If you don’t play video games, I feel so bad for you.
“The Last Of Us: Part II,” came out recently, and last week, after 23 gut-wrenching play hours, I put it to bed, then gave myself some time to reflect on it. There’s no simple way to explain how I feel about this thing. It’s a big, beautiful, imperfect, spectacular beast. You could call it a masterpiece and I wouldn’t argue. You could also call it deeply flawed, and I might agree there too. What it really is is fascinating. Whenever you meet someone else who’s played it, you can feel the energy spark as you start comparing notes: what did you think, how did you feel, etc. Maybe it’s not perfect, but maybe it’s something better than perfect. If it were perfect, what would we talk about?
In an attempt to try and parse my feelings about it, I’m going to alternate between GOOD and BAD aspects of the game. But I hope you’ll understand those are gross oversimplifications, useful for structure only.
Let’s begin…
GOOD: GRAPHICS. Holy hell will this game knock your teeth out it’s so pretty. It’s the kind of gorgeous you can’t get just by ramming in more polygons, it has to be hand-crafted by masters. And as if that wasn’t enough, the load times are minimal, and bugs are infrequent (at least for me). A lot of ambitious games have a heavy feel to them: menus load slowly, pop-in everywhere, it’s like you can feel the engine groaning (hello “Assassin’s Creed”). Not here. Everything is light and crisp.
GOOD: UI/UX. This doesn’t get talked about enough, but “The Last Of Us” has always had the cleanest, most intuitive menu/inventory system known to man. Swapping and crafting on the fly are a breeze. You’re notified when you’ve collected enough resources to make something, then, while you’re making it, you’re also told what you won’t be able to make anymore if you finish (wow). The menu tells you how long ago the game auto-saved (which it is CONSTANTLY doing by the way). Controls and movement are snappy and responsive. Everything hums. Again, the best of the best flexing at full capacity.
BAD: LENGTH. “The Last Of Us: Part II” is about 5-7 hours too long. My run took 23 hours, and by the end, I was desperate for it to be over. The game mechanics had run out of new things to teach me at hour 15, and the encounters were blurring together. I greeted each new set piece with a groan, sometimes saying out loud “I get it already.” Part of this is because TLOU2 is a stealth/action game, and that’s inherently a higher-stress genre. It requires vigilant attention, like holding a muscle tensed, and after a while, it wears you out. About 20 percent of any given level was redundant mechanically and could’ve easily been shaved off (if this were a Nintendo game, where no encounter without novel purpose is permitted, they would’ve been). I suspect they didn’t do this because there remains in gaming a tyrannical, miserly obsession with games being “long enough” for the money. ND was likely mindful of how long TLOU2 had taken to produce and eager to avoid any semblance of “seven years for THIS??” I get that, but they padded their game with superfluous encounters that detracted from the wealth of incredible content they had produced. I salivate at the thought of an abbreviated version, where the game rockets from jaw-dropping set pieces to heart-breaking character moments, with all the “stealth pass the same enemies for the fourth time this level” stuff excised.
GOOD: STORY. Boy did they not play this one safe. The original, for all its glory, was simple and–let’s be honest–formulaic, elevated by great execution, and a genius ending. TLOU2 is the complete opposite, a sprawling opus full of flash-backs, parallel narratives, and a massive ensemble (albeit a small number you actually play as). There are lots of new characters, and they’re compelling, but they don’t ask to be liked; some actively fight against it. It is, to use a phrase, “a big ask” from the player. Naughty Dog knew exactly what their fans wanted from this franchise, and they chose not to give it to them, because it would’ve been a cop out. It was the right call, and I salute them.
BAD: LUDONARRATIVE DISSONANCE. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it’s when what you’re doing mechanically in a game doesn’t line up/make sense with the story (Penny Arcade wonderfully demonstrates it in this comic about GTA IV). The most famous example is Naughty Dog’s other franchise, “Uncharted,” where charming playboy archaeologist/adventurer Nathan Drake murders hundreds upon hundreds of bad guys during the game’s infinite gunfights, and yet is presented as a fun and quirky guy to be loved by the player. He’s a mass murderer!
