The Last of Us

If I had to say one thing about The Last of Us I would say it's a morose and yet brilliant narrative with equally likeable and contemptible characters, with a beautifully realized world all messily bundled in a terrible game.

Of course to say The Last of Us is a terrible game is perhaps reaching. It's not necessarily a terrible game, it's just a very lumbering mess that seems to be at ends with itself. Does it want to be a stealthy game slick with enough tension to suspend a bridge or does it want to be an entry in the Uncharted series? Naughty Dog are a fantastic studio with a standard of quality, and indeed the industry clout only matched by the likes of Rockstar Games and Quantic Dream. In previous outings Naughty Dog have managed to create consistently excellent games with beautifully realized and seamless matching of story, world and gameplay. At least, in all of their outings in previous generations. After the success of the Uncharted games it seems Naughty Dog have found a formula that works for them and indeed many others, it's just a shame that they have a hard time realizing that one link in the chain is particularly weak and that is in the gameplay department. I do not believe that Naughty Dog understand how to make, or at least don't have the intention of making a good shooter game. The Uncharted franchise maintains a certain level of clunk that is extremely mismatched with the companies quality in other departments and it's for this reason that The Last of Us was such a difficult grind for me as a gamer who enjoys both a challenge and enjoys a well made stealth game OR shooter.

The Last of Us is Naughty Dog's latest game using the Uncharted engine though it is wholly unrelated to Uncharted. It tells the story of a man named Joel who finds himself slap bang in the middle of a fungal virus outbreak. The airborne virus finds it's way to humans via clouds of "spores" that, when inhaled, the victim will have their internal organs enveloped in a fungus which later breaks out of their insides and begins to grow as large mushroom-like formations on the skin. This eventually takes over their system and turns them in to violent cannibalistic creatures. After starting off relatively safe in a very courted off part of Boston alongside his survival-buddy Tess, he meets a woman who tasks them with delivering a girl to a group known as the Fireflies who serve as the games rebel-for-a-cause types. Joel accepts and his journey alongside Ellie, a young girl who had been bitten only to survive the infection, and through many trials and tribulations a common bond is formed as they traverse the United States in hopes of finding the Firefly headquarters and potentially a vaccine that prevents the spread of infection.

For a game desperate to be a tension ridden survival thriller, it sure loves to pretend it doesn't also want to be a shooter. I honestly wouldn't mind if The Last of Us was indeed in part some kind of shooter but my biggest contention with the game is their decision to artificially gimp your ability as a shooter and yet in the face of this artificial gimping they also promote heavy usage of guns. Not the least of which is the fact that there are far more guns and lethal options than non-lethal. That is not to say that you can't stealth past the majority of sequences but given how repetitive, tedious and unsatisfying that experience can be, it feels much quicker and more pertinent to gun down enemies when given the chance. One of the more egregious examples of this sort of dissonance in their intent is the fact that I'm regularly being reminded how sparse and rare ammo is going to be and yet there is a maximum capacity for ammo. It would be unrealistic of me to ask for them to change Joel's character model to reflect just how much loot he has packed away in one of his many shirt and jeans pockets and to reflect just how full his backpack but I feel like this whole situation was entirely overlooked by Naughty Dog. Why can't Joel fit this one relatively small box of Revolver ammo in his backpack or one of his unused pockets? It feels ridiculous that, knowing how important ammo is, I just can't carry one more round of ammo.

I'd be dishonest if I denied knowing the actual reason for this issue. In game design you have to maintain certain contingency spawn points for things like ammunition, health packs or any other kind of valuable resource a player might need. Naughty Dog can't predict that a player will or will not spend the ammo they have found and they can't predict how much health a player will lose. At least, they don't want to predict it because it may be unrealistic and a waste of time/resources in development. I feel like in a game like this, with a studio that has as much freedom as they do from publishing pressure, could have devoted a little more time to making their "ammo is so important!" thing feel a little more reasonable and ultimately realistic than it does because otherwise it starts to promote using guns because I can always rely on finding more ammo. And I did. There was never a point where I felt pressed for ammo. Worse yet, if I ever was out of ammo a companion character would non-nonchalantly throw a pile of ammo my way to make sure I was stocked up and ready to waste another thug or infected.

