The Last of Us

Harsh and unforgiving, but so well done

Oh, so pretty. Oh so violent.

The Last of Us has some of the most picturesque post-apocalyptic background environments that I’ve ever seen. Crumbling, moss overgrown buildings, partially collapsed ruins with trees growing up through the floorboards, sunlight sparkling on submerged streets with rusting hulks sticking up out of the water.... Everywhere you look you can see signs of nature reclaiming man’s attempts to subdue it. The world is full of green and growing things.

It’s too bad everything else has gone straight to HELL.

The introductory sequence to this game had me on the edge of my seat. It does a marvelous job of building tension and was, for once, appropriately paced. Happening right at the beginning of a mysterious outbreak, you control a young girl named Sarah. You have no weapons. You can’t run very fast. It’s the middle of the night and her father is nowhere to be found when she wakes up. A panicked phone call from her uncle is cut off midway through and though the night is quiet at first, strange sounds from far away soon fill the air. An explosion in a nearby city, panicked dogs barking off in the distance, the wail of sirens as police cars hurtle past your residence, and the growing sense that something is definitely wrong.

Atmospherically speaking?

Nailed it.

I genuinely did not anticipate how this sequence of events would end. The feelings of fear and panic, chaos and confusion are carried across quite well. The intro concludes in a shocking, violent manner, thereupon to skip ahead twenty years and begin the game proper.

So what kind of game is The Last of Us? Mercy me, I seem to have stumbled upon an authentic survival horror experience in modern gaming. I was beginning to think the genre was almost completely dead, what with the focus being almost entirely on action horror titles these days. At least that was my first impression of things. I must say that this was not entirely correct.

What it actually is, is a third person post-apocalyptic survival experience, mashed with a brutally punishing stealth system where the slightest wrong move will have you swarmed by enemies that can instantly kill you, or your soon to be corpse will hit the floor riddled with bullets unless you move fast and keep low.

If stealth gameplay is not your cup of tea, or you are prone to visiting acts of violence on your equipment when frustrated, you should probably stay faaar away from this game or play it on the easier difficulties, because it will take careful conservation of your supplies and a true survivalist mentality for finding hidden items in order to acquire enough resources to really shoot it out with your enemies with the limited weaponry available to you. Or you could just try to sneak past them, as most enemies seldom drop items anyway. Oh, you just shot three dudes with guns? Go take a look and check their weapons....

What weapons? Huh, this guy here had two bullets in his gun, but the freaking gremlins stole the other ones I guess. I know it’s a way of delicately balancing the resources available to the player, but it is immersion breaking when time and time again I would kill human enemies that were shooting at me and find that a series of miniature black holes had opened around their firearms and sucked them into the negaverse. One time I had a revolver literally vanish in midair after I killed someone while I was zoomed in on it. I just had to shake my head and move on.

They drop melee weapons, but firearms are a real crapshoot. Couldn’t you have just had them drop empty guns? It’s enough of a stretch that they all have unlimited ammo in a situation where it should be pretty scarce. Oh, I have an even better idea. Have them run out of ammo in the middle of a firefight like I do and resort to fighting with their fists or running away. Would make combat a hell of a lot more interesting, but what do I know? I’m not a game developer. It would probably be pretty complex to try and work all of that into the combat scenarios and what we do have works fairly well. It’s monstrously unfair, but it’s quite functional.

To assist you in your endeavors, there is an ability the main character Joel has called ‘listen mode.’ This allows you to hear/see enemies and allies moving around, even through walls...provided of course, that they actually make noise. Absolutely silent enemies are a bitch and a half. Unfortunately, this mode also mutes any sound in the immediate surrounding area, such as conversations that might be interesting to listen to. So you have a mode that transforms your auditory sense into a mostly visual one and yet prevents you from hearing people who are close by talk. Huh.

Stealth kills are relatively easy, depending on who and what you’re sneaking up on, of course. Avoiding discovery afterwards? Not so much.

Should you choose to duke it out with your foes, you will usually be outnumbered and/or outgunned. The game does it’s damndest to discourage this approach. You have limited ammunition, melee weapons break after a number of uses, and certain enemies will simply kill you if they get their hands on you.

