In the last week, I played marathon sessions of The Last of Us and The Last of Us II. I usually play/finish about one video game per year. I finished two in the last week. If catharsis helps you deal with trauma (it does help me), these are two of the best games ever made.
But they are also incredibly heartbreaking, violent, and disturbing, from the very first moments. I cried several times, just short of sobbing at one point. I used to regularly write about horror (alongside and intermingling with pedagogy). These games made me miss that work.
One of the strengths of the horror genre is its ability to deal directly with issues that would be taboo in other genres. Politics, race, religion, gender, sexuality, grief, loss. All of those are in The Last of Us with an incredible nuance I’ve not seen in other games.
These are not games I’d recommend to most people at a moment like this one. At least not without basically all the content warnings. But, more than anything else, these games are about sublime nature, parenting, the ineffable parts of being human, and love.
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