do some of the best work of their careers, respectively. them) causing difficulties. Both games begin with a character — one child, one beloved — murdered defenseless. No scene is immune to the brutality of violence, which sets the tone for the games from the start. This remains true throughout the story, with numerous named characters being tortured, tortured, and killed. There are light and funny little moments, but the world of Our final bleak to the point of suffocating.
That’s what happens between cutscenes where Our last makes a difference in terms of making the audience nervous. The original game did an admirable job when it was released in 2013 on PlayStation 3, a famous difficult system to develop a game on. Anyone who’s played the game can remember the first time a Clicker, one of the worse non-Zombie strains infected with a post-pandemic fungal infection, ripped Joel’s throat out with his teeth. And the Bloater mini-boss ripping off Joel’s face with his jaw remains one of the most gruesome deaths in the game. But like in all great zombie media, it’s what we do with others that matters most.
Our last used the graphical fidelity granted by the PlayStation 3 (and later the PlayStation 4’s upgrade when the game was released in 2014 on that console) to show the brutality that Joel inflicted on the human body. People. Exit wounds open on enemies hit by bullets, their lifeless eyes looking lifeless. The game’s shotgun, issued at the beginning of the story, carries enough power to rip limbs at close range. The human body is both beautiful and fragile, and suffering so much carnage on it is deeply unsettling.
Our Last Part 2, was designed specifically for the PlayStation 4 and leverages years of graphical and technical advancements, making players feel worse about their actions. All the same gory characterization there, with Ellie showing more ruthlessness than Joel in her hand-killing sequences, rendered in stunning and nauseating detail. Part 2The story of the story, a meditation on revenge at any cost, is much darker than Part 1 and the level of violence displayed matches it. But not just the level of violence or description but Part 2 used to confront players; that is its immediate consequence.
