I loved the Uncharted games and have always thought that the first level of TLOU:PI is one of best set-piece intros in gaming history, up there with FFVII's "Bombing Run". If you suspect that this is me buttering you up for a takedown, you'd be correct. I have some major issues with TLOU.
Like a lot of modern zombie media, it eschews the genre's initial thrust towards satire of race/class issues to instead play them straight, presenting a survivalist power fantasy that edges a little too close to colonialist sympathies. The admitted beauty of its settings actually makes this issue worse: players are supposed to admire the despoiled wilderness, cities and towns rendered bucolic via violent depopulation. This is only broken by the continued clashing of human/formerly human fighters and soldiers; there are still too many people.
Finding out that one of PII's subplots was meant to be an allegory of the Israel/Palestine conflict made things click hard, especially remembering how PI's development difficulties (famously, Amy Hennig being forced to lead a push to force Neil Druckmann to change the original plan to make Clickers female-only) dovetailed "grossly" with the eventual story (one where almost every prominent female character is killed brutally on-screen). What was supposed to be a thoughtful exploration of human nature, as literary as it was interactive, turned out to be just another [redacted] [redacted] power fantasy along the lines of Call of Duty. Maybe worse, for the pretense.
Like a lot of modern zombie media, it eschews the genre's initial thrust towards satire of race/class issues to instead play them straight, presenting a survivalist power fantasy that edges a little too close to colonialist sympathies. The admitted beauty of its settings actually makes this issue worse: players are supposed to admire the despoiled wilderness, cities and towns rendered bucolic via violent depopulation. This is only broken by the continued clashing of human/formerly human fighters and soldiers; there are still too many people.
Finding out that one of PII's subplots was meant to be an allegory of the Israel/Palestine conflict made things click hard, especially remembering how PI's development difficulties (famously, Amy Hennig being forced to lead a push to force Neil Druckmann to change the original plan to make Clickers female-only) dovetailed "grossly" with the eventual story (one where almost every prominent female character is killed brutally on-screen). What was supposed to be a thoughtful exploration of human nature, as literary as it was interactive, turned out to be just another [redacted] [redacted] power fantasy along the lines of Call of Duty. Maybe worse, for the pretense.