No, really. I have a mental checklist of features in games that drive me absolutely insane, and this game managed to mark off quite a few of them quite often. Are there monsters with one-hit kills? Check. Are the monsters really difficult to pick out from other monsters when a majority of combat happens in dark places? Check. Does the AI constantly show how ridiculous it is, either by having monsters trip over NPCs without seeing them or having a bad guy get stuck somewhere so it becomes impossible to sneak past him? Check. Do my NPC partners occasionally run over to the other end of a map while I'm in combat and get themselves killed before I can get over to them? Check.
Worst of all, do I die a lot while playing it? Check.
I died one hundred forty-four times. The game keeps track for you. It's, well, I don't want to call it "kind" for doing that, but I guess the information does come in handy.
So why did I play it through to completion? That's a good question. Mild spoilers ahead, but I'll try to be vague.
Before I get into what I found so fascinating about the game, we should get some basic details out of the way first. The game is, quite simply, gorgeous when it gets a chance to exercise its visual muscles. Outdoor scenes and a few indoor scenes are highly detailed and rich with things to catch the eye. Time spent poking around corners and trying alternate routes never felt like wasted time since I could usually find something entertaining or interesting to look at. There are a few set pieces that did feel rather bland, however, including a frustrating staple of video games, "the sewer level." Other stages are extremely dark, forcing you to rely on a flashlight to be able to see anything, which always has the added problem of missing important things because your flashlight was angled slightly left or right.
The game play features are basic enough, and after some practice I found my hands moving easily to access weapons, trigger combat maneuvers, and maneuver around bad guys while being stealthy. Certain aspects were annoying, but were able to be compensated for, including drift on the sights of a gun that can be bought off with points earned through stages.
The proverbial meat and potatoes of the game, however, are in the story. You play as a smuggler in a post-apocalyptic America who is hired to transport a teenage girl to an organization who might be able to manufacture a cure to a major biological threat from her system. Now, I haven't had great luck with games that are primarily "escort" missions, with a few notable exceptions (Ico, Resident Evil 4, Bioshock Infinite), but for each one I enjoyed, there were attempts to lead people to safety in games like Dead Rising which made me swear quite loudly at the AI.
Now, normally escorting a teenage girl around a zombie-like infested wasteland just screams "infuriating" to me, but the hype surrounding the game swept me up in its flood across game consoles nationwide and I heard very few negative things about it. I was intrigued by the fact that the game utilized an actual affliction that takes over the bodies of ants and causes them to kill themselves. This calmed down that small part of my brain that looks for a little scientific basis before being willing to simply suspend disbelief.
Ellie, however, isn't a standard defenseless heroine (well, okay she is towards the beginning). She's not afraid to speak her mind, will have intense emotional moments (you know, like teenagers do), and seems to have a maturity beyond her years when it comes to her own purpose and what it takes to survive in the world. She also swears more than a twenty-four hour block of stand-up comedy on HBO, but I did find it rather humorous that there's only really one person who tells her to watch her mouth, and then to see what becomes of that character.
If there's one thing I feel the need to point out, however, it's the big deal surrounding a choice made at the end of the game. Now, this isn't a choice that you, the player gets to make, it's a choice the character makes to further the story. Now, I like to think I would have made the exact same choice in the situation, based on how attached I had become to Ellie, but I realized as I played through that part of the mission that there was another reason I didn't mind making the choice. With the exception of two characters who I know survive until the end of the game, everybody else you meet in this world is an absolutely terrible person.
And I don't mean terrible like "oh, they say mean things," I mean they seem to go out of their way to be the most horrible people they possibly can be to decrease any and all sympathy you might have for them.
One person you meet early on in the game is a soldier who questions his orders, but even when you think he's going to refuse to follow them out, he suddenly lifts up his gun to obey. A gang in one city takes delight in their treatment of "tourists" who stumble into their area, which includes activities like "keep running away while our armored car with a machine gun cuts you down." Even the people you eventually meet up with towards the end of the game don't seem to show any attempt to be nice to you.
When I met them, I was trying to resuscitate Ellie after a moment we were both trapped underwater. Instead of letting me save the life of a teenage girl, the first person I meet smacks me in the head with the barrel of a gun. I'm simply told "sorry, they didn't know who you were" like it makes it okay to let a kid drown. When I show any doubts about their plans, instead of a "look, just listen as we try to explain this" a guard is told to toss me out and "shoot him if he resists." There's no call for a lot of the behavior these people deliver on me, and there's no motivation behind it, it seems, besides "make your character and Ellie the most sympathetic people in the world."
Strangely enough, the one organization I did feel compassion for was a group you encounter late in the game who actively attempt to kill you. Now, to be fair they do start the whole business by attempting to murder your character and Ellie as you're leaving a building, but when you encounter the same group again later, you realize the reason why they were there in the first place and what kind of group they come from. You start to feel bad that you killed those people until you realize that they tried to kill you first with no attempt to communicate.
Now, granted, something happens with the group that once again swings them back towards "unsympathetic" (unless you really start to ponder what lengths people would go to in order to survive in this kind of world), but even while I was once again butchering my way through them to get across a map, I'd hear snippets of conversation that would make me want to pause and see if I couldn't just figure out some way to leave without hurting anybody else.
A few other things that bothered me were all combat-based. As I said before, certain monsters kill you in a single hit if they get their hands on you, and I'd quickly lose track of where they were in a crowd, allowing them to simply sidle up beside me and force a reload. Human enemies would be able to spot my ear sticking out from around the corner of a building from a city block away, and everybody was a dead-eye shot with even the smallest guns, pegging me before I could lift my head up and aim at them to shoot back.
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| This was the last thing I saw so many times. |
Remember, I died one hundred and fourteen times getting through this game. On normal difficulty.
The story is also rather predictable. I could point out characters as soon as I met them and go "they're going to die, he's going to die, she'll live, he'll live, that one person will die, that person's already dead, they just don't know it yet." I was also able to fully predict moments that things were going to get bad, and could recognize when the game was trying to lift up my spirits slightly with raised music or brighter surroundings. My immediate reaction was "well, things are about to get bad soon, they're building up to a sudden dramatic twist." I don't think I was wrong with a single prediction.
Also, everybody knows that you never go into the sewers when there's monsters around. It's just common sense.
So, with all these problems (frustrating combat being the topmost), why did I finish the game? I wanted to see what happened to these two main characters. Much like how I felt a strong paternal instinct to protect Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite, I felt the same drive to keep Ellie safe in The Last of Us. Both characters are richly developed, but since you don't control Ellie (save for a few short moments), she's allowed to grow and develop on her own. I found myself chuckling under my breath as things I take for granted in today's world were explained to her, and I groaned at bad jokes she'd tell that I'm sure I told at her age (the grapes one made me actually laugh out loud). I found myself appreciating how frustrated she'd be when major decisions were made without her input or letting her voice her opinion, but I also understood that the main character knew best with the experiences he already had.
While the story itself isn't really that remarkable (it is, after all, a standard escort mission with the slight difference that the escortee becomes more capable as the game continues), it has some new twists that kept my attention and strongly built characters who I wanted to spend time with to see where their lives went. The combat was frustrating, the graphics were often dark to a point of being ridiculous, and the AI was glitchy at best, broken at worst, but if someone asked me "Hey, should I play this game?" my response would be "Certainly, but..."
It's not the best game I ever played, I'm not even really sure it's a "great" game outside of the characters that Naughty Dog managed to create and animate in this setting, but it got me involved, and that's a credit to it.
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