The Road is a unique post-apocalyptic story. The aftermath doesn’t see the usual tropes of a world rebuilding, newly formed civilisations thriving, or the undead devouring whoever is left. It’s an empty world with next-to-no life—even the colours are drained away. All that’s left behind are scant survivors who cling to an existence not worth holding onto. It’s impossible to grow new food, there are no animals to farm, and so the remnants of humanity are left to slowly die out as they hoard a dwindling supply of decaying scraps. It’s bleak, but✨ more than 🐼anything, it’s oppressively lonely.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us was directly inspired by The Road, and almost perfectly tapped into the quiet of a dystopia that only faintly resembles the world we know, but the presence of zombies (or ‘infected’) diminishes that lonely feeling. We aren’t wandering an empty, bare world, as it's still full of animals and people, they just don’t resemble people in the way we know them. The Road, by contrast, is vacant—a man and his boy are the only signs of life for miles and miles. The closest video game to The Road isn’t The Last of Us, it’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Death Stranding.

Spoilers follow for The Road

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For the majority of the game, we’re travelling huge distances across vast emptiness. The remnants of civilisation have been devoured by the elements or left as a monument to a bygone era—the colours, likewise, are stripped away, leaving behind a muted shadow of the old world. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sam Porter Bridges is completely alone during his excursions, and any signs of life are more of a threat than a sign of hopeꩲ, which is something that sets apart The Road from so many other dystopian works. Loneliness is a beautiful respite, not a terrifying prospect—there’s no need for zombies or monsters or aliens since humanity stretched thin is monstrous enough.

Sam from Death Stranding Staring at Four Floating Figures

Granted, Death Stranding does have monsters, via the Timefall, but they feel more akin to the elements given life as opposed to traditional apocalyptic creatures. This is evident from the start. Rain alerts them, serving as an intricate web that they feel every strand of, but when they make themselves known, they are invisibleಌ black f🧸ootprints scattered across walls. The Timefall isn’t a tangible threat, but the shadows and the Earth itself given a voice, and the idea of death manifested. In many ways, this parallels The Road’s greatest villain—nature.

Nature threatens to freeze the man and his boy while ruining their supplies, pushing them to scurry under bridges and huddle by fires with their coats hugging them as blankets. Nature is what tears apart the roads and makes the paths nearly impossible to traver🐽se. Nature reclaims the world as humanity dies, never stopping for a moment to mourn the civilisation that degraded it. That is the Timefall, and because the Timefall channels nature into a more traditional threat, it evokes The Road’s bleak, inescapable hopelessness far more than any monster could.

sam walking in the mountains in death stranding

Aside from nature, it’s the people that make these stories so unsettling. For the most part, travelling leads to nothing but bandits, proudly wandering in the open as they herd together. We see this in both worlds, with the man and his boy in The Road often hiding from people, killing them, or running, because people mean trouble—especially well-fed people. In a world where there are no animals to farm and where crops cannot be grown, the last resource is human flesh, so those with meat on their bones are automatically suspect. Likewise, those confidently standing outside of safe zones in Death Stranding are immediately a cause for concern. They’re unafraid of the elements and others, grouping together because they are the threat.

Yet, we do find good people in Death Stranding. These are the ♌last bastions of civilisation, an optimistic connective tissue that offers a glimmer of hope in a similarly bleak world. But that’s what makes it feel so close to The Road. While it spins a message of despair and distrust—the futility of survival—it ends on a high note. The boy’s father dies, a tragic gut-wrenching finale, but before the pages run out, he meets another man, someone who is part of a wider community, and he is ushered into safety, with the promise of comfort. The book ends ambiguously to leave open the possibility of a happy ending. Whether that ending truly comes doesn’t matter, because, for once, the boy isn’t afraid of people.

Sam Porter Bridges takes on many packages in Death Stranding

He overcomes that fear, while his father throughout The Road shot a man, stripped a man naked just to teach him a lesson, and refused to feed another, significantly older man. The lack of humanity across the story paints a picture of a selfish existence where nobody can be trusted and nobody can be treated with decency, but the ending leaves open the possibility of change, a world where kindness can prevail. Death Stranding’s 🔥message of loneliness adopts similar themes, rather than giving into a black-and-white nihilisti𓂃c portrayal ✃of human suffering - even though the world is empty, they find help, whether it’s that man at the end or the bunker full of loot left by a passing stranger they never even meet.

Any civilisation that rises fr𒈔om the ashes will only have the ashes to call home, a starkly disconcerting existence, but care is still possible—it’s a lonely life, and there are so few to trust, but finding those you can is the beauty in such an existence, no matter how empty.

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