I remember the day I got my PS3.
I was sitting in front of my computer... one eye on the screen, the other on the sports section of my local newspaper, furiously typing in the names and numbers of the players from my favorite team, continuing the decades-long tradition started by my dad of getting the rosters updated on FIFA 99. It was a mindless thing to do, but so much fun as to keep it going long after the game had become completely obsolete. That day, however, the 3D-ish fields and faces of my favorite sports game would have to wait, because there was a knock on my door (a very rare occurrence indeed) and what I found waiting for me at the other side of the frame was history waiting to be made.
You see, my brother-in-law had just recently bought a PlayStation 4 (which was new and smoking hot at the time) and was trying to sell his old PS3 to cover at least a bit of the money he had spent on this new toy, but he found that he just couldn't do it -- the PS3 had been the first thing he had ever bought with his own money, purchased with the scraps earned through a low-paying, entry-level job. He just couldn't imagine it being handled by someone who might not respect it or care for it enough, despite being willing to fork out the (elevated) asking price he demanded. So, instead of seeing it gone through the mail, he decided that I should have it instead.
I was speechless because this was no ordinary gift -- the PlayStation 3 was still a hot-selling, insanely popular devise even after its time under the Sun had began to fade, so getting one for free was something that belonged solely on the realm of nerdy fantasies... or so I had thought.
The haunting beauty of sadness.
My brother-in-law just marched in and deposited the heavy, original box in the table and asked me to help him unpack the console, but I still didn't quite get what he meant by it. I was a somewhat skilled mechanic (and I had helped him plenty in the past when his computer had started acting up), so I meekly asked him if he needed help getting it repaired, assuming that something had gone wrong with it. I never even considered it odd that he had brought along every single game and peripheral he owned, but the rational part of my brain was still scrambling to come up with a decent explanation that didn't give way to this crazy theory about being gifted something I could never afford. It was quite simple --I would tell myself-- he just wants to celebrate getting it fixed by playing with me. Yeah, that was definitely it. However... he just got tired of waiting for me to get the thing unboxed and asked me whether I "didn't like his gift". "Gift"? I still didn't quite get it so, he spelled it out for me. Yes, he was giving me this thing for free, just because he didn't want it going to a random person on the internet, and because he considered it actually quite sad that my chief form of entertainment at the time was editing 20-something-year-old games to try and match the times. I felt a little insulted, but not enough to turn down this pot of gold, and so I dug in, extracting every single wire and peripheral like an archeologist who has just unearthed the discovery of a century, carefully handling every little bit of rubber and plastic as if they would shatter under the pressure of my trembling fingers. Once I was done, I was staring at a slim PS3 with two controllers, a bunch of wires, two motion controllers, the little nob thing for playing media, a freaking camera, a pistol, and a rifle... and, of course, some seventeen games to boot. Not since the age of piracy had someone come across such a treasure, and it reminded me quite heavily of the time my friend and I got a fully-equipped Dreamcast for basically nothing, but still beating that one because the price tag this time was zero.
What followed was hilarious because I had to actually be coached on how to use the damn thing, completely unaware of how my new console worked. It was a little embarrassing having to learn stuff like how to TURN OFF THE SYSTEM, and to sit through endless warnings about never shutting it down while the machine was saving my progress, being treated to a bunch of scary stories that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of "Are You Afraid In The Dark?", cautionary tales about impatient kids who ruined their consoles because they couldn't wait an extra five seconds to ensure that it was safe to turn off the thing... echoes of my dad's words about properly powering down Windows 98 flashing through my mind.
