2020
2020
Sins of the Father: The Last of Us Part II and the Limits of Empathy
This essay explores how The Last of Us’s frequent focus on the character Joel quietly erases the agency of its female characters, including Joel’s surrogate daughter Ellie, a main character in the first game who becomes the protagonist of The Last of Us Part II. Despite being the protagonist, Ellie is never allowed to develop as a character beyond the first game.
BUSY AND POOR: THE GENTLE VIOLENCE OF KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO
Kentucky Route Zero is not a violent game: it has no swords, no guns, no combat. It’s not a traditional horror game, either, with no jump scares or gore or monsters. And yet… it is a game about violence, and a game that uses horror elements to drive its themes home.
WHERE DO WE GO NEXT: KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO’S aNXIOUS aPPROACH TO hOPE
Sometime during the several hours that I played Kentucky Route Zero, I began to resent 5 Dogwood Drive. For the first four acts of the game, Dogwood Drive is mere legend—impossible to drive to, real enough that non-player characters offer directions to it, and important because it’s where the player characters need to make a delivery. But while getting to 5 Dogwood Drive is the goal of the game, it isn’t the point of it.
going through the motions: the mechanics of grief in gris
Unlike in real life, emotions in Gris are beautiful. The game, developed by Nomada Studio and released in 2018, tells the story of Gris, a young girl going through a difficult loss. The audience can fill in the blanks as to what Gris’s trauma was (or perhaps it’s just a proxy for our own) because the trauma isn’t the point. Gris is a game about healing in the aftermath.