The Last of Us Review

The Last of Us released to absurd fanfare in 2013. Quickly compared to Citizen Kane, cited as proof of the storytelling potential of games, and now shifting to proving legacy media's superiority in the TV adaption. Yet, I kind of love it - much of that directed at something that doesn't seem intended by the creators, complicating things further. This is split it into gameplay (mostly the messy melee system) and story (centered on the ending).

The Bottom Line [★★★★☆]

Great storytelling execution, solid atmosphere and environmental storytelling, and a fantastic ending. The overall pacing is marred by tedious traversal, and the gameplay is very mixed, some high points but a lot of issues. Left Behind is more intimate, not as hard hitting as the main game but solid storytelling and the arcade is brilliant. Letting you turn infected against other humans is neat, probably the best event / set piece style content in the package.

Game Methods

I played the remaster in November 2020 on PS4 for 22 hours. Made notes at the time but never got around to writing this out (what better time than now, when all discussion of the show has died down and the hype cycle for the second season is yet to start?). I haven't played the sequel but am looking forward to doing so if it comes to PC.

I played on the Survival difficulty, and I'm a bit torn on recommending it. It was easy enough in parts that giving further slack would take away from the oppressive atmosphere and lessen the import of resource management, but at the same time having more health and ammo to work with would allow interesting switches between stealth and shooting instead of just resetting on detection. The highest difficulties also remove QTE button prompts and the sonar (which gives you enough feedback to actually rely on stealth) - these in particular make me think Hard is best for a first playthrough, coming off as sacrificing UX for some vague immersion factor.

Another aspect is restricting shiv usage, while making clickers require a shiv to stealth kill (the first clicker comes too early for you to have ammo or molotovs so I had to use one of that limited resource there). What you really want to use the shivs for is to pick the locks on loot rooms, two of which I couldn't unlock despite never using another shiv in combat after that first. There’s various upgrades, skills and options to use shivs in stealth and combat which are just off limits, constraining your exploration of the game's systems.

Gameplay

Whether stealth, shooting, a mix of those, or some gimmick, whether against zombies or humans, the gameplay has issues on every front and doesn’t work very well systemically nor does it play well with clunky movement and punching. Managing consumables that use shared resources is cool but dynamic ammo drops and clunky comeback options lets that down a bit too.

Despite being a shooter by genre, it's really the melee combat that makes or breaks the game. If you fail stealth, you start shooting. If you run out of ammo, you punch. Only when you fail there do you decidedly die. Since failure pushes you to use melee to recover (and anticipating failure encourages using melee to shore up resources, it's not like you actually have the ammo to kill everything no matter how good your aim is), the ultimate cause of a game over is usually during melee. Even if it was less pivotal, it's convenient to focus on melee as the most flawed system; stealth and shooting are pretty generic on that front, and issues more come from encounter design which I'm not going to go through all of (and they vary so much based on difficulty level and what resources you happen to have at the time).

The melee system they made for this (which was polished a lot for Uncharted 4 and then presumably TLoU2) has unified camera and character facing, meaning it's sluggish to turn around and you can't view anything that isn't right in front of you. I hate this cinematic approach to melee, most glaring in the new God of War where not being able to see what you're not attacking limits the design space massively (and makes it really annoying to manage multiple enemies or archers). Here it's only one of many reasons why melee is unreliable, and being a shooter it's easier to justify (FPS games already work like this but without turning animations), but it's still pretty annoying.

Because damage actually matters long-term (no health regen over time as in Uncharted), whether you take damage while fighting is important; it doesn't have to be 100% avoidable, but you'd want it to be fairly consistent to prevent you from just melee-ing an entire section sometimes while others you die to a couple of mobs. One limitation is you can't time and set up your slow punches, since if an enemy isn't detected for the paired animation nothing happens. If an enemy is advancing around a corner or other obstacle they can hit you with a melee attack while yours phases through them because the corner blocked them to start, or they can have a situational animation like vaulting over scenery that doesn't let you lock them into a "being punched" animation so you miss them as they get right up in your face. The high amount of snapping can also make you hit unintended targets or miss in other unclear ways.

So the neutral state for melee that the game forces you to rely on is both you and the enemy ready and in range to attack, where your attacks are not fast enough to safely stagger them and prevent a counterattack, nor do the enemies have distinct dangerous states that you can kite to then go in and punish while they recover (respectively akin to Zelda vs Dark Souls). If they have a gun, they can shoot you before their model even faces you, so even if you close the distance safely there's no reliable way to take them out without taking a hit. You can pick up limited use weapons like axes or bats which lets you carve through enemies much more efficiently, except the scrubbiest zombies can still randomly hit you in between or before your attacks for unavoidable damage.