This game? Definitely NOT for the kids. It earns its mature rating by virtue of the incredibly vicious nature of the combat system alone. There is an elemental brutality to this. Joel is absolutely lethal with any weapon or none at all, using a variety of nasty punches to his opponents’ vital areas and utilizing context sensitive finishing moves depending on where you kill an enemy. You use planks, pipes, baseball bats, machetes, axes, and instead of throwing the ubiquitous bricks and bottles that are lying around everywhere, you can smash them into the heads of your enemies instead. Crunch. Oh, I’m sorry, was that your face? Not no more it aint.

He cares little for whether his opponents are human or infected, but some of the infected enemies require weapons to kill and others are simply immune to close quarter combat entirely. If you can build up a bit of a sprint, you can take off the majority of an enemy’s health by charging them and hitting them right in the face with your fist, or killing them outright with a homerun swing of an improvised melee weapon and spray of blood. Swing batter batter! Joel knocks it out of the park and the crowd goes wiiilld! This is extremely satisfying, by the way.

Yes I am a reasonably well adjusted, mostly nonviolent person. Why do you ask?

Speaking of kids, somewhat early on in the game Joel gets saddled with Ellie, a spunky, somewhat foul mouthed fourteen year old girl who is central to the main plot of the game. Lest you think that the whole game is some sort of godawful escort mission, I should point out that the game itself is very forgiving about Ellie’s presence most of the time. Enemies rarely attack her and she proves somewhat useful in combat. At first, she can dodge things that try to grab her and she throws bricks or bottles at enemies to defend herself. If Joel get’s grabbed by someone or something and she’s close by, Ellie will stab them in the back with her switchblade and free you. She’s not completely invulnerable and you do have to watch out for her somewhat, but she’s not bad to have around in a pinch.

When you’re both in full stealth mode, the game doesn’t punish you by breaking stealth when enemies would normally be able to spot Ellie while she follows you around. They simply can’t seem to see or hear her, which is slightly immersion breaking when you notice her tripping over the feet of certain infected that have exceptional hearing and can instantly kill you, or darting past patrols of armed dudes with shotguns, but the alternative would make the game so miserably unfun that it simply wouldn’t be worth playing.

In later segments, after Joel has come to trust Ellie more, she actually helps out more in combat, wielding a handgun or a rifle, and she can even stealth kill enemies with her switchblade if they don’t notice her. When she’s actually fighting in these segments, the enemies do of course, attack her more. Ellie is not as strong as Joel is, nor does she have as much health, but she is far from an unpleasant burden. You watch out for her and she watches out for you. It’s actually kind of nice having help, considering just how frustrating the game can be.

So who are the main enemies?

I mentioned a mysterious outbreak at the beginning of the game. The word of the day is ‘Cordyceps’. No I have no idea what it means. The game explains it as some type of fungal parasite that spreads through spores and contact with infected bodily fluids. It apparently drives the host violently insane, eventually mutating it into something that only vaguely resembles a human. While that all sounds pretty original, in practice it amounts to little more than zombies/mutants by another name. Huh. I guess fungal parasite is kind of neat in an absolutely terrifying way.

No seriously, real life parasites scare me. It may be an irrational fear, but this stuff doesn’t seem terribly farfetched at all to me.

I have observed four distinct stages of infection...which uh, actually should be termed ‘infestation’ if we’re talking parasites, but maybe I’m just nitpicking here. Stage one infected are called Runners. They’re fast, loud, and individually somewhat weak. Runners aren’t terribly difficult to kill, but in groups they can swarm you, or alert other, more dangerous enemies to your presence while you dispose of them. You can sometimes find them crying in corners for some reason, or wandering about somewhat erratically. Runners are the easiest to stealth kill and still react to the presence of light, so keep your flashlight off to keep em from spotting you.

