Sony should count their blessings for having Naughty Dog in their corner. The Uncharted series has continually managed to impress and is probably my favorite IP to come out of this console generation, well that is until this game came along.
The Last Of Us centers around Joel, a loving and devoted father who is suddenly faced with the end of civilized society. A fungal infection has begun to spread throughout the world. Once infected you have a small amount of time until the infection spreads to your brain and causes you to exhibit typical zombie behavior, i.e. a strong desire to munch on flesh. Like traditional zombies the disease spreads through bites, unlike traditional zombies, after you’ve been exposed long enough the fungus will begin to take over your body. During its advanced stages the fungus will grow to cover the hosts face causing them to become blind and significantly meaner. These advanced infected are known as “Clickers” and they’re going to cause you some heartache throughout your journey.
The bulk of the game takes place twenty years after the infection’s origin and primarily follows Joel on his quest to deliver a young girl, Ellie, to a resistance group for an initially undisclosed reason. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that things don’t really go as planned.
What you take away from the gameplay in The Last Of Us will largely depend on how you play it. As a shooter, the game isn’t going to take home any awards. It’s also not very exceptional as a stealth game. What the gameplay is good at is generating tension. You’re often placed into situations where there are enemies on all sides of you. Stealth is ephemeral, you can hide and take out enemies one by one but once somebody has seen you the jig is up and everyone will, for the most part, know your location. This almost always leads to situations where you’ll take out a few enemies before eventually being discovered and then just making a desperate attempt at surviving the encounter. Sometimes you’re able to make a run for it and conceal yourself again, other times you may even make it all the way to an exit.
If you play stealth games like I tend to, your gut instinct upon being discovered will be to restart the encounter. I feel like in The Last Of Us that’s a mistake, a big part of where this game shines is in letting you have close calls. Taking out a whole room of hunters via stealth is time consuming and unsatisfying. Conversely: silently thinning their numbers before being discovered and finishing the encounter with a single bar of health and two bullets left in your gun will leave you very satisfied indeed. This game is meticulously balanced to give you close calls and that’s when it is without a doubt the most fun.
Playing on normal the game is somewhat stingy with ammunition and supplies. Especially early on. You’ll feel a massive difficulty spike when you encounter your first Clicker. But as the game goes on you’ll become better equipped and the challenge eases up a little bit. You’ll often times find yourself using a gun, not because you like how it handles, but because there simply were no other options. Although the shotgun became a fast favorite of mine, I played entire chapters without ever being able to use it due to a lack of ammo.
Although the trophy system implies that you can collect all the upgrades offered to you throughout the game I probably only wound up earning about half of them. I feel like I did a pretty good job exploring as well. There is a “New Game+” feature so maybe you can only get all the upgrades and trophies by doing that.
But if you’ve followed this game at all you know that the gameplay is almost a side dish for the main course that is the story. This game, much like Bioshock: Infinite from earlier this year weaves an adult tale not often seen in video games. The characters all feel real and have motivations that make sense, there’s some nice morally gray questions for you to munch on, and the general development of the characters is a cut above even the best games I can recall in the past few years.
Even the story is not without its faults though. Story beats are heavily telegraphed and you can usually figure out which characters are going to be biting the dust and which ones won’t. A lot of the tropes, especially during the first half of the game are predictable and easily identifiable given the genre. But it’s hard to complain when it’s all got such a strong polish to it. The Last Of Us doesn’t innovate end of the world storytelling, but it does perfect what’s already there.
The game has its problems, sure, but that hasn’t stopped it from being my favorite game of the year thus far. The conclusion of the adventure bored its way into me for a long time, and I remember sitting patiently through the end credits in their entirety just praying for a second or two of this world. And if that doesn’t merit a 5, then I don’t know what does.
