The Last of Us

This review contains spoilers.

The Last of Us is a competent post-apocalyptic zombie game about a troubled, violent man making troubled, violent decisions. It may never quite manage to successfully integrate its gameplay systems into the story, which leans too heavily on the clichés of the genre, but still offers a carefully built nihilist narrative and a couple of memorable main characters.

The intro is beautifully constructed and – much like Ori and the Blind Forest – is the best part of the game even if it’s one of the most scripted moments of it. We meet Joel and his daughter Sarah on his birthday. She gives him a present, a wristwatch, but despite the special occasion, despite the gift, and despite a couple of jokes he makes, the scene plays out a bit cold: Joel never says thank you, he never hugs his daughter, and he jokes about… mortgage and the gift being broken. We can already see Joel has problems displaying real affection.

However, even though he is an absent father (“You’re never around,” his daughter writes in his birthday card), Sarah still loves him, and even jokes about not knowing exactly why (“and yet somehow you still manage to be the best dad every year,” the birthday card concludes.) This part of the opening is important because it already establishes what kind of person Joel is: a man who hides his emotions and whose rare attempts to show affection fall flat.

We start playing as his daughter, which helps us empathize with her and see the chaos and confusion of the outbreak through the eyes of a person who has every reason to be scared and confused. But after a car crash, we start to control Joel as he tries to protect his daughter, who broke her leg and must be carried around. The chaos is perfectly captured without cutscenes: people are running on the streets and being tackled by the infected, and a car crashes on a gas station, blowing it up and adding noise and fire to the scene. Eventually, Joel meets a military man and thinks they’re saved. This is the turning point: it’s not the infected that kill Joel’s daughter, but an American soldier carrying orders; it’s a terrified man who receives a heartless order from a terrified officer. If Joel was already the silent type before, this hardens him even further.

After a time jump, we are introduced to the horrible world the now grizzled Joel lives in: a post-apocalyptic, violent society that is utterly devoid of hope. Civilization seems limited to military zones where people are dragged down through the streets and put down in front of everyone if found infected. “No future. Burn it all down,” the graffiti next to Joel’s house states.

And this is a world Joel and his partner in crime, Jess, fit right into –they are smugglers and brutal ones at that. When talking to the goons of a gangster who double-crossed them, Jess simply says “Fuck it,” and shoots the guy right in the face, unprovoked. They are not that different from the gangsters and goons they kill, and they know it: “We are shitty people,” Tess says to Joel. “We are survivors,” he responds, trying – and failing – to justify their actions.

The truth is that Joel has become a ruthless man, that brooding, silent type that is immensely violent. The type of man that would rather commit genocide and condemn humanity to a hopeless existence rather than go to therapy. The first main objective in The Last of Us is to murder the gangster who stole from him – and everyone who works for the poor guy as well. And it’s telling that both Joel and Jess seem unphased by all the killing: violence is not just a part of their everyday lives, but the essence of who they have become.

Soon, however, they get a new job: to smuggle a girl out of the city for a resistance group called Firefly. This girl – who Joel quickly finds is infected and immune to the infection – is called Ellie.

When Joel first meets Ellie, she’s almost his polar opposite, showing warmth and care for those around her, being weirdly upbeat. Despite having been born in that horrible world, she seems untouched by it– and indeed she has never truly explored it: when they have to venture into the woods and she sees fireflies for the first time, Ellie displays childlike wonder. She’s playful and boasts the typical carefree attitude of children, which is a bit dangerous when there are zombie-like creatures nearby: there’s even a scene where she tries to learn how to whistle… in the middle of an infested town (fortunately, she fails).

Ellie is constantly reacting to the world around her. If she enters a music shop, she’ll express sadness that all those CDs will collect dust forever and never be listened to. When she spots a poster of a female model, she asks Joel why people of his time didn’t eat food properly if they had it at their disposal. When she passes through a dilapidated coffee shop, she asks Joel if he went often to one and what he had to drink. “Just coffee,” he answers, but in an uncomfortable manner, as if he were hiding the real answer.

These tiny bits of dialogue and moments of interaction are the thing that makes The Last of Us – and the Uncharted games before it – stand out: they help make the world feel lived in, adding depth and texture to it as the characters react to the environment and make comments about it. And this also helps develop the characters themselves, often displaying Ellie’s curiosity and innocence while reminding us that she grew up in that dreadful society, without a chance to know how it used to function before. With these brief conversations, Joel is also given the opportunity to be less aggressive, since he’s forced to remember and talk about things of a time when everything was better for him.