Stage two infected are called Stalkers. I hate hate HATE these things. SO MUCH. They are tougher, stronger, and more dangerous than Runners. They hit harder and have more health and they are incredibly difficult to sneak up on and stealth kill. Stalkers have exceptional hearing, almost better than stage three infected and the minute you kill one of them, all of them instantly go from ‘wander around erratically’ mode, to ‘sprint back and forth and hide’ mode, making no noise and waiting for you to attempt to walk past them so they can jump you. Fire your gun once and the whole shebang will descend on you like a ton of bricks. The only good thing about em is that they seem to ignore your flashlight, so you can keep it on for all the good that will do you.

At this stage the host has started to mutate. Strange fungal growths have begun to sprout out of their extremities, making them look bizarre and almost inhuman. Thankfully, the game doesn’t throw Stalkers at you very often or I may simply have quit playing.

Stage three infected are called Clickers. It takes a few years to reach this stage, but by now the parasite has caused severe mutations to occur in the host body. Fungal growths encapsulate the Clicker’s entire head, causing it to go completely blind. However, its sense of hearing is extremely acute and the distinctive clicking noise it makes indicates that it uses echolocation to find its prey. Clickers are extremely dangerous as they can instantly kill you if they get their mutated hands on you, unless you upgrade Joel’s abilities so that he can use a shiv to fend them off. Clickers also can’t be stealth killed unless you use a shiv, making them one of the most annoying, resource intensive, dangerous enemies in the entire game. Or you could just shoot them, which brings every enemy in the area down on top of you.

Fortunately, Clickers can be easily distracted by thrown objects and if you find you can’t easily kill your way through them, maybe it’s time to just chuck something off into the distance and sneak past when they leave to investigate the noise. This doesn’t always work well though, as the game usually has something pretty noisy you have to do in order to escape the area with the Clickers. I found myself growing angrier and angrier as I was faced with stealth segment after stealth segment, filled to the brim with erratically moving Clickers. After numerous deaths, nothing less than blood would satisfy me and I discovered that if you draw a bunch of Clickers to an area by throwing something, they burn real nice.

What’s that smell you ask? That is the smell of victory my friend. No, I don’t think it smells particularly good either.

The fourth and final stage of infected are called Bloaters. Over the course of many years, the parasites have mutated the host body into something almost completely unrecognizable. Bloaters are large, terribly strong, slow, very very tough, and have a ranged attack where they throw spore bombs at you. Bloaters shrug off melee attacks like you aren’t even hitting them and if they get their meaty hands on you, say goodbye baby cause it’s back to the last checkpoint for you. They soak up a ton of bullets before going down and they don’t burn all that well, unfortunately. As far as I can tell, they are one of the only enemies in the game capable of putting themselves out once set on fire. Fortunately, they are few and far between, serving as sort of boss encounters. I recommend blowing them up or running away from them if you can.

Contrary to the impression the game might give you (and to basic goddamn logic) the most numerous enemies in the game are not, in fact, infected at all. No, your primary opponents in your struggle for survival are other humans. And not just any humans, oh no. These are the most primo, top of the line, grade A assholes, so devoid of any redeeming qualities that they make Joel’s merciless stealth murder of anyone or anything who gets in his way look not only justified, but fucking necessary by comparison.

Of course, it doesn’t seem that way at first, as you fight against men hired by a fellow smuggler who double crossed Joel and his partner in the beginning of the game and then later you have to escape from what’s left of the government soldiers who control the quarantined zone where Joel lives. I had no real problem with either group, though it establishes quite well that Joel has no particular aversion to killing people who get in his way.

Things rapidly go downhill from there as to the motivations and methods of the human enemies you encounter. Alright, I get that there are likely going to be opportunistic assholes in a post-apocalyptic situation like this. Gangs of raiders I can understand...but the shit I encountered in The Last of Us is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

There’s the entire city that’s full of people who overthrew the government soldiers controlling their quarantine zone. Their society is based around one simple concept: “Kill anyone who isn’t us and take their stuff.” They set up ambushes at key entrance points to their city. There are literally hundreds of them crawling around inside patrolling the place, armed to the teeth, looking for infected and ‘tourists’, which is what they label anyone who isn’t one of them. They raid the surrounding area and keep ‘tourist manifests’ which catalog their spoils. They even have an armored vehicle they stole from the military with a mounted fifty caliber gun on it, which they use to cruise around their city looking for anyone who slipped through their net.

