I’ve written a lot aboutThe Last of Us, both in its original video game form as well as the HBO television adaptation.The Last of Us Part 2was especially formative for my understanding of video games, and in some ways it changed the way I view the world and my own relationships.
The series, however, is undeniably bleak. It’s peppered with horror and tragedy, and though there are light moments of beauty, each game explores dark themes that often veer into nihilism and pessimism.
Now we know thatThe Last of Us Part 3 will eventually be made, and there’s no reason it won’t be as dark and pessimistic as the two games that came before it. After all, the series is set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with dangerous monsters and even more dangerous people. Both games explore flawed protagonists who do terrible things, turning them into the villains in other people’s stories. These are not happy, light-hearted games, and I’m not sure I’m emotionally prepared to play another in today’s world.
Because have you looked around lately? Everythingsucks. Climate change is spiralling even further out of control than it already was, and the cost of living is rising while wages stay the same. Companies get richer and CEOs become billionaires while the people doing the actual labour struggle to afford rent. The industry I work in faces layoffs every week, and every week I see a new wave of talented, hardworking developers and journalists struggling to find work. It increasingly feels like everything is being made to extract the most money possible from consumers to their detriment. Wars are being waged and children are dying in them. Everywhere I look, there is a reason to lose hope that the world will ever start getting better.
I’ve found that recently, turning to more optimistic media has helped. I wrote about howLike A Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, inspires me to face the world with kindness and optimismdespite being naturally inclined to nihilism, and that’s the kind of media I think the world needs. Like Kasuga, I always want to find a reason to keep moving forward, even if that reason is as small as getting to pet a cat on the street. If we don’t keep moving forward, how will the world ever get better? Giving up and resigning ourselves to certain doom only ensures we won’t have a chance at making things better.
The Last of Us is not an optimistic series, and that’s where its strengths lie. It dives deep into heavy themes and explores what drives people to do evil things, but that potential for darkness is becoming increasingly difficult for me to swallow. As everything around me gets worse, I’m not particularly inclined to want to play more games about how terrible people are.
Statements from director Neil Druckmann have made it even harder to engage with a potential third game after hetold The Washington Postthat the second game’s themes were inspired by his regret of his own feelings of rage and revenge when he saw a video of two IDF soldiers being killed by a mob. The politics of the game itself have also been compared to Israel and Palestine, with the gamecriticised for dehumanising language towards its stand in for Palestinians. When the writer of a game about ending cycles of violence implies that in this one case, violence is justified, it’s hard to believe that any of it means anything. It feeds right back into the cruelty of the world.
I don’t doubt that whatever Naughty Dog makes will, at the very least, be moving and thought-provoking. After all, that’s what the studio is good at, and it’s proven its skill over and over again. For all we know, this game will lean into the moments of hope and lightness that we’ve seen peppered into previous games, showing us another way to look at an objectively terrible world. But if it doesn’t, I don’t know how much more bleakness my spirit can take. It will be a long time before we see this game come to light, and a lot could change in that time. Things could be better. Things could be worse. Only time will tell, but I know that if things stay as they are, it’s going to be really hard for me to face whatever The Last of Us Part 3 has to tell me.