TLOU2 runs afoul of this phenomenon in a different direction. The game goes to great lengths to humanize combat: getting shot knocks you down, choking someone out is messy and time-consuming, melee kills come with great effort. The characters scream in pain, howl in rage, gasp in exhaustion, etc. It’s all sweaty, brutal and real feeling. Great. But that makes it feel even weirder when the player is tasked with assaulting fortress after fortress, all stocked with able-bodied and heavily armed opponents. (MILD SPOILER) At one point, my character took a near-fatal puncture wound to the side, bled out for hours while hung upside down, then got free and was immediately required to Rambo an entire compound of heavily armed goons. It’s really really hard for me to take that seriously.
Now, I know games have you do incredible stuff all the time, but “The Last Of Us” puts so much effort into trying to make the combat feel real, that I don’t think it can get away with being over the top. It’s like playing a “Project Cars” game that gives you blue shells to fire at the person in first place. TLOU2 is pitching an uneven, inconsistent world at the player: on the one hand, these are mortal people, and yet they are regularly empowered to do things that are flat-out supernatural. And to do them over and over.
The weird thing is, you could lose this stuff and not lose the best parts of the game. All of my favorite sequences were ones where I was accomplishing things I felt like my character was capable of. There are a couple of car chases that are jaw-dropping, and part of what makes them so spectacular is how human and frail you are in the middle of them. There’s a boss fight in a hospital that was great in part because of how powerless and terrified it made me feel. TLOU2 didn’t need the Rambo stuff to be fun.
GOOD: CHALLENGE. TLOU2’s autosave system made me want to kiss it on the mouth. It aggressively followed me, often saving multiple times during an encounter, like after I got a particularly slick takedown. I’ve never seen another stealth game do this, and I can’t praise it enough. Some developers think it’s “fun” or at least valid to punish the player for failure by making them repeat things they’ve already completed in order to get another shot at the thing that bested them. I find this insufferable, outside of rare exceptions like “Dark Souls” or “Alien: Isolation,” where the gameplay warrants it. But most other games would be better served following Naughty Dog’s lead here.
When a game removes irritating crap like that, it frees itself up to challenge you in more satisfying ways. I relished and leaned into the encounters in TLOU2, because I knew it had my back. The manual save system does occasionally get “trickys Hobbits” with you and pretend to save your progress while actually kicking you back to a predetermined checkpoint, but this is rare and I always understood why they did it.
Also, the game offers a comprehensive suite of sliders to adjust difficulty (as well as standard “easy normal hard” etc), so you can craft the experience you want to have. I know this must be a burden to implement, but every developer who can do this absolutely should. Between this, the fantastic saving, and the sublime UI, TLOU2 bought a ton of goodwill from me. Yes, I was tired and annoyed at the end, but the buttery smooth player experience kept me going.
TLOU2 is a player-positive experience. It wants you to enjoy it, and it’s committed to helping that happen. Given that, I’m not surprised that they have accessibility features beyond what anyone else is doing. They want everyone to play.
GOOD: REPRESENTATION. The lead character is a gay woman. Another lead is trans (NOT Abby, damn it). They’ve shifted four millions units so far, and it’s a powerful statement that they’re willing to withstand the demented cries of “SJW” and tell these important, oft-neglected stories. I also admire Sony for backing them up on it. This ain’t some little indie game, it’s a flagship franchise, and they are not holding back. Bravo.
BAD: MORAL DISCONNECT. TLOU2 is about the cycle of vengeance. It’s obsessed with making you kill someone, then showing you who they were in excruciating detail until you feel so guilty about their death you can’t stand it. And that would be fine, except in a strictly linear game with no player choice, this moral quacking has no meaning. You can’t criticize the player for doing something you require them to do.
At several points in the game, I was required to carry out acts of violence that I didn’t agree with, didn’t like, and would’ve chosen not to do. In one case, I actually tried to just walk away from the encounter, to no avail. The game insisted, so I unhappily did as it asked. Then later, the story circled back around and “tsk-tsked” me for my actions! But they weren’t my actions. I wasn’t given in any say in anything!
I’m not arguing that TLOU2 should’ve had branching narratives, but you have to tailor your story to your genre. “Mass Effect” can talk about the moral weight of player choices, because the player gets a say in what happens. “Witcher 3” can as well, often even more so. But in a linear game like this, the player is a prisoner to the will of the developers, so it’s a little unbecoming to require brutality and then