As I explored this area of the game, I found out that every member of their society is sent out to hunt for resources and kill anyone who isn’t one of them and that anyone who protested this course of action was summarily executed on the spot. Wow. Just...wow. Their whole society could be summed up with three words: “murrrder muuuurrrder muuuuuurrrrrrrder.” That’s everything. That’s all they live by.

Excuse me for a moment. Isn’t humanity on the brink of extinction? How can you create a society based solely around the idea of killing other members of your dwindling species, without someone, somewhere, realizing that at some point they’ll run out of people to shoot?

What’s that? I’m sorry, I can’t hear your replies over the sound of you shooting at me. I’m sure someone with half a brain will realize this at some point, but in the meantime, I’ll be serving you up a nice big ol helping of death, with a large side of more death, and for dessert I’m serving some elegantly prepared death, and an extra helping of ‘y’all done fucked up now boys’. Did you get what a colossally bad idea it is to try and mess with Joel? No? Guess I’ll just have to keep killing you assholes until it sticks.

Say it with me boys: “Murrrder, muuuurrrderrr, muuuuuuuurrrrrder.” Yeah, Joel speaks that lingo quite well.

If the idea of killing a bunch of snarling mcfuckwits who look at you as worth nothing more than the possessions on your back which will soon be theirs, bothers you for some strange reason, then you can always try to distract em and sneak by their heavily armed patrols and guard positions. This is theoretically possible and might be worthwhile in order to save on resources, however due to the fact that they ambushed me, tried to choke Ellie to death, shot unarmed people right in front of me, bragged about the many ‘tourists’ they’ve killed, and did their damnedest to hunt me down everywhere I went, even after I left their territory, I was slightly disinclined to pursue this avenue of approach. The world would be a much better place without these assholes, I reasoned. So I shot, stabbed, strangled, burned, blew up, and bludgeoned my way through their territory, leaving a sizeable trail of corpses in my wake.

That’s Joel for you, making the world a better place, one strangulation at a time. You can just call him a humanitarian.

I wiped out their patrols, curb stomped their ambush points, and left no man alive who dared to cross my path to report back to their mysterious, amoral boss...and yet, rather than sensibly becoming scared of this one man murdering machine and his sidekick, little miss stabby, all this does is make the survivors angry.

“Let’s get this tourist, men! How dare he kill our guys!”

How...dare...I...WHAT!?

How dare I not have the decency to die when you shoot at me like everyone else you’ve killed? How dare I aggressively defend myself while you and your hundreds of heavily armed pals try to blow my head off? I’m sorry, you get ZERO sympathy for that “you just killed my friends” line. In fact, you get negative sympathy. You’re an asshole, you’re friends were assholes, and their friends are assholes too. All you’ve succeeded in doing is making me incredibly pissed off. I’d be extremely happy to run over the lot of you with a cement mixer, but killing you one at a time will have to do.

Their society is inherently unsustainable. Their level of organization for a civilian group is unbelievable. The number of men they’re willing to throw at me in a suicidal attempt at revenge or whatever is nothing short of staggering. The amount of ammo and gas they have for that goddamned armored Humvee with the fifty cal is absurd. I despise the whole lot of them.

Great job on the antagonists, by the way.

After I finally moved beyond their territory, I breathed a hefty sigh of relief. Ah, back to killing infected. I almost missed these mindless monsters. Sure they’ll still kill you, but at least they aren’t complete bastards.

And then about an hour later I ran into a colony of cannibals led by a dude who wants to keep Ellie alive so she can be one of his ‘pets.’

 All of my hate. ALL OF IT.

 At least their reasoning for hunting people is a bit more efficient. If a hunt goes well, dinner time. If a hunt goes poorly and their people die, well, the survivors still get to eat. Of course, this too, is completely unsustainable, but at this point I just didn’t care any more. A part of me was reduced to an endless repetition of diediediediediediediediediDIIIIIIIEEEEEE, while I was playing through this part of the game. I may have gotten a little indiscriminate with my flamethrower and certain cannibals may have been ‘cooked’ in an ironic twist I’m sure they probably would’ve appreciated if they were still with us.

