The story of the “zombie apocalypse” has been done to death, but unlike those who put the setting at the front of their plot, The Last of Us takes a different approach, which allows it to outshine others in its genre while presenting its story inside of a beautifully haunting world.
NARRATIVE
The Last of Us follows Joel, a man who by the time the story gets moving, is a weathered version of who he was when civilization still stood. Eventually, he is paired up with a teenage girl named Ellie, and together they journey across the apocalyptic United States. The pairing works together brilliantly, and with the superb voice acting of Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie), they have easily solidified their characters as one of gaming’s most iconic duos. The story itself focuses on this pairing, giving us time to see each of them grow and change with the other throughout the 14-hour story. This leads the narrative to be heavily character-driven and the world around them only amplifies the tension and drama between these character-fueled moments.
GAMEPLAY
It may seem by the way I’m writing that the narrative is the biggest highlight here, but the gameplay of The Last of Us can be just as tense as the story. The one thought I keep coming back to is how every encounter with the enemy, whether it had been infected or human, made me feel unsafe. In many games, I find that in the second half you start to feel this shift in power. You, as the player, start to gain more abilities or a wider array of weapons and some enemies become too easy to defeat. In The Last of Us, every fight from beginning to end, I always felt like I was in danger, and I had to work to make it through. A big part of this is the way the enemies attack. Infected enemies are quick and ruthless once your position is known to them which makes aiming and hitting your shots very crucial in a short window of time. Human attackers are threatening in their own right; wielding all different types of firearms and even reacting when you click an empty gun magazine by calling out to others that you are out of ammo, before then rushing you.
The game offers a large arsenal of weapons and equipment for you to protect yourself with, and rewards a mix of using them both. With the limited ammo that is littered throughout the world, crafting and using equipment like bombs or Molotov’s are rewarded with quick kills. Of course, guns do the job, but like I said, they require good aim and timing to be able to dispatch enemies effectively, and unless you scour each corner of the game (which I advise you do) your ammo might be in small supply, so finding creative ways to use other means of attack are a great way to make it through these high-pressure enemy scenarios.
The game immersion here is great too and something I found appreciation for was the inventory system, being someone who loves a less cluttered display on the screen. To access your inventory, press the touchpad, and Joel will drop to one knee, sling his backpack off, and with the D-pad you can switch seamlessly through all weapons you are carrying. From this menu, you can instantly craft and equip equipment as well.
WRAP-UP
The last thing I want to touch on is the world that Naughty Dog built here. An overgrown and dangerous world surrounds you, but within all the violence there were these moments of silence. Moments when the player is walking down a street in a small town or across a barren highway and it feels like the world has truly died. There is nothing but Joel and Ellie walking alone and it creates this “story inside the silence”. While some may see this as boring and the characters might see this as normal, it really hit me how if our world ever fell, it could be this empty one day. The atmosphere was very surreal and that was something I had never felt in a game before, to the degree I did here. The little details go a long way in grounding the realism of this game alongside its already stunning graphics and presentation.
The Last of Us is a milestone in-game storytelling and a milestone in the zombie genre. With a character-driven story, gameplay that makes you feel the threat, and a truly fallen world around these elements, it’s a game that anyone should play who has an interest in single-player games or post-apocalyptic stories.
Score: 10/10
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