Still, after that was done and my brother-in-law had left, I sat cross-legged on the floor and began examining my bounty: there was a lot to dissect around there, and I actually made myself dizzy by following the true-and-tried method of judging every game by its cover, sweeping my gaze from one to the next, trying to decide which one would have the honor of introducing me to the seventh generation of gaming. It was a tough choice, ranging from the interesting-sounding ("Borderlands"), to the allure of the familiar ("Resident Evil 6"), to the ridiculous (and unhealthy amount of "Pro Evolution Soccer"), however... the game that drew me in like a magnet was a little thing called "The Last Of Us", a game whose cover did little to impress but whose name sounded awfully familiar. Without further ado, I took it out of its plastic shell and began my journey through gaming's most powerful iteration (for me, at least).
The Last Of Us was one of those games you just knew about, even if you hadn't actually seen it. It actually reminded me how I would know games like "Doom" and "Mortal Kombat" by heart as a kid, even long before I even knew what they looked like... it was quite an interesting phenomenon, and a lovely throwback with impeccable timing -- it was as if I wasn't allowed to move forward without reminiscing about the past first.
There's definitely something to be said about a game about zombies in which your biggest worry is still other people.
And honestly? That should have been enough to make me turn off the game and never bother with it again. I wasn't having a good time and I couldn't care about Joel's painful loss while I was being actively fought against by game and console and prevented from enjoying the nuances of the situation. It got even worse when I was introduced to the first time skip and to Tess, making me believe that this highly-praised game was just gonna be "one of those" titles, the kind that features a flawed hero with a tragic past and who is scarred by lost to the point when he raises up with his love interest and changes the world for the better by vanquishing injustice and restoring peace to the land. I was SO ready to believe that the gaming press had just awarded every accolade to a trope that I just played along, not even paying attention as the two leads discussed something about a smuggling operation gone awry and as I slugged though a tutorial that --of course-- kept glitching out. BUT, I was actually quite impressed by the fact that the game utilized the full PS3 controller in a meaningful way, showing me what could be done with each and every combination and button press... that kept me in enough to realize that I had been fooled. Oh, The Last Of Us started out as a walking trope, but then it did something so unexpected as to win me over instantly and permanently, glitches, loading times and bugs be dammed:
It became a game about friendship.
If there is one thing that I can't stand about modern media is how allergic it is to the concept of friendship.
We trust our fiction to put up "guardrails" and let us explore the most intense and interesting scenarios, taking us along the tempestuous seas of love and lost, shoving us hard against metaphorical walls as the characters we root for try to win the guy or the girl over even as the world around them collapses... and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's a tiring concept due to the endless repetition it has been subjected to. And, besides, real friendships can be just fulfilling and interesting to watch because the stakes are much higher than advertised: the characters who seek out friendship don't look for a "happily ever after", they are in for the possibility of having someone watch their back as they fight their way tooth and nail through whatever random hell they had been thrusted into. But for whatever reason we have collectively decided to vanquish those kinds of stories to kids' media, cartoons and comics, not letting them anywhere near the spotlight as romance took over every major story not about shooting something (and, more often than not, those too). So having one of the most-beloved games of its era be about this "forbidden" topic was a great surprise indeed, and it gave me plenty of reason to keep playing.
It didn't take long for me to become enamored of what I was seeing on-screen, watching with great enthusiasm as Ellie's and Joel's relationship went from ice-cold to lukewarm, to one of the sweetest, most earned and beloved tales that I had ever had the pleasure of witnessing. It did it right, too, by removing Tess from the plot in a very dignified and meaningful way, guaranteeing that the story would be about those two against a world that had gone mad, instead of about two adults keeping a kid out of harm's way. The game is all about the concept of family, of shattered memories and of trying to build oneself back up after a great loss, so I appreciated that they didn't go the easy route by making those three into a makeshift family of sorts, instead making Ellie and Joel find in each other what they had missed the most in the decades since the start of the apocalypse, but without either of them actually acknowledging that that was what they were doing.
Friendship can be such a power driving force, yet it is vastly underutilized in media.
