Without getting too much into it, in the game The Last of Us, three of the main characters, Joel, Tess and Ellie, are on their way to the Massachusetts State House in downtown Boston to turn over Ellie to a rebel group called The Fireflies. I won’t spoil what happened, but at the end of this chapter, Joel and Ellie escape from the rear of the building into a subway station very close by. I decided to visit The Capitol Building (as it’s called in the game) and recreate that chapter. Unfortunately, it was closed yesterday and the fact that I didn’t have any weapons and I only had Jonathan with me, who, unlike Ellie, doesn’t have a potty mouth.
We started out the morning at IHOP where I was lucky enough to draw The Little Mermaid calling card. After breakfast, we headed out to the Quincy Adams train station to take the “red line” to downtown Boston. We got off Downtown Crossing because I wanted to take the Orange Line to State Station which is where the trio finds themselves on their way to the Capitol Building. The whole point of this exercise was to see if the game recreated Boston accurately. I decided that it would be too much to do, so we just exited the subway and headed to the Boston Common (Boston’s version of New York City’s Central Park, but much MUCH smaller).
As with every “central park”, you find all sorts of people, including, but not limited to, protestors of some sort. I couldn’t figure out what they were complaining about, nor did I care, but the only people paying them ANY attention was, well…..me.
The State House is on the opposite side of the park. So after a minute and a half walk, we arrived at the State House. The featured image on this post was taken with the same vantage point as the game’s. I was really interested in finding this nearby subway station since the closest one (that I know of) is Park Station which is where we entered the park. Though, in all fairness, the station in the game looks like it’s inside a “perimeter”, so, perhaps, the State House has its own “batcave entrance”.
Jonathan and I walked around the State House noticing some of the architecture that the game matches, but no subway station. Though I’ve driven through this area before, walking Beacon Hill is quite nice. I peeked into some of the apartments and many have been modernized and look fantastic. Plus, the street view is very comforting to me. We should enjoy it now because in nineteen years, this place is going to be overrun by “infected” (though looking at some of these people, I wonder if it hasn’t already happened).
As a consolation prize, we stopped at a Dunkin Donuts for a treat and we headed back to the subway station. Maybe next week I’ll tackle photographing State Station or the next chapter which takes place in the Town of Lincoln “…just a few miles west of here…”, which is really not, but maybe in the year 2033, continental drift moves these towns much closer to each other.
Other notable shots:
