The Last of Us — Snap Judgement #12

In honor of The Last of Us Part II’s arrival, I finally publish the first review I ever wrote.

Last week, the corner of Twitter known as “games discourse” erupted when the first, aggressively spoiler-free reviews of The Last of Us Part II hit the internet. It felt like the conversations from the 2013 release of The Last of Us had undergone the same zombification witnessed in the games — what once was dead was now alive again and suddenly much more aggressive.

The most obvious evidence of this reanimation was in the comparisons between videogames and movies. The last line of Brittany Vincent’s review in The Hollywood Reporter was turned into an oft-chided tweet:

Then another tweet comparing it to a very specific film received even more scorn. (Reminding us of the whole “Citizen Kane of videogames” thing probably didn’t help):

For me, the rest of the conversation was a blur of “ludonarrative dissonance” and “brutal violence.” If you’re wondering what’s really happening here, Chris Plante summed it up best in 5 tweets:

None of this fervor surprises me. For enthusiasts like me and the people I follow on Twitter, this conversation is what it’s all about. When a game gets lauded as “revolutionary,” we cannot help ourselves from either challenging or validating that assessment. I think we imagine these as rare moments when the entire entertainment consuming world tilts its head toward us to see what we have to say, and we all start talking at once, our different voices and perspectives becoming a cacophony. We have so much to say and are so infrequently listened to.

In 2014, I was playing The Last of Us and reading Twitter, so, naturally, I felt like I needed to add to the conversation. So, I did what felt like the only thing to do: I started writing. And, miraculously, I actually completed a review that decently encapsulated my thoughts on both the game and the conversation around the game. At the time, I had nowhere to publish it, so it simply sat on my Google Drive.

Now, as we experience a collective deja-vu around The Last of Us, I dug up that old review and gave it a read. Remarkably, I’m still pretty happy with it. Some of the language is clunky, but my overall point — that The Last of Us wanted to and succeeded at proving that games could be mature, dare I say “artistic” entertainment — still holds up. I’ve developed a lot more thoughts about that thesis in the last six years, but that core statement is still what I believe about The Last of Us, and I think I argue my point well enough in the review.

And now, since The Last of Us is available on Playstation Now and thus a game I need to review for Snap Judgement, I figured I’d finally publish that review. Yes, this is also a ploy to knock out a review without having to replay a fifteen hour game. But, in addition to the fact that my 2014 views might actually be more valuable than my 2020 ones, I don’t know if I’d be able to play such a brutal game again knowing that I want to play it’s sequel a week later. I did play The Last of Us: Left Behind for the first time however, and its review can be found here.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the review I wrote from June to July 2014, originally titled Finding The Game.

***

For a long time, I was waiting for The Game. The Game was an idea — maybe “dream” is a better word — of a videogame that succeeded in being taken seriously by gamers and non-gamers alike. Every time someone would say “games are just toys, they’re not to be taken seriously,” I would hold up this game and say, “but what about this one?” and they would relent. I was waiting for The Game that would prove to people that videogames could be art. I imagined The Game being taught to game design students years in the future just like silent movies are shown to film students today. I dreamt that someday someone would show Roger Ebert The Game, and he would say, “oh, ok, I see what you all are saying.”

Over my years of game-playing, so many games had gotten close to being the game, but they had all come up just short. Grand Theft Auto IV and V were both compelling, but too flippant to be taken seriously. LA Noire was close, but it seemed too stale, too tense to be it. Both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite were compelling candidates, but they still felt too much like a shooting gallery. Indie games had many of the elements of seriousness, but they all relied on too much of an open mind or a very videogame-literate audience to embrace them. Even the ones that sold well couldn’t really be considered popular culture touchstones.

The wait for The Game revolved around the frustration that games had untapped potential. I thought I was alone in this frustration until January 2012 when I read an interview with Neil Druckmann in Edge Magazine. He said he was making a game and wanted to “change the fucking industry” with it. When I read that expletive in the middle of the sentence, I instantly knew what he meant. Loving videogames can be a frustrating endeavor. You love them, but you also desperately want them to be more. That was the dream of The Game: a game that would shake up immature, silly games. Druckmann’s anger was my anger.

The game Druckmann was talking about was The Last of Us.

I got excited for this game, but I subdued my expectations in the months leading up to the release. The PR campaign for the game was dramatic and stark — a teaser trailer showed footage of riots and gas masks. There was no gameplay footage or advertising of features. The whole campaign possessed the attitude that this was going to be a game that changed games. That was a good first step, but I had heard this song before. Besides, I hadn’t seen anything to even indicate what the game would be like. When I put the disc in my Playstation for the first time, I still wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to get.

What I got felt familiar. It was a game operating inside standard conventions that anyone who’s ever played a triple-A videogame will recognise. It, logically, reminded me of the Uncharted series. It was the same cutscene-gameplay-cutscene-gameplay presentation as countless others. The main two mechanics were shooting/killing humans/zombies, and collecting items to assist in human/zombie slaughter. The story followed a journey through a post-apocalyptic world from one place to another until the protagonists finally find what they’re looking for. It all seemed familiar because I had seen it all before.

