Tevis Thompson on The Last of Us: Left Behind
I love reading Tevis Thompson’s game criticism. It does for me what I think great criticism of any medium should do. Not tell me what I want to hear. Not reinforce my own perspective on a specific game or games in general, but broaden it, deepen it, and sometimes challenge it. His work tugs at the edges of my perspective and illuminates for me how there are so many angles from which to approach a thing and when it comes to games, most of us are stuck in approaching and evaluating them from a very narrow range of angles. Whether I agree with him about an individual game or not, he always expresses his perspective so clearly that it helps me understand my own perspective better, and to think about that game and games in general in different ways.
The Last of Us: Left Behind is one of my favorite games of this year.
On his website, Thompson has reviewed it and 29 other games (and counting) in 100 words each. His review of Left Behind captures what I love about the game more precisely and beautifully than anything else I’ve read. In doing so, they deepen my appreciation for what that game is doing. They let me love it even more. He wrote:
My favorite videogame moment so far this year focuses on the face of a teenage girl – freckled, flushed, screen-lit. She’s playing a broken arcade machine with her eyes closed, listening to her best friend narrate a Street Fighter fantasy. It’s an act of trust, of shared imagination. And in this moment, Ellie is seen.
Left Behind repurposes its AAA mechanics – the shooting (of waterguns), the lobbing (of bricks at cars), the quick-time-event (her face) – not for domination or survival but connection. It left me longing for entire games of altered verbs. Of fumbling connections. Games of seeing and being seen.
When I read that, I thought, yes, that’s it exactly. Left Behind is a game, a story, about two people tentatively reaching out to each other, taking risks, deciding to trust each other, to reveal themselves to each other, to let themselves be seen. Almost every AAA game is about domination through violence, or needing to resort to brutality to survive. Left Behind doesn’t escape this. But it is fundamentally about connection. Fumbling and beautiful and human.
You can read all of Thompson’s 100-word reviews here, and follow him on Twitter at tevisthompson.
Notes
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