The Last of Us 2
Neil Druckmann was raised in Israel and has stated that the game’s “cycle of violence” theme is modeled after his understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The game both-sides the conflict between the main factions, making you switch perspectives between the two main characters repeatedly.
The ending of that game for me was a drudge. I was invested so I kept playing, but emotionally I just wanted it to be over and I had a feeling very similar to watching someone self destruct their life and knowing you can’t stop them. I felt pity and sadness and frustration. Apparently that was not the intended effect:
“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.