What? You probably would’ve done the same if you were as pissed as I was.

During this segment, Ellie gets separated from Joel and you play as her for a while. There’s a significant decrease in melee power, but she is relatively small and sneaky and I invented an impromptu game I like to call ‘hide and go stab’ that I introduced the cannibals to while they were hunting for me. It’s during this part that I find out that the leader of the cannibals, a man named David, wants her captured alive. His men decide otherwise however, so it’s kill or be killed, or you could just sneak by the whole lot of them pretty easily I suppose.

Hang on a sec, the voice of Joel is speaking to me. What is it saying? “Kill them quietly Ellie.” Sure thing Joel. It’s switchblade time. As Ellie, I stained the snow red with the blood of my enemies. At the end of this section of the game, I actually killed more cannibals as Ellie then I did as Joel.

Muuuurder, muuuurrrrrdeeerrr, muuuuuuuurrrrrrrdeeerrr.

So much death. So much violence and savagery. Even if I chose to play differently, the death toll would still be pretty high at the end of the game and the on screen violence during the cut scenes and movie sequences would be just as graphic. There are also segments where you have no choice. You must fight and you must kill your enemies to survive.

The game is unrepentantly, explicitly violent and savage. It’s challenging, frustrating, and immensely satisfying at times when you emerge victorious from a particularly tough area. This whole thing is a survival masterpiece. Hunt and be hunted. Kill your enemies quietly or they will kill you. The exploration part, which is actually my favorite part of the game, comes secondary to this, as you will need to wipe out all of the enemies in an area before you can explore it safely. Though I should mention that the game’s path is very linear, there are usually multiple avenues of approach towards any engagement and I tried to thoroughly explore each level for supplies before moving on.

All of this horribleness is mixed together against a backdrop of wilderness beauty. Snow capped mountains, lush green forests and rivers, cities overgrown with vibrant vegetation, a whole world teeming with life. The game seems to make a pointed contrast between the beauty of nature and man’s ugliness. I’m not sure what the message here is, really.

The central plot of the game is fairly simple. Joel must get Ellie to a group called the Fireflies. Who are the Fireflies? Well, depending on who you ask, they are either a group of freedom fighters or terrorists. They like to bill themselves as the last hope of humanity and encourage people to ‘seek the light,’ but I never quite bought into their whole shtick.

The leader of the Fireflies is a woman named Marlene. She knew Ellie’s mother and promised her that she would take care of her daughter. She hires Joel to transport Ellie out of the quarantined zone and to a group of her people that’s supposed to meet her just outside. Things don’t quite work out that way. Events spiral out of everyone’s control and Joel and Ellie are forced to travel all the way across the United States in order to find Marlene and the Fireflies again.

Over the course of the year that they travel together, Joel and Ellie become close. It’s obvious that she looks to him as a father figure and he views her as his daughter. He would, and does, do anything and everything he has to in order to protect her. Their relationship goes above and beyond the job he was originally hired for and he promises her that when they find the Fireflies, he won’t leave there without her.

Things...don’t go well.

The end of the game is as brutal as the rest of it. Joel keeps his promise to Ellie and the credits roll, but I was left with a profound sense of dissatisfaction. We fought so hard to get there, survived against nearly impossible odds, only to find...what, exactly? Before I reached the end I told myself that I would count it as a ‘win’ if both Ellie and Joel survived. I find I must revise my statement slightly. It’s true that I did beat the game, but it sure as hell didn’t feel like a win.

I’m getting somewhat tired of endings like this.

The Last of Us is a profoundly personal story. It’s well told and gripping. It’s an intense and vicious tale of survival in a world that’s thriving while humanity is dying out. Despite our impending extinction, we just don’t seem to get it. Instead of working together, we’re still trying our damndest to kill each other, all in the name of survival. Honestly, if the game is trying to say that humanity doesn’t deserve to survive if we’re going to be acting like this, then I might be forced to reluctantly agree.

It’s still a great game and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys stealth murder simulators or post-apocalyptic scenarios and edge of your seat storytelling. It’s just...thinking about the way people behave towards each other in it is really depressing.