This robs tension and satisfaction from how the game plays out. An ideal game dynamic is overcoming a final obstacle in a bad situation purely due to skill - everyone loves a comeback. But in this game because melee is the final arbiter of whether you get that comeback, and it's so unreliable and cares little about skill, it's more often a relief from getting lucky than satisfaction at clutching it out. Or, when you don't get lucky, it's simply frustrating negative feedback that puts less emphasis on the preventable mistakes you made earlier on to get into that situation. Another option you can rely on, yet cannot because it's so janky, is the friendly NPCs (worthless at stealth but invaluable as meat puppets once the shooting starts).

When you're able to just tough it out with ammo, and/or maneuver the spaces with stealth, it can be really effective. The enemy AI doesn't respond consistently (and their equipment can change) so even if you do a lot of resetting in tough parts, there's always some new details and emergent situations (only real issue there is clickers having a 50% chance to flinch from throwables). There's a double bloater battle towards the end which was cool to kite around and manage different weapons for, and pushing a car while keeping the horde off your back is also a good set-up. On the bad side you have some real dogshit though. The end of the game has more and more assault rifle enemies covering each other in corridors, the last one I'm almost sure is just impossible to engage with in any genuine way (I threw smoke bombs and ran for the cutscene trigger). The DLC has some problem spots too, like the four half-clickers and the last bit where they force detection in a cutscene, and of course there's the infamous sniper sequence, one of the worst encounters in this whole medium.

Finally, there is a lot of connective tissue between proper gameplay and dedicated cutscenes. Walking and talking sections are a vehicle for story and a way to wander around these abandoned ruins while picking up resources, but then there's these "traversal" "puzzles" which serve much less of a purpose. At best this kind of environmental interaction can be used to convey character, like how Ellie can't swim so any water section she relies on you to get a raft or whatever, but the vast majority seem like just filler, whether to mask loading or as some obligatory videogame mechanic so it doesn't get called a walking sim (as if that would deter gamers). On the other end are fast-paced set pieces where you run through fields of bullets and make impossible jumps, which makes it hard to tell what constrained, unrealistic line of action you're supposed to be doing and just clashes really hard with the tone of the game.

Story and Ending

In usual Naughty Dog fashion, the storytelling is head and shoulders above any contemporary, very smooth and well-paced. This and Uncharted 4 mark a step up in writing and even if it can't match the art direction and polish there, the overarching story really delivers with one of my favorite endings. I also really like the character design, Joel's huge sad eyes, Ellie as a sort of cartoony innocent daughter figure, they're more archetypes than realistic portraits (naturally, every subsequent representation fails to capture this).

The setting is a bit too all-out miserable to make me get that invested, part misanthropy and part just bracing for the obvious tragedy that'll always come. Some of the details really sell it though, like finding a bloody tarp used to cover up children while their guardian mercy killed them - it's far more effective when it's just used to paint a backdrop. Witnessing Ellie and Joel grow closer is charming too, driven by moments of raw emotion. He has lost everyone he cared for, while she has lost everyone that cared for her - the ultimate lost parent and lost child. The key word is witness though, because I really don’t think the game-y sections do much to make this development felt. It doesn’t take long for her to get a gun and even then she’s mostly useful for the same things as before (ammo and as a distraction). She runs around in front of enemies (whether in stealth or not), making it more comedic than giving this feeling of barely getting by with each others’ help.

The ending is bittersweet, Joel making the decision when traditional videogame thinking leads you to expect a player choice, and putting the nail in the coffin for his characterisation (past acts are left vague, but here it’s clear he’s given up on the world and chooses Ellie over it). It’s a bit open with their relationship in an awkward spot, very nice tone to end on. It paints him as a bad guy by killing people that say they’re saving the world, but if you consider what’s known about the fireflies and their actions it’s clear they can’t be trusted even if they were acting in good faith without the lies, extortion and murder.

It's not the only one, but I find myself favoring an entirely positive reading over time. Both metatextually and in-game, logic and morality favors the fireflies: they inspire the downtrodden, rebel against authority, look out for people, try to fix the actual problem etc. But through love and attachment, Joel faces the truth and forces the player to go along with him: that they are nothing but incompetent, evil, hypocritical morons. Old Joel, jaded and bitter, would have given her up, whether to feel better about himself doing what he's supposed to, or to avoid attachment and the heartache that's always brought. His loving self refuses to give in to convention and ethics, instead living up to his personal morality and responsibility.

The ending isn't stark and effective because the player has to face the fact of "Joel is selfish and evil" (a twist that's dull even when a game commits more to it), but because Joel is right and the player is lead towards thinking the former "twist" is the message by both the game's world and conventions of the medium. Importantly though, even if you disagree that this is the objective right choice, it still acts as a powerful resolution for his character. He's watched as everyone he cared about got taken from him, unable or unwilling to do anything, but this time he has agency (as opposed to the player) and makes an active decision informed by his history and the reality of this setting (that of humans taking far more from him than zombies). Even if the fireflies weren't incompetent bastards (as there's been some effort to retcon them not to be) that sympathetic core to the character is still compelling.