Now I already mentioned that I wouldn't mind if The Last of Us was in some way a shooter, even if it had a stealth component and even if the narrative would otherwise lead you to believe it's a by-the-thread survival game. Some games like to make sure all types of gamer can access their game with ease and find a comfortable way to play. The trouble is there are a lot of things that push you to shoot and kill yet the physical act of shooting is so overbearingly clunky and hard to handle. Joel has been fighting human bandits and infected for two decades, as of the beginning of the game, it should stand to reason that he knows his way around at least a pistol and yet drawing one in any given combat scene (of which there are many, a few of them even forced) would lead you to believe that he has never fired a gun in his life. His aim is off, the guns kick back a lot and he does this with such inaccuracy that he would have a better chance hitting the bandits had he thrown his gun directly at them (which would be a very welcome feature, Naughty Dog!). You might ask if I'm just terrible at shooters and that I can't aim but just to clear that out of the air, I play a whole lot of third person shooters. More so than I play first person shooters and I have been playing both my whole life, I know what I'm doing. It is the artificial limiting that makes it so bloody difficult to maintain any sort of skill or accuracy when you do have to use guns.

I could rag on about the gameplay for hours at this point. I feel my point has been made that the gameplay suffers a lot from not knowing it's own identity. It's not a very good shooter but it's also not a very good stealth game. It does everything to make sure you're good on ammo for the entirety of the experience and yet when you do try and spend some of that oh-so-precious ammo it feels like Joel is trying to shoot while carrying Ellie on his back rather than being the seasoned veteran of the infection that he is. Stealth amounts to attempting to keep the thumbstick in a very precise and often times completely unclear position in order to skulk by clickers without being heard. Move too slow and you'll end up stopping, move too fast and you'll be heard by one of the infected. The trouble is this magical space between not moving and moving too fast is so hard to find and unclear that it's actually happening that you'll find yourself aggro-ing or at least irritating infected enough making it a very tedious experience. Toward the end of the game I found my self abusing the more powerful (read: extremely overpowered) utilities such as Molotov cocktails and heavily upgraded Shivs. These combined with a more aggressive play style often lead to clearing combat sections with ease rather than toy with the repetitive, boring stealth and saved me from having to rely too much on guns, other than the shotgun and rifle, which were far easier weapons to use because it was either point blank, or extreme range. Trying to use anything in-between was an utter drag unless they were absolutely necessary to use for the handful of times the game stripped my weapons and equipments away.

What made The Last of Us a memorable experience that, despite my grievances with the gameplay, I thoroughly enjoyed both as a spectator and as a gamer was the narrative and the characters. It's hard for me to say that I really like Joel. I enjoy his personality and his often times endearing will to protect Ellie and bring her to the safety of the Fireflies but the man is a very reprehensible person. He is no better than the bandits that he comes up against throughout the story and it certainly wants you to know this. That is not a criticism, however. I think this feeling really goes on to sell just how much of a story of survival this really is. Joel is not a good man in a bad world, he is a bad man in an equally as bad world - we just happen to be seeing things from mostly his perspective and thus we find ourselves rooting for him and Ellie. Sure, his intentions with Ellie and the Fireflies are generally for the good of mankind and he does everything in his will, for the most part, to stand by Ellie and keep her safe - but he's still just as much of a murderous bastard as everyone he has come up against and I like that. It's certainly a more interesting spin on things than trying to pretend he's a saint. People have to survive and Joel knows this and throughout the narrative his attitude is unwavering, so much as forcibly reminding Ellie to forget about past wrong-doings and some of the more horrible things that have happened in their combined past as partners.

Ellie, while very young, is a clearly very experienced girl in this wicked world and has had her fair share of run-ins with bad people. Not to mention the whole being bitten and surviving thing. That'll put a few years on ya'. She's quite a cheeky and sarcastic character, always punctuating Joel's more serious tone with some sort of quip or playful jab at whatever she may be observing of or around Joel. Both Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie) gave absolutely stellar performances that at times had me tearing up and wincing because of how painfully real some scenes felt.

This utter seamless ability to blend very realistic performances with a game as pretty as The Last of Us is made for an extremely enthralling experience that, despite constantly fighting against the game mechanically, kept reeling me in for more over the course of my some fourteen hours of playing. I'll stand by my original statement that The Last of Us, and by extension the very design philosophy Naughty Dog employ for their last four games, is an absurdly well realized character piece with a gorgeous world that is unfortunately nested in a mechanically messy and unflattering game.