It's not a perfect take (of course), and sometimes I did wonder why Joel would be so cruel to the clearly shell-shocked Ellie, even going as far as to not trust her with a gun when that could very well be the difference between him being alive or dead, but those moments were quickly dissolved by the way the game's visual storytelling took over, making subtle changes to highlight their growing and thawing relationship without having the characters drop explanations during the time skips... the way their idle chatter becomes more and more excited and involved as the game progresses. The fact that Joel starts mocking Ellie's awful attempts at humor; the way she starts running ahead as the game progresses instead of keeping in the background... it's all richly told to an incredible degree without ever being explicitly stated, and it was such a subtle underline that I didn't even catch it during my first playthrough.
At one point I even started rooting for these people (like honestly rooting), even though a part of my brain knew just how silly that was... to be so emotionally-invested on people who didn't exist, who lived in a world that I could never even set eyes on, and who were voiced by extremely talented actors whose jobs were to read whatever piece of paper was put in front of them, but that's the magic and the beauty of it, really -- I bought everything that was being said to me because the writers and the actors behaved like this story was the most important thing in the world. And if the people who made the game went through such lengths to make their world believable, I was ready to accept it and tag along. Not enough games out there have the confidence to act like they are the best thing in the world, and if they don't do that, then why should the player? But this one so confidently tricked me into accepting its word as gospel that I just had no problem playing it in marathon sessions after work, fighting my own closing eyelids just to advance an inch further. It was really good stuff.
There was one single moment that fell completely flat for me (and it was a crying shame, because it needed to land perfectly in order to work): it was when Joel finally decides to trust Ellie and actually handles her a gun to cover for him as he explores the nearby area. Ellie is given a rifle they just got out of a random, decaying corpse that had been sitting in a balcony, exposed to the elements for God-knows-how-long and all Joel does is to check that it's loaded before trusting life and limb to a fourteen-year-old girl whose best experience with handling a firearm up to that point (and according to her own words) was shooting at rats with BBs and who is handling a weathered gun that Joel had no way of knowing to be in working condition and with such kickback that there was no guarantee that Ellie would be able to properly handle it, yet that's what the writers went for and it felt really forced and poorly executed, specially as Ellie could use that whole scene as her audition for the new "Sniper Elite" game. Thankfully, though, that was about the only time when I was taken out of the story not by bugs or glitches, but by the plot itself.
The rest is solid gold, though. And there's definitely something to be said about a story so good as to make me want to explore more of it by any means necessary, successfully making me hunt down both the accompanying "American Dream" comic book and a copy of "The Road", the novel that inspired it.
The one stain in this otherwise flawless product. I guess it's the exception that confirms the rule.
But no matter how good the characters were, the game would have sucked majorly if it failed at being a scary, action-filled zombie game... and it just didn't. In fact, it was one of the best experiences I could have hoped for, reaching a strange place of privilege among other games I have played within the same genre, and actually narrowly edging out heavy-hitters like "Resident Evil 3" as the scariest game I have ever played.
For as sweet and interesting as this game is, it also didn't pull any punches when it came to being a terrifying experience: this is a genuinely scary game, and both its supercharged atmosphere and inspired monster design did a lot to draw me in like a magnet. I actually jumped a little when I was ambushed by my first Clicker on a tool shed (which made me friend burst out laughing because of how much a beginner's trap that was), and I could never quite shake the feeling of powerlessness as I encountered more during the adventure. But even the regular Runners and the (aptly scarce) Stalkers made me grip the edge of my seat as I inched my way forward, being able to hear them but completely unaware of their actual whereabouts, which caused me to give the game my undivided attention -- there was no checking my phone in the middle of that one as growls and puddles being splashed into kept echoing through my room. I died so many times just trying to get a good shot in as those guys came charging me out of nowhere that I actually became a bit of survivalist myself, always taking stuff one step at a time and never diving headfirst into any situation, least I wanted to stare at that awful death animation over and over again. This also had the desired side-effect of turning me into a pro at inventory and resource management, making me beg for a shiv or the materials to upgrade my weapons (because Joel apparently is too precious to get a perfectly good knife out of a dead zombie) or create explosives or medkits just to get an edge on the enemies.