Joel’s relationship with Ellie follows the well-established formula: it starts off cold, as he tries to maintain a professional distance from her, then it becomes hostile when he discovers her secret, and then there’s resignation when he accepts the task of delivering her to the Fireflies himself. Eventually, he begins to warm up to her and, finally, the predictable happens, and he starts to see her as a daughter.

While Joel’s journey softens him up to her – but only to her –, Ellie’s journey toughens her up in a general sense. From the moment Joel hands her a gun, she begins to tread the path of a killer. Shooting infected first, then shooting a man point blank in the face, and then she basically turns into Joel: a ruthless murderer, who slaughters bandit camps and brutalizes her enemies.

After she cuts down a man with a machete, and keeps disfiguring his face in anger, she finally turns silent. Gone are the playful sounds and the jokes she occasionally makes. The best character moment in the game is when we ask her to come over to Joel so he can boost her over a ledge to grab a ladder for him – an action that has been performed countless times already, leading us to take it for granted – and… she doesn’t come. She’s sitting on a bench, lost in thoughts, letting the violent episode sink in.

“Everyone has a family. Best not to dwell on it,” this is how Joel teaches Ellie to cope with having murdered a hundred people. “How can you not?” she questions him, not believing it to be possible. Joel’s lesson is a symptom of his personality, defined by his insistence to repress his feelings and avoid dealing with traumatic events. With Joel, The Last of Us offers a cautionary tale of the typical man who doesn’t cry, and so finds in anger and violence the only way to vent his frustrations.

The climax is the culmination of this problem. Joel faces a decision, to let Ellie die for the cure or save her from the surgery and condemn humanity. His choice, then, seems inevitable given his personality and backstory: he chooses Ellie because he simply cannot lose another daughter. His motivation is not altruistic in any sense, as he’s not thinking of Ellie or of what she wants – the game even closes with Joel lying to her about the event to reinforce this interpretation, since he fears she would just go back to the Fireflies and sacrifice herself for mankind. If he chooses to save her life it’s because he never managed to process his previous loss and is then incapable of suffering through the same trauma again. His choice is egotistical in nature – he puts his feelings above nothing less than the future of humanity – and is the fruit of a life of self-repression.

The Last of Us has an episodic structure and here it’s where the game is at its most basic and predictable, narrative-wise. It relies on several tropes of the genre and shows characters that never go beyond their basic traits.

First, there’s Bill, the trope of the paranoid survivor, who has become a bit crazy because he believes his paranoia is the reason he’s alive. It’s the intense character that is a bit unhinged but must nonetheless work together with the main characters to fight the monsters. Then, they meet little Sam and his brother, who are good people and, therefore, have a sign with the words “we are going to die” written on their backs. Then, there’s the crazy gang leader, who appears civilized but just wants to have sex/rape and – maybe – even eat Ellie.

There’s little to talk about these characters. Take Bill, for example. After Joel and Ellie leave him, she reveals that she took a porn magazine from him and, when she describes it, we discover that Bill is gay, and the scene plays out as a comedic reveal: the unhinged, crazy character was gay and that’s it. When Joel and Ellie are next to Bill, exploring the town and defeating zombies together, the dialogue between them never goes beyond the trope of the paranoid survivor. His sexuality, then, is irrelevant, never even being acknowledged when it could have made a difference: we can even find a letter written by his old partner, but the text never hints at any kind of romantic relationship, there’s just hatred for Bill in it, reinforcing the interpretation that the guy could have been just a partner in the professional sense. In other words, Bill is just there to be a friendly companion to Joel and Ellie and nothing more.

This lack of complexity regarding the side characters hurt these self-contained stories, which find their strength only when, together, they form a whole: a pessimist, nihilist journey where the good people either die or are forced to become savage maniacs. The gang leader, for example, is the turning point in Ellie’s life because it’s when she’s pushed to violence like she never was before, as it ends with the girl continually hitting the man’s face with a machete.

The Last of Us’ story doesn’t glorify violence – the characters are broken because of it – but it can be easily consumed as if it did, since a surface reading of the events can be “they did what was necessary to survive.” After all, Joel himself utters this exact line, but the thing is that he’s lying to himself, repressing the damage done to his soul. The “it is necessary” excuse may be the go-to justification for a person’s most horrible deeds, but here not even the person who utters the sentence is really being earnest about it.

