Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an SN30 Pro+ controller, compatible with PC and Switch, courtesy of 8BitDo

Mark Whitfield

Atrocity exhibition

I realise joining the chorus of criticism of The Last Of Us Part II feels like something of a pile-on, for players if not reviewers, but having just completed the 20 gruelling hours, I have to second Anand Modha’s letter (E347) on what a waste of talent the whole enterprise is, in so many ways. What lesson are we exactly supposed to learn from a piece of art - and it is visually stunning - that essentially fetishises brutality, particularly when it seems to be telling you how bad killing is before forcing you to do it over and over again? Naughty Dog’s stock defence has been that this is a morality tale about violence which challenges the narrative of who the good guys and bad guys are. But if that’s the case, why depict every gruesome act with lingering arthouse shots of each and every new way of mutilating someone, ad nausea?

“When I go to an art gallery, it’s not like seven out of ten paintings I look at depict violence”

It wouldn’t be so difficult to stomach if Neil Druckmann didn’t claim such lofty ideals for the game. When so many marginalised groups endure violence as a day-to-day lived experience (Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari was an eye-opener for me), how much empathy did the creators really have for their own characters? The biggest waste is that for a story which could be about empowerment, of strong queer protagonists in a game which is clearly going to find its way into the homes of people who might not be natural soulmates, it’s a deeply conservative piece of work which values the individual over the collective, assumes the worst about humanity and offers no redemptive arc. You can’t redeem yourself if you want to.