ExhiBIT: The Last of Us and the American War of Independence

Let’s go to Boston for a guided tour with a mushroom aftertaste. #history #museum #videogame

Welcome back to Artcade, where we slide happily from still lifes to not-so-still lives. Today ExhiBIT takes you to a very peculiar museum: dark hallways, shattered display cases, exhibit labels smeared with blood… and a staff that’s a tad too pale. Please remember that during the visit you must not touch the artworks, but above all, do not let the other visitors touch you. Enjoy the read!

---

We’re inside the Boston Museum from The Last of Us Part I. That slightly crooked person you can see in the image above is our guide. Not much of a talker, unfortunately, but they assured me they’ll show us all the museum’s wonders. Their name is Shrombie which, as the sharpest among you have already guessed, is the perfect mash-up of zombie and mushroom.

Museums exist to preserve; the undead exist to decompose. Here you could say there’s a decent balance between the two impulses. The collection and the exhibits revolve around the American War of Independence, with a special focus on what happened in Boston. I tried the audio guide, but it only has one track that goes more or less like this: “Aaarrrh” (actually, since we’re in The Last of Us it’s more of a “TCH TCH TCH”). No audio guide then. We’re in the hands of Shrombie.

Shrombie cares a lot about Boston’s role in American history. Here he points us to a panel about the Boston Tea Party of 1773, a protest by North American colonists who, disguised as Natives, dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor in response to taxes imposed by what was then the Kingdom of Great Britain.

To appreciate the level of care Naughty Dog put into The Last of Us, you can compare the large image in the panel from the previous photo to the one below.

Tea sabotage in Boston Port, by Nathayel Corrier, 1846.