Saturday, July 13, 2013

The Last of Us - Review


In growing older, I've come to appreciate the father / daughter bond that forges over time.  While I don't understand the full complexities of it just yet, I do recognize that there's something very special and unique about it.  The Last of Us explores this bond in a post zombie apocalypse, because when's better to establish a relationship?

Quality Time
You play the game as Joel, a once regular guy who had lost everything to an infected outbreak 20 years prior. Through a deal for survival, he must escort a teenage girl named Ellen Paige Ellie to a renegade group's drop off point for unknown reasons.  Naturally, things don't go as planned, and we bear witness to the relationship between the two grow and change over time.

Gameplay is essentially a third person action title that encourages sneaking and tactics versus direct confrontation.  There's lots of cover and the game provides ample bottles and bricks to use as distractions and stuns to get through nearly everything quietly.  Yes, you can fight your way through the entire game, but you'll often find yourself with minimal resources for doing so.

Inventory control is important, and only allows you instant access to a few items at the same time.  Over the course of scavenging,  you'll find new weapons and a variety of objects in which you can make med kits, Molotov cocktails, shivs, and a few other useful things that make getting through a little easier.  Other upgrades you find allow you to modify weapons, inventory slots, and your own abilities like hearing and health.

So I can kill somebody with my bare hands, but bricks only stun people?  Got it.

Dealing with enemies is the most emphasized aspect in the game.  Moving from area to area, players will find themselves interacting with other factions in the game world including infected and other groups of survivalists.  Typically "interacting with" is framed as "killing", but there are parts that you can easily sneak by.  Where it gets disappointing is that with the rare exception these encounters are basically the same thing over and over again, just in a slightly different environment.  A store front with toppled over shelves instead of a ransacked house or a dilapidated sewer.  Too soon does the game become "Crouch and listen, position yourself to sneak up on somebody, take them down with a choke hold, move on."

Most games look to place the player as the hero, or at least central character of the story.  To prove this point, think about how you talk about playing a game.  "I can't make this jump", not "Mario can't make this jump".  Games fulfill an escape where the player is the star, the one who gets to save the princess, or defeat the alien invaders.  This is where Last of Us fails.  Joel takes actions and acts in ways that a normal person would not.  There is a very good reason for this, it's because Joel has lived through a 20 year span of time doing whatever he had to do to survive.  The problem is that this is not expressed enough to the player.  The player never gets that connection with the character to make them understand why he does the things that he does throughout the game, specifically at the end.  Because of this, it is not your story, it is not you making the jump.  It's Joel's story, and he acts this way without anything that you can do about it, you have to do it Joel's way.  Without the sympathy and understanding that is associated with it, it becomes meaningless.

That's my problem with the game, and it took me weeks to put my finger on it.  Because the player cannot possibly understand the emotions and reason of thinking that is behind Joel's story,  the key relationships that are forged throughout the game become meaningless. Major characters die and naught a tear is shed for them. 

Concept Art of things that DON'T happen during the game
The Last of Us, at it's heart, is trying to tell the story of a what a father and daughter have to do to get through a terrible tragedy and become closer for doing so.  They work together and overcome obstacles, people that would stop them, and nightmares that haunt them.  The game is about the journey from start to finish, but there's large chunks of road missing, and the bridges they use to gap the story and emotions together are flimsy at best.  But they do make it across, and the package as a whole has some pretty great moments.  This is definitely worth your time, but you may find yourself to be an outsider watching the events unfold instead of being a part of it yourself