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
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