SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
PART ONE
At first it feels like a knock-off Half Life, with button mashing quick time events and a clumsy stealth mechanic instead of shooting, but quickly demonstrates itself as superior in its care for demolished urban environments, shocking violence, and surprising beauty. The Last of Us supplies all three in spades, but then expands and expands, reeling out place after place and broadening its emotional scope slowly but deliberately. You start in ruined downtown Boston, then trek a short ways to a small Massachusetts town, then even further to Pittsburgh, and even further than that to Wyoming, Colorado, and finally Salt Lake City. Each traversal manages to feel like a surprise, and each environment gives the game developers a chance to showcase a new kind of ruined beauty and explore the stories of a new kind of people. It really is remarkable.
The moment to moment movement in the game somehow manages to feel important and fun, even though mostly what you're doing is poking around old houses and opening drawers. You know you aren't going to find enough supplies, and that whatever encounter comes next is going to be tough enough that if you don't give yourself an edge it's going to be annoying, so you're pressed to search. Luckily, the houses are detailed and beautiful, and the remains you find there tell deliberate stories of apocalypse, and the little notes and letters you might find left behind are well written and concise. Not to mention, the animations and movements you make when you grab the items are fluid and satisfying. It's a core movement to the game, and it feels good.
In fact, the movement over all feels fluid and intuitive. There's less of that feeling of "snapping" to cover that you get from other cover shooters. Jumping through windows and over counters is quick and quiet. When you get caught, the sprinting and dodging feels break-neck and frantic.
The drawings are realistic but never look real. Everything has a lush, animated quality to it, though the light plays realistically, it feels more like moving through a world inspired by our world, than an attempt to emulate it. It feels rich, and works with both the natural and urban environments, and sometimes is able to recall accurately moments from reality. There is a point mid-way through the game where you wash up on a river shore in Pittsburgh at night, and the night sky is so beautiful and quiet, it reminds me of the real night sky, in a way I have not encountered in a game.
The zombies are not the main event but they are creepy. The game has managed to do something new with zombies to demonstrate how horrible it could be. The fungal blooms that erupt from the zombie corpses are beautiful and alien. The idea of fungal spores permeating an apartment building and infecting the inhabitants hits close to home. The actual enemies feel like video game enemies, and there is not much to say about them, but I enjoyed the idea that, as the infection spreads, the zombies stop becoming killable the way people can be killed, because they are mostly fungus.
The stories of the few people you meet are concise and cruel, but never seem to overstep their bounds. At first they seem sort of stilted and histrionic -- early on, your smuggling partner is bitten by a zombie and sacrifices herself to save you. Ok, well, everyone saw that coming. But we keep meeting people, just a few of them, probably no more than six characters, and each one is drawn directly and quickly, their personality is clear and again if not real-seeming then at least realistic, and their ends are varied and often cruel in ways that are surprising, and just as importantly, affect the main characters, and their relationship to each other.
Joel and Ellie really are an excellent pair of characters. The play between them is obvious, one is a hardened and bitter smuggler and he misses his dead daughter, the other is a naive young girl, who has nevertheless seen her share of sorrow. But the writers really milk it. The whole game is filled with snatches of dialogue and banter between them as they remark on the world around them. Their different takes on what they see, what they care about, their slowness to care for each other, it is really affecting. When they are separated from each other, it is horrible. Joel's difficulty in showing his genuine care for her, and then the relief and feeling with which they embrace finally near the end of the game, is one of the few truly moving moments I've encountered in a game.
Much has been said about the end of the game, I'll say it again. Joel rescues Ellie from a hospital, where the doctors are going to kill her to extract a vaccine from her body. She does not know this is going to happen. To me, it feels natural at this point that Joel would do this, and I support him. He guns down the doctors and gets her out, but when she asks him later what happened, he gives a blatant lie to cover up his guilt and his fear that Ellie would leave him, which Ellie hesitantly and for the time being accepts with a simple "Okay." Again, this is a remarkable moment of story-telling which I have not seen in a game before, a fast ending that illustrates something new but true about both characters, and which ends the story that was being told. The dialogue has a deliberate, written quality that really works here. At the end, the inability of the characters to be really closely intimate, despite their longing for it, is simply illustrated, and then the story ends. It's very, very good.
PART TWO
Man this game is weird. I don't really know what they were going for.
The first thing I noticed is that the characterization is off. Joel no longer seems like Joel. There is a lack of specificity to his character. He doesn't seem like the fucked up, emotionally calloused murderer from the first game, he's more like a sweet and beloved war hero. He's quickly murdered by a character you play as in the tutorial, which is a strange choice but seemed deliberate, though it didn't quite work, as I couldn't tell what they were trying to accomplish. That feeling of not quite knowing what they were trying to accomplish sticks through the game. There's an inconsistency that never lets up.
At some point in the game, I noticed that the grabbing motion feels strange. Your character's gestures when they reach out feel sort of robotic or over-scripted, like over-fluid, maybe uncanny valley. This persists.
Throughout the game, the moment to moment writing is either a little bit off -- the letters and notes you find lack a feeling of directness and authenticity -- or just strange. There are strange sex scenes, strange murders, and a feeling of flatness. The game takes you in a direction for a while, and then stops, or suddenly changes direction.
There's an open world area at the beginning of the game. You're given a map and everything. I figured the rest of the game would have open world elements, but as the game continues, it never shows up again. The rest of the game is really linear, like the last one.
Your allies switch out so often, and there are so many of them, that the game starts to feel a little unmoored. At first your companion is your girlfriend, Dina, a shallow and annoying girl, whose appeal I don't see. Then there's Jesse, a grim and personality-less young man, who stirs some jealousy. About halfway through the game, perspective unexpectedly shifts to Joel's killer, and you play the rest of the game as her, and are accompanied by a number of companions, most of whom die. None of this stirs much feeling.
There is a hollow flatness to the game's events and violence. It is shockingly violent, the streams of blood that spurt from people's necks when you drive your knife into them is cunningly animated. The violence is joyless. There is a sense that the game is trying to demonstrate that violence is bad. Your enemies are given names, they call out to each other. At first this is intense and interesting, but as the game progresses and nothing is done with this information, it feels only manipulative, but to what end?
The game ends in a violent, boring brawl full of close-ups, seemingly meant to demonstrate the worthlessness of revenge. It sucks.
The most remarkable thing about this game is the strange juxtaposition between its realism and density, and the hollowness of the characters, the story, and its message. The visuals are astonishing and mesmerizing, though not exactly beautiful. It evokes a beautiful, ghost-like, foggy, wet place, a conjured Seattle I've never been to but now want to visit. The fog and the ferns and the rain feel magical and full, the dripping water, the rushing torrents of water, the rain, and the storm and lightning, the swelling waves, it's really great. But then the dialogue and people are so flat, and there's that sense of manipulation, that I'm being made to do something I don't want to in order to learn a lesson. That I'm being subjected to the unpleasant impression of violence, just to be taught that violence is unpleasant and bad.
Weird game.
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