10 Video Games With Little Hope For Humanity
2. The Last Of Us Part II
The Last of Us is a frequently terrifying and unpleasant game for sure, but it at least has major flecks of hope, centered around the surrogate familial relationship forged between Joel and Ellie.
The Last of Us Part II beats that relationship to death with a golf club, quite literally, in its opening hours, for a sequel that while a masterful feat of technical engineering, is also one of the most relentlessly miserable and upsetting video games ever made.
Sure, there are fleeting flashbacks that remind us of sunnier times, but the bulk of the game's 25 hours are defined by a never-ending cycle of vengeance-fuelled violence.
That Ellie doesn't kill Joel's murderer Abby at the end is about as optimistic as Part II gets, but the fact that Ellie only accepts the soul-destroying nature of revenge after two-dozen hours of killing people hardly makes her a portrait of human virtuousness.
The game is better defined by the aggressive suspicion with which humans view each other, inviting the usual "Who are the real monsters?" post-apocalyptic hand-wringing.
Considering that the current pandemic has laid bare the ugliest and most selfish aspects of humanity, if a far deadlier plague such as the Cordyceps brain infection ever hit the real world, it's easy to believe the outcome would be similar to, if not worse than, the one depicted in these games.