Sunday 30 June 2013

The Last of Us Review

All great games have flaws. Half Life 2’s character development focuses only on Alyx. Red Dead Redemption’s ludonarrative dissonance can reach unintentionally hilarious levels. Planescape Torment’s combat is about as enticing as yesterday’s greasy dishwater. Regardless, these games remain magnificent achievements. The most frequent criticism levelled at games however is also the most apposite: the writing. Games writing is not merely bad, it’s awful. From a troop of stubbly men shouting at each other through syrupy cod-philosophical meanderings (Yes, you Kojima) to the evocative emptiness of Dear Esther, it runs a whole spectrum of appallingly sophomoric trash. It’s sometimes argued that perhaps games simply cannot be well-written. Perhaps games are still wallowing in their juvenile phase. Every antagonist must threaten the very universe itself or, worse, New York! All emotions are overblown. All characters merely archetypes. Perhaps they should imply, as Shadow of the Colossus and Dark Souls do, rather than state. Perhaps, despite rare and qualified successes such as Ken Levine’s work and To the Moon, games should abandon the authored experience altogether and focus instead on emergent stories such as in Skyrim or Stalker. After all, it took film half a century to outgrow melodrama, and novels even longer. Yet, in delivering The Last of Us, Naughty Dog has answered all of the above doubts in the most emphatic manner imaginable.

            Joel, a hard-bitten survivor, must escort Ellie, a precocious smart-mouthed teen across a post-apocalyptic America because she holds the key to a cure for zombageddon. That The Last of Us’ story sounds cliché when summarised should not be cause for concern. Most stories do (An ambitious young nobleman seizes the crown at the urging of his evil wife then goes mad because of the guilt before being slain in a rousing swordfight by the righteous and rightful prince. There, that’s Macbeth - spoilers!). Story-types are few, and rely on commitment and execution for their heart. At the heart of The Last of Us are two characters, superbly performed by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, whose every nuance of expression and stance is reproduced by some seriously expensive mo-cap wizardry. As the game progresses through its four seasons, these are characters we very much come to know.


Neil Druckmann’s script lends the game weighty dramatic heft and thematic complexity. This is writing at its most poised and elegant, unafraid to simply step back and allow the characters to breathe, to walk or talk amid the ruins of a dying world. Where lesser developers would cram these silent moments with clumsy expository dialogue, Naughty Dog are confident enough in the player to let the silence speak for itself, aided only by the strains of Gustavo Santaolalla’s sparse soundtrack. The plot proceeds from character, as it should, and never once descends into cliché or excitable juvenilia. Druckmann and the game’s director, Bruce Straley, understand that those skyscrapers haunting Pittsburgh’s silent horizon need not fall upon us to be dramatic, that the Infected need not leap out from behind every fridge in cheap jump scares to elicit dread. And that men are the truest monsters of all.

            Combat is always dangerous and it’s easy to die if you don’t plan. The Last of Us is very much a survival horror, and this heritage is evident in the scarcity of ammo. On higher difficulties, it’s near impossible to progress without using stealth and carefully crafting (in real-time!) and rationing what supplies the game releases. Thus every encounter is a puzzle. Yet rather than being an exercise in controller-flinging fury, it instead transmutes into some of the greatest combat in any videogame. The human AI is frequently brilliant, flanking and hunting you while simultaneously being, crucially, just stupid enough to allow you to defeat it. The Infected AI is simpler but offers a more frenetic twist to combat. Naughty Dog’s masterstroke here though is the relative paucity of combat compared to most games. Even ones with genuine claims to excellence such as Bioshock Infinite could become tiresome with their unrelenting focus on combat, the only method of interaction with Columbia being to shoot the hell out of it for ten hours. The Last of Us’ combat is less frequent, but more intelligent and challenging and therefore more meaningful. No-one remembers shooting Generic Goon #87573. Everyone remembers taking down Phalanx in Shadow of the Colossus (you monster). Also, there are no red barrels.

            The level design is expansive and assured, offering multiple tactical options that beg to be replayed. Naughty Dog also know their world is one you’ll want to bother exploring, and have made scouring every inch as compellingly unnerving as it is necessary. Moreover, while rifling through drawers for scissors to craft your nail bombs with, you’ll occasionally come across visual vignettes that lend the world a genuine sense of place and serve to obliquely tell the story of those who survived and those who didn’t. The bloodstains I followed led me to scenes that gave me pause certainly, yet more importantly displayed Naughty Dog’s contempt for the moribund safety of well-worn videogame confines.  The Last of Us is an unapologetically provocative work, yet not simply for the sake of it. There is neither pretension nor gratuitousness here. Its core is a story that is relentlessly human, airy abstractions avoided in favour of a tale as urgent and personal as bone and blood. It is a story of a man who is far from a hero and a girl who is no damsel.


            Beyond even the superb setting, story and gameplay, The Last of Us succeeds in becoming more than the sum of its parts - its enormous success is important for the medium of games as a whole. It’s a title that ignores received wisdom. A new IP, it sold 1.6 million copies in its first week. It’s a triple-A  hardcore stealth game in an era when Ubi is gutting Splinter Cell to ‘broaden its appeal.’ It’s an old-school survival horror in a time when Capcom is busy ‘evolving’ Resident Evil 6 into something very far from its origins. It has a pony-tailed teenage girl on the cover. For those of us who have long chafed at being made to play as some grizzled super-soldier with two guns and regenerating health who’s involved in a helicopter crash every few minutes, The Last of Us feels like vindication.

            So what is its flaw? When Joel and Ellie crouch, Joel puts his arm protectively over Ellie’s shoulder in a perfect symbolic representation of the game’s main theme. In lesser games, this would be a cutscene full of violins and Enya. Typically, Naughty Dog allows the action to simply speak for itself.  After beating the game, you unlock skins for both characters, but if you equip them, for some reason Joel stops putting his arm over Ellie. Don’t equip the skins.


Gary Bowness

Games Booth Rating 10/10

PRODUCT INFORMATION
The Last of Us
Format: PS3
Out: 14/6/2013
Publisher: Sony
Developer: Naughty Dog

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