The only things that didn't quite work for me were the few "boss battles" against the Bloaters, a monster so spectacularly powerful as to even be teased with a missing page on a bulletin board early on into the game. Oh, the very last one you face is a real treat because you get to murder a bunch of Runners and Clickers before getting to deal with him, but the other two/three are easy to dodge and quite fast to overwhelm with the right weapons. They simply didn't turn into the formidable adversaries they had been so hyped up as.
The human enemies, on other hand, were the true selling point of the game for me (at least when it came to baddies).
I liked fighting my way through gangs and squads of people because their sole presence kind of underlined the sadness of the game world beautifully: there we had this dying planet in which human life is a rare commodity, and yet we have so many factions willing to slaughter each other for minimal gains as to defeat the whole point of keeping civilization together. You kill so many fit and healthy people in this game as to actually usher forward the end of the species, and no-one really minds the catastrophic moral implications of such a bloodbath, not even the rebels who advocate for a world of peace and justice and whose numbers are thinned out to the point of disbandment by the fanatical way in which they engage everyone (and everything) that they can't reason with. It's kind of tragic when you think about it, particularly since the last huge action set piece of the game takes place in a hospital that gets filled to the brim with corpses by the end. They are all just an inch away from salvation, yet salvation wouldn't come. Not for them. Not for humanity. Arguably not even for you.
Actual nightmare fuel.
But the character that really got my blood boiling was David (masterfully portrayed by Nolan North). He is the archetype survivor and makes sure you know it right from the get-go, playing it cool around Ellie during their first encounter, then nonchalantly concealing the fact that he's packing an extra gun after managing to convince her that he had given up his hunting rifle (his only means of defense) to some random, ragged kid holding a bow and arrow (the absurdity of which should have probably sounded off some alarms in Ellie's mind, had she been in the right state of mind to asses the situation properly) and then not attacking her after figuring how she was, what she and Joel were responsible for, and not even after outnumbering her by the time his buddy showed up to back him up, going as far as to keep his promise for a fair exchange of food and medicine and letting Ellie go. He was such a great character that I couldn't wait to stab him multiple times in the throat, especially after watching just how twisted his true nature was. And the fact that he appears in one of the very few chapters in which you actually play as Ellie does marvels for his character, as you can clearly see where his goals lie and what he's planning to do, which makes his violent... removal all the more fulfilling once it actually happens and cements the bond between the main characters because of the kind of frozen hell he had put them both through.
The only thing that I truly didn't like about the game was the actual ending, which somehow tried to balance the need to set up both a prequel and a sequel, but falling short on both accounts. It's not that it was bad or unearned, it's that it feels like a step backwards in terms of where our characters were regarding their relationship. The fact that Joel felt like lying to Ellie in order to make himself feel good about the (possibly) world-ending, selfish stunt he had just pulled felt wrong and annoying, but I guess that that was the point. Still, I'm sure there was a more subtle or interesting way to pull that off without making one of our leads look like the most horrible being in existence (in a world that wasn't exactly short of such characters) seconds before slamming the door in the face of what had been a true masterpiece of storytelling.
Regardless of that... I truly, deeply loved this game.
I don't know exactly what clicked so well with me, but the thing is that I could never put the game down after getting past the prologue (and I returned many, many times just to unlock skins and find collectibles) no matter how much it tried to antagonize or traumatize me (damn that sniper just outside the Ish's underground lost paradise). It was just the kind of game I needed at the time: ruthless but not without a heart; funny, but not without its sadness -- witty, but not without its share of idiocy... and fantastical, without ever straying far away from reality. It was an explosive concoction delivered to perfection, and one I still return to from time to time just to experience it all-over again.
If you will excuse me, I'm going to play it again.
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, I’d welcome it.