The story, therefore, has its ups and downs, with some powerful moments – such as the ending – but some weak, shallow ones as well. When it comes to making its world feel cohesive, however, the game truly excels. When walking through the city at the beginning, for instance, we can easily spot a huge skyscraper that fell onto another, which managed to barely hold its weight. Eventually, we get right beneath those buildings, which gives a sense of progression to the adventure. The Last of Us is brilliant at this, always displaying an important environment in the background, even if we don’t know that it is important at the moment. Later on, we even get inside that same fallen building, which becomes the center stage for the introduction of the game’s horror element: the infected.

One of them is called a Clicker, a human being with a fungus growing out of their head. This is how Tess explains how they work to Ellie: “They see using sound. Like bats. If you hear one clicking, you gotta hide. That’s how they spot you.” What the character is describing is often referred to by incredibly smart scientists as “some form of bat radar,” but it’s also known as echolocation: a bat makes a sound, the sound bounces back after hitting an object, and the bat can calculate where and what the object is.

However, the way the Clickers function during normal gameplay doesn’t match this idea. They should be using noise – their gruesome clicks – to spot moving objects and identify them as prey. Their design, therefore, should have focused on the noise they make and on Joel’s movement. But in the game, it’s the other way around: we must walk without making noise to not startle the monsters while watching their movements. This means that, in practice, despite the lore around them, Clickers basically function as blind enemies that have good hearing and just that.

They are still fearsome foes, as they can move fast and deal an instakill grab when they get too close to Joel, but the gameplay around them simply doesn’t match how the characters present them in the story. We can, after all, very much ignore their clicks and just move very slowly toward them without too much fear of getting caught.

Modern games believe “x-ray vision” is a must, even if they break immersion, and The Last of Us is no different in this regard. At any point in the game, we can press a button that focuses on Joel’s hearing and it shows the silhouettes of every character in his vicinity moving – even behind walls. It’s not true echolocation because Joel doesn’t have to make sounds to use his naturally-built sonar, but the result is similar and makes the character behave in a superhuman way. Many games suffer from this, but it is especially off-putting when the story doesn’t acknowledge this power and is also built through naturalistic dialogue while boasting detailed, realistic environments. We are not obligated to use this so-called “Listen Mode”, it’s true, but the game is designed around it and only an extremely difficult option removes it completely.

On Normal difficulty, the game is at odds with the tone of its story. To make combat encounters more interesting, it keeps giving Joel new weapons at every turn, such as a bow, a shotgun, and even a flamethrower. This means that, after a while, it’s more like the infected are stuck in a room with Joel than the other way around: he becomes a killing machine capable of wiping hordes of monsters and armed thugs. So, even though the story tries to build tension around the infected and make us fear them, the gameplay turns them into easy targets.

Stealth is pretty simple as well. Joel can see – sorry, hear – where every enemy is and even what type of enemy they are – and he can even move while doing so. Then, it’s just a matter of getting behind an enemy and stealth-killing them – making some noise if Joel doesn’t have a shiv, which is pretty easy to craft. Clickers are immune to stealth kills if Joel doesn’t have a shiv, but we can always just avoid them or shoot the hell out of them. Later on, we also get access to smoke bombs, which turn enemies blind and stupid.

Therefore, The Last of Us, on normal difficulty at least, is a power fantasy disguised as survival horror, which makes the fantasy even more enticing: the game gives the player the means to wreak havoc and destroy everything in their path but, at the same time, it tries to convince them that what they’re doing is actually very hard, difficult, and terrifying.

However, even in the hardest of difficulties, The Last of Us lacks suspense. Its structure clearly separates combat encounters from exploration, which means that we know Joel is safe when exploring rooms for crafting items, as the game will signalize – either with a cutscene or a scripted event – when infected are nearby, and it’s finally time to move stealthily or utterly destroy them. One last thing about the “Listening Mode” is that it also lies before these events, showing that a room is empty just before Joel enters it and a cutscene plays out where a man grabs him from behind the door.

Finally, The Last of Us also suffers from the modern plague of useless collectibles. We can find soldier tags from Firefly members, but these tags serve no purpose outside unlocking an achievement. We can find comics for Ellie to read, but she never reads them and we can’t read them either, but just look at the cover. The only useful ones are the notes scattered around the environments, containing brief tales of people who probably died, as they aren’t as lucky as Joel and can’t see enemy shapes behind doors. There is nothing special about these stories, but at least we can read them.

In the end, The Last of Us is still a perfectly decent post-apocalyptic game. The developer of the Uncharted games has trouble making the gameplay fit the more serious tone of this story, but it has a pair of interesting main characters and a fully realized world to make up for it.

February 01, 2023.