For “changing the fucking industry” The Last of Us appeared pretty run of the mill. Yet, it still felt different.

The thing that that was setting The Last of Us apart wasn’t the gameplay or the subject matter. It was the way it was all presented that made it outstanding. Plenty of games have had polished gameplay and some games have had a well presented story. But none have done both so well. After I had only played for a few minutes, I realized this game was doing what everyone else had been trying to do for at least the last twenty years: It was succeeding at being a blockbuster videogame that has depth, maturity, and seriousness.

In other words, this was The Game.

Like a scientist, I tried to disprove my hypothesis. Surely, like all other games, if you broke it down, this game could be ridiculed right? The easiest way to ridicule a video game is to look at the characters’ motivations. Most of the time, the only reason for doing something in a videogame is because it’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re doing something because you or your character wants to do it. Not here. In this game, you’re doing everything because you desperately feel like it’s the only option. You don’t shoot people because they are there to be shot. You shoot them because they pose a threat to you. It’s either you or them. (This is the only game where I’ve ever really felt afraid to take any damage.) And that was just motivation on a micro level. On a macro level, characters respond realistically based on their history. The story doesn’t flesh out every character, but most have enough elegantly told backstory to make their actions feel properly motivated — even when that action is slaughter.

Yes, you still kill an almost comic amount of people and zombies in this game, but this is one of the few times the amount of carnage isn’t ignored. Your characters have survived long enough to be considered expert killers, so your abilities are justified. Your trail of carnage is occasionally brought up and discussed. When you encounter new characters, they remark on how many people you’ve killed. You kill a lot of people, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world. It’s not a perfect justification, but it’s logical enough that your disbelief can be suspended.

Speaking of stories, this narrative was being told extremely naturally. Yes, much of the story is conveyed in cutscenes, but both the cutscenes and the in-game dialogue all flow completely naturally. Not once was there a hand wave or a “this is because of this” explanation. Characters lie, twist truths, hide things and generally act human.

But I’m always a sucker for story, what about the gameplay? Well, that was checking out too. This was a tense, challenging game of evasion and neutralization. The controls felt tight and responsive. The levels followed the established arc of getting harder as the story goes on. I thought of my friends who skip every cutscene in a game to get right to the action and I knew that even they would like this game.

That total experience continued to hold up for every minute of the 10 hours I spent playing. (Editor’s note: I think I severely underestimated the time it took me to complete this game. I took a leisurely pace and died occasionally. My real play time was probably around 15 hours, like most players. I think at the time I wrote 10 hours because that seemed long.) There wasn’t a single time the game let up. Even in the middle, where many games would insert filler, every moment developed the characters and provided both narratively and difficulty-level appropriate challenges.

Then there’s the end. You’ll have to see that for yourself. It may not satisfy everyone, but it’s definitely an ending that feels like it caps a 10 hour experience.

Now, that’s not to say the game is perfect. There are definitely compromises made in this game. Amazingly, however, no matter what type of game player you are, be it story-lover like me or gameplay lover like the friends I mentioned, it always feels like the compromises are made in your favor. I feel like gameplay was worked around to present the story, but I could also point out scenes where story might have been worked around in the name of game play. Neither set of compromises tip the scale definitively in one direction.

It’s not a perfect game, but the dream of The Game was not about perfection. It was about that successful, dramatic game that proved that games are a mature medium. This game does exactly that.

I expected The Game to appear in a flash but instead it arrived in a fade. The Last of Us received plenty of fanfare. It was lauded and awarded and deservedly so. But it only felt like a logical step forward, not a great leap. This wasn’t the game that took the ball down the field, it was the one that took the ball the final yard into the endzone. In fact, the echoes of older games that this game showcases made me wonder if this wasn’t The Game. But when I replayed those older games, I realized how significant the difference was. Playing an older game after playing The Last of Us felt like watching a movie in black and white after seeing The Wizard of Oz in color. There’s still brilliance in all of those old games and The Game could never exist without them. But after a taste, I want more of that saturation.

So, this certainly sounds like the end of the story, right? No. This is just the beginning. Perhaps the next chapter is my favorite so far. When Watchdogs came out in May, it also carried the same kind of anticipation that you would expect from The Game. But when the reviews came out the consensus was that it was held back by two-dimensional characters and unjustified gameplay. Reviews gave it plenty of flack. But for the first time, it was catching flack for things that had been brushed off before. Had Watchdogs been released in 2012, it would probably be forgiven for its sins and declared a hit. Unfortunately for them, it had to be compared against The Game, and the first game of the new console generation hit the newly raised bar.

Hey Neil, I heard you wanted to “change the fucking industry.” It sounds to me like you got your wish.