PixlBit

By now, I'm sure everyone has read the various reactions and reviews to this Playstation Exclusive. For the most part, you're going to read the same things here, but I wanted to put into print my biggest gripe with the game. That will come at the end of this piece, so skip ahead if you want.

Now, despite whatever nits I will pick with this game, it is definitely in contention for game of the year. Why's that? Because this game does what it's supposed to do very very well. So, before I start gushing, let's cover some complaints.

This isn't really my complaint, but it is one that is brought up quite often by other reviewers: the story is pretty unoriginal. After finding out that a young girl is somehow immune to the fungal plague that started the zombie outbreak, you, as Joel, have to escort her to safety at a research facility. From there you run into the expected groups of marauders, zombies, and general craziness that happens in a dark zombie apocalypse story.

To me, this wasn't a drawback, as the tropes that the game repeated it did well and the character's reactions to the events are interesting. And it's the characters that drive this story.

The gameplay was sparse, which leads to complaints about this being an interactive movie instead of a game, and the gameplay was sometimes broken. And I completely understand those complaints, but as I said before, the characters are the important part of The Last of Us, so there didn't have to be an emphasis on tactical gameplay or other such nonsense. Even so, the ability to have Joel focus his listening would allow me to attempt plans to avoid the Infected, though I would not always succeed. Some of these instances were when the partner AI would run into an Infected or in one case, start firing on them after I had spent minutes carefully stalking my way around them (I hate you, Bill).

It was beautiful. But sometimes the graphics broke. Particularly in one instance when I was shoving a fungi infested runner away from me, only to have him stuck in a wall, running and snarling. I couldn't hit him with any weapons, so I ended up having to restart at the last checkpoint. (Luckily, the game would save constantly, so it wasn't much of a setback.) Other times, the characters would phase through the environment. It wasn't so bad, but it grew frequent and noticeable as the game went on. Still, there were some points in the game, where I would just gaze out into the amazingly detailed world and marvel at what Naughty Dog was able to pull from the PS3.

Now, gushing:

Dear Lord, this was a great game. Seriously, it blended so much of what can turn video gaming into a wonderful entertainment experience and wrapped it into a beautiful package. And it was beautiful. Cutscenes blended in well with the actual gameplay and the mo-cap was tremendous. Joel and Ellie have to be among the most emotive characters in gaming nowadays. I was recently playing Ghost Recon Future Soldier and the humans in The Last of Us were a slap in the face. This game is proof of what time and attention can do for a game's presentation.

Tension was present in so much of the atmosphere, as well. I'd find myself dreading entering tunnels or ruined houses. And when I would get too far into some areas and the air became choked with spores, my toes would curl and my spine would stiffen. I knew I'd get into some trouble and wasn't sure if I had enough to make it through. Which brings up the item situation. I played on Normal, which supposedly allows for ample items to craft shivs, makeshift bombs and molotov cocktails, but as I headed closer to the end, I didn't get nearly as much. I realized I had gotten too confident in luring out the zombies into my bombs and now that I was grateful just to have some scissors to make a shiv. I can't imagine how others could make it through without frustration in Hard or Survivor modes.

The story, which had unoriginal events, was a joy to play through because of Joel and Ellie and how they reacted to them. And the end! Dear God the end! Even with the intriguing and hearbreaking end to Bioshock Infinite, did I not have the emotion that the few and simple last lines of Last of Us provoked.

Now, as teased in the opening to this review, I'd like to talk about my biggest gripe with the game, which bumps up against the "interactive movie" complaint I brought up earlier.

One of the greatest things that video games provides and separates them from other forms of popular entertainment. Really, only tabletop rpgs run along the same line that video games can. You see, video games and rpgs are the two forms of entertainment that can give the audience/participants the ability to make decisions that impact the future of that piece of entertainment. As I've said before, Last of Us is primarily an interactive movie, but the interactivity is isolated to areas that are traditionally game oriented: combat and sneaking. All's well and good with that, for reasons stated earlier, but what the game really lacked was true choice. You were guided through the story as well as the various stages of the game.

If Last of Us had found a way to blend in the sort of choice that was found in last year's Walking Dead game from Telltale Games, I really think it could have easily won the Game of the Year title for me. But it didn't--and I really don't think that it could have. That's not really the direction of the story.

I haven't played TWD more than once (though I keep meaning to), so I'm not completely sure that there isn't another ending to it, but I think that the ending I got was it. All there WAS was the heartbreaking and emotionally scarring final bit. And this compares with the end to Last of Us, except that throughout the preceding 10 hours of TWD, my choices felt like they mattered and when I finally got to that prewritten sequence, it had become MY story, it was me in that room with Clem. It was ME telling her what to do. With the Last of Us, I was watching the end, not truly experiencing it. And if The Last of Us had given me the latter, I would have been truly won over.