The Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse survival adventure game that will push your emotional buttons.
If it does not make you cry, it will at least give it a good go and at the very least, you will experience your brain triggering that cry response that simulates the feeling of a golf ball being lodged in the back of your throat.
Read on for how The Last of Us will make you want to cry and generally make you feel at the end of your emotional tether.
(This post includes some mild spoilers about things that happen early on in the game, but stuff that I’m glad was not spoiled for me.)
1. They kill your daughter
Death is something we get pretty sad about. Lo, what insight I have bestowed upon thee. Artists the world over, I call upon you to write that down.
With video games however, death is something that has been somewhat de-clawed. Dying is more of an inconvenience in this particular form of media and we are used to being able to recover from it, so game developers have to work a little bit harder to get a tear or two out of this one.
The dynamic of a parent-child style relationship is core to The Last of Us.
It could be argued that death of a child or spouse equally does not quite cut it these days. It has been used too often as a lazy way that writers get an audience to care about a protagonist, but the unfortunate side effect is that if we simply just hear about it without any context, it inspires little more than an eyeroll. Being told about a dead spouse or child instead of seeing what they meant to the hero also has a tendency to reduce them down to little more than objects to an audience. It renders it the equivalent as hearing that someone has lost their car, albeit a very nice car they liked a lot.
The Last of Us makes you care about your daughter who then gets killed tragically. The game opens with the establishing of the father-daughter relationship and after a short intro sequence, the first character you control is the girl herself. You see the world from her eyes, you get to have a walk around her bedroom which is filled with photos of family and friends, posters of emo-style bands and Twilight-esque movies and puts you firmly in her shoes.
You then get to experience the early tell-tale signs of a zombie apocalypse through the eyes of a tween girl. You have the breaking news report on the television, you have the neighbours acting all weird and trying to break into your house to eat you, then you have your father and your uncle talking agitatedly about what might as well be the end times before you are bundled up into the back of a jeep and the three of you try to escape.
At this point, the game transplants the player into the father and you’re suddenly protecting the thing that you just were. You feel invested, probably because your brain still think that you are protecting yourself and is acting all selfish and by the time your daughter has been shot and is dying painfully in your arms, you feel like a part of yourself is in pain and dying right there too. This could very well be the most effective method of inspiring a parental emotional response in someone who is not a parent.
You will want to cry because they kill your daughter and they make you care about that.
2. They kill your friend
As the death thing works so well as an emotional trigger on squishy humans, developers Naughty Dog decided to explore other ways that it can get a reaction.
The first part of the game has you running around as an arms smuggler with a female companion you clearly have a rapport with, a history of working together that is implied through the dialogue without it being heavy handed and is generally set up as a really important part of your continued end-of-the-world life. As an added bonus, this is in no way dressed up as a romantic thing.
It quickly becomes apparent that she is incredibly capable. With most games, if you have an AI companion at any point, they will get in your way of your carefully lined up shots, they will upset any of your stealth related plans, they will get themselves killed, they will stand in doorways blocking your way, they will say the same few lines of canned dialogue over and over again and generally make you want to just give up and play something else.
This companion however is quicker at finishing off enemies in stealth than you are, helps you move ladders around and get up on to higher ledges, is spectacularly no-nonsense in the cut-scenes and is a far better shot than you are (ok, maybe that one is just me – I have a habit of aiming and then shooting a few inches just above the left shoulder, then the right, then having to reload and starting again).
Having a perpetual companion as you travel through the world somehow drives home the sense of desolation.
Your friend dies trying to buy you some time to get out of a trap during a scripted sequence. That is not a narratively mind blowing or anything, but it still affects you. You don’t see it happen, but you hear the gunshots and shortly afterwards end up doubling back and being able to see her dead body. This is horrible because they have done a good job of showing her as more than just a faceless companion and at the same time, your selfish-brain has registered that you have just lost something really rather useful mechanically. You cast your eyes at the 14-year-old that you’ve been left with and can’t help thinking that she isn’t going to be helping you carry any ladders…
3. The action is emotionally immersive
Early parts of the game have you fighting with other human apocalypse survivors as well as infected zombie-creatures and it does not matter who you are fighting, you never really want to be doing it. There is nothing about the way the violence is portrayed that makes you feel like a hero or that you are powerful. It might make you feel strong, but after the first few fights you get into, it is likely that you will want to avoid as many as possible.
I talked about how video game violence can leave players feeling unsettled when I talked about Saints Row IV, but ordinarily, that is triggered by a near-adolescent obsession on guts, gore and blood that spatters across the screen. The Last of Us always makes it feel like a desperate struggle. When you sneak up behind someone and strangle them, they don’t give up easily and it does not feel like the clean swift special-ops style takedown regular players-of-games will be familiar with. This feels like the life or death survivalist struggle that the whole game represents.
There is very little finesse available when lobbing a brick.
Games often talk about immersion with the connotation that they want to put you inside the middle of a great big firework display re-skinned as a war-zone so you can sit back and breathless exclaim “wow” for a few seconds before getting used to it and carrying on. The Last of Us immerses you emotionally. After even a mundane skirmish, you feel the strain on your heart, you feel slightly out of breath and you will want to avoid a fight if you can.
There are no bonus points for shooting zombies in the head, there are no special awards for killing gang members through stealth and the game is not keeping any real kind of score. It simply the case that if you survive and make it through the next section, you are not losing.
4. The world has ended and the world does not care
Throughout The Last of Us, you will be treated to some of the most visually stunning post-apocalyptic landscapes you will have ever seen in a video game. When you find yourself having to traverse a forest, you are struck by how beautiful it is, you will observe how serene things are and you might even smile at the rabbits that leap happily across your path. As your smile broadens it will stiffen as you come to realise that the world does not care about humanity’s problems and is doing just fine without it.
The more common post-apocalyptic landscape is what you see in the world of Fallout. This Mad Max-esque nuclear wasteland variety strikes you with the sadness and despair by focusing on bad things that mankind has done and the destruction it has brought upon itself. These landscapes show that not only has the human world fallen, but it has left its scar on nature too as if humanity is the only thing that keeps it all together in the first place.
Nature sees the end of the world as an opportunity to take a few things back.
The Last of Us is green. It uses colours.
There are certain colour pallets that define various eras of technology. With the birth of film, this would be black and white. Early comics had a heavy focus on red, blue and yellow because of the way printing cheap comics worked. After the Matrix came out, everything tried to be a bit green. The 2010s will be remembered for everything being graded in blue and orange. Video games appear to get browner with every upgrade in television definition level. But The Last of Us is green. It’s almost a surprise.
The things that are broken, grey, brown and destroyed are all human things. This world really feels like one that is being reclaimed by nature and it adds to a tremendous feeling of helplessness that brings you to the edge of despair as you realise that not only are you as a species on its way out, but you really won’t be missed.
The Last of Us gives you a relentlessly grim, harsh and unforgiving world
This reminds me a lot of The Walking Dead and not just because of their title fonts. There are very similar themes running through them and they both have this way of tapping into your emotional core through the prominent exploration of meaningful relationships. Centring around a parent and child dynamic and then piling layer upon layer of adversity and tragedy that you have very little control over is a sure fire way to make you want to cry.
The Last of Us is a seriously interesting direction for the industry to take and really shows what developers are starting to be able to illicit from their players. Whilst this post should not be considered a review as such as I’ve not yet finished the game, just based on the first parts alone I would definitely recommend giving it a look. If you’re thinking about picking this up, I have been playing The Last of Us Remastered on PS4
