I just got into these games.
I have some cultural awareness of the story (blame all those golf memes) but had never actually played them. It's fun to be forming my own opinions about them in 2025, given that every video, article, etc., I see about them is clearly entrenched in this-or-that cultural narrative about them. Mostly avoiding interacting with the discourse until I've finished them (not entirely, as you can see below). I'm playing the PS5 remake,
The Last of Us Complete Edition, on Grounded. I like how it forces you to ration your ammo and other consumable items and won't let you see your HUD. Very tense experience.
I'm reading
The Mushroom at the End of the World concurrently and it is really shaping my take on the games. The book talks about "multispecies collaborative spaces" formed by "contamination" at "sites of encounter" following "disturbance" which is all poetic language for how human beings centre themselves in narratives in which there are actually other protagonists: animals, plants, fungi, collectively speaking, "landscapes," all negotiating and vying for their own existences. I swear it made me sympathize with
Cordyceps.
...The Road, 28 Days Later, and Children of Men...
This isn't really fair to
TLOU because of how formative this narrative is, particularly after
The Road. You could throw
The Walking Dead and Justin Cronin's
The Passage into the mix, alongside
Logan and
God of War. They all play with it a little. I think with TLOU's story, it's the situation with the Fireflies at the end. As a parent you can't really condemn Joel because you know you'd do the same thing he did. The theme of love as a potentially destructive force is explored well, I think. Reminds me of certain Sufi writings using metaphors of fire, moths consumed by flame, etc.
Watched this video a week or two back to get a little perspective and it was so much more balanced than the thumbnail implies.
Have been meaning to watch this but was afraid it might slant my views too much so saving it. Have to say, so far, I don't agree. Even just Bill living in a church and you leaving through it before going out into the wider world. From memory so might be slight paraphrase, "Nice place you got here." "Ha, yeah, well, you got anything to confess, now'd be the time to do it." The beauty of the stained glass window and the diffused light overhead. It did not seem like an insignificant beat.
Given the influence from
The Road which is very much an Irish-American Catholic novel about the mechanisms of grace in a fallen world, I refuse to believe that themes aren't in
TLOU somewhere, regardless of authorial intent. Redemption is a big part of Joel's story, and of parenthood in general. As McCarthy puts it, "He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
The age of zombies being threatening is over, it's all about zombiepuss now.
Fool. It was
always the age of zombussy.
