The developers behind the excellent Uncharted series, Naughty Dog, bring us their new IP. It’s a story of survival, and is also one of the most emotional gaming experiences I’ve had.
The prologue immediately grabs your attention. Set several years before the outbreak, you play as Joel's daughter Sarah as the event of the disaster unfold around her perspective. Its a very significant set piece us it show how unprepared the people where the infection hit. You can feel the chaos in the background as Joel, his brother and Sarah try to escape. Only more tragic as you watch Joel loss Sarah his arm after a collision. This sets up Joel’s primary flaw of having unresolved issues with loss after the death of his beloved daughter. A few hours later Joel is paired up with the games second emotionally flawed protagonist in Ellie. We eventually find out that Ellie may be the only person to ever develop an immunity to the infection, and Joel is pressured by multiple interwoven events into escorting her from Boston to Colorado. Predictably the job goes south and soon Joel and Ellie are moving across the country from one city to another just trying to survive. Along the way they encounter hostile soldiers, murderous bandits, and of course the infected.
The story is possibly the greatest aspect of the game. It is well structured as each season acts like a chapter. I found that the story works well because it contains some of the most well rounded characters crafted in gaming. All the characters in the game felt so real and that each of them had faced real emotional problems from the world they live in now. Naughty Dog have uniquely captured the fragility of our society and demonstrated the brutality that some people are capable of. They made the real threat to the main characters of The Last of Us are not the infected but the humans that have survived.
Shamefully I did find the controls odd at first, but once you get a hang of them you feel like you have spent the last twenty years doing just this, and become scarily good at sneaking past the mutated fungus people. There is a decent amount of choice in the route or strategy you choose to take while going through this game. Depending on how you play it, it can be either a run-and-gun experience or a tense test of your nerves depending on the situation. My main strategy was generally going in guns a blazing. The game does encourage the stealthy approach but Naughty Dog made sure that the non-stealthy approach was still viable.
What annoyed me was the hit and miss detection system of the enemies. I would wait patiently for the perfect moment to stealthily move past an enemy, only to be discovered by the eagle eyes of the enemies that could distinguish seeing my hair from behind cover. Then other times they'll ignore you as I stuck my whole head out of cover to check the situation. This doesn't really cross over to the infected , because their sections are mostly based off of how much sound you make. Every time I encountered one of the infected I was terrified by the fact that any screw up meant instant death. The game doesn’t hold back in showing just what the consequences of failure are. My run and gun approach meant I got to see these rather nasty deaths a fair bit. These are small nitpicks though.
I enjoyed watching Ellie and Joel go from wary strangers to trusting friends. I think it’s a triumph of writing, performance, and technology. This is a game that will leave a lasting impression on you long after you have finished.
The Last Of Us is up there as being one of the best games I’ve ever played.
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