Lucas
Versantvoort / October 3, 2014
The Last of Us is one of my favourite games, because it
provided me with a genuinely emotional experience and that’s not something you
see every day in gaming. How often do we see games attempting to be emotionally
compelling, but all they manage to achieve is make me roll my eyes as I watch
some cutscene with all the convincing drama of a soap opera? I’ve seen so many games
going through the motions, trying to create drama with all the dramatic
subtlety of a Star Wars film and all
it does is make me feel awkward. Note how I emphasize the story as the focal point of this game’s success and not the gameplay. The source of all those Game
of the Year awards isn’t the gameplay. It’s functional, polished and glitch-free
(as far as I can tell), but it’s the very well-told story that won over gamers en masse including yours truly.
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| Right away, the main menu tells you you're in for something special. |
The game is set in America after the
Zombie Apocalypse has taken place. You (mostly) control Joel, a man who lost
his daughter when the outbreak started. In the years afterwards, he learned how
to survive together with his partner, Tess. Together, they scrape by in the
quarantine zone, a part of the city that remains free of infected. While on a
mission with Tess to recover some weapons that was stolen from them, they meet
with the leader of a resistance group, the Fireflies, that is still looking for
a cure. She tells them she’ll give them the weapon if they’ll deliver a ‘package’
for her to a building somewhere outside the quarantine zone. This package turns
out to be teenage girl, Ellie. They decide to take the job and, of course, the
mission changes when the people who were supposed to pick her up are missing.
Eventually, it’s just Joel who’s stuck with Ellie on a quest to deliver her to
the Fireflies. (As I’m writing this little summary, I realize how hard it is to
convey the emotional power of this story when you have to steer clear of
spoilers. You really have to play it yourself to appreciate the well-written
story and characters.)
Before delving into the story’s many
merits, I will say that it is by no means the most original story. It freely borrows elements from various sources,
but then again, isn’t that true for most stories, if not all. For example, the
zombie outbreak theme is pretty common; the task of escorting someone who might
be Mankind’s Cure reminds me of Children
of Men, etc. It’s also no surprise that the cold and distant Joel who lost
his daughter many years ago starts to open up and act like a father toward
Ellie. It doesn’t exactly win any originality prizes. What it does do very well is execute this type
of story to perfection. Through careful direction, great dialogue, motion
capture and voice acting, Joel and Ellie (among others) are wonderfully brought
to life. The script is tight and has a clear set of themes that are explored
over the course of the game. Also, it’s all done with a lot of subtlety, something that is severely
lacking in many of today’s games.
When judging The Last of Us gameplay-wise, things are admittedly less than
great, though I have little problem with it. It’s your basic stealth shooter
that developer Naughty Dog also used in the Uncharted series of games. Whether
that’s the stuff 10 out of 10 scores are made of…your mileage may vary. Of
course, it’s easy to apply the familiar Ludonarrative Dissonance critique to
this game as it keeps alternating between cutscenes and violent gameplay, but I
think a few things can be said in the game’s defense. First, the violence is
integrated into the character development. During gameplay, Ellie is constantly
exposed to violence and consequently becomes desensitized to it. This is seen
in cutscenes and random dialogue. Secondly, the game tries to reduce this
constant alternating between cutscene-gameplay-cutscene-gameplay by throwing in
lots of random dialogue during gameplay. Joel and Ellie aren’t just two people
who become deaf mutes during gameplay and suddenly burst into monologues during
cutscenes. Rather, their character development is integrated into the random
dialogue, so that we get the feeling of continuous character development. And
there’s a lot of it, right down to the little “watch your step” remarks from
Joel when Ellie has to…watch her step.
Besides the gameplay, another point of critique
is the underwhelming crafting component. The game designers try to make you
feel like a survivalist by having you pick up tape, scissors, etc which you then
combine to make Molotov cocktails or health kits. They even try to increase
this feeling by making Joel rifle through his backpack every time you enter
your inventory. However it feels…undercooked. You go through so many different
locations and there’s always this limit on the type of items you can carry. You
might think that this or that might be useful, but no it’s always the scissors,
the rags, etc. The whole crafting part of the game feels intuitive, but it just
feels like it could have been expanded upon, because as it is, it’s merely an
afterthought compared to the core gameplay of stealth and combat. It just feels
like a wasted opportunity that the entire concept of crafting in a survival
horror game boils down to a few extra button presses…
Other annoyances include the fact that
Ellie is invisible when in stealth. The reason for this is obvious. If you were
skulking about and it’s Ellie who keeps alerting the enemy to your presence…well,
it wouldn’t exactly make gamers like her very much, would it? So, from a
gameplay perspective, this was the only option and to be fair, it’s only
occasionally annoying. There's also a lack of variation. By this I don't necessarily mean the stealth combat, but the things surrounding it. The first time Ellie gets on a raft that you can then push to a previously inaccessible location is okay, the same goes for boosting Ellie up to a high ledge, but after five times of looking at the same animations, I'm longing for some variation (though the game does subvert this in a train station late in the game. If you've played it, you know what I'm talking about).
Another thing I wanted to mention has to do
with the backlash the game has gotten in a lot of forums from gamers who
believe the game’s overrated. I believe the countless high scores and game of
the year rewards have damaged the game’s reputation a bit. What all these awards
imply is that you’re about to play the Best Game Ever, that you’re about to embark
on some transcendental journey. Naturally, many ‘true gamers’ disagreed and
started to criticize the aspects of the game they felt were uninteresting or
unoriginal, like the gameplay. These reactions are understandable. How can a
game receive so many perfect scores and have such by-the-book gameplay? What
happened is that reviewers voted with their gut. They probably knew lowering
the score to a 7 or 8 for gameplay reasons wouldn’t reflect the emotional impact
the game had on them, so they went with a higher score. Because I’m not tied to
those rules and for convenience’s sake, what I’d propose then is to come up
with two grades, one for how The Last of Us succeeds as a game and
one for the narrative experience. For me, in terms of story, The Last of Us was one of the best
experiences I’ve had in my long history as a gamer. Games with this kind of
subtle storytelling that manage to stir my emotions to such a degree aren’t exactly
growing on trees these days, so for that reason I’d give it a 10 out of 10. However,
if you’re judging the game as a game,
then you could easily knock two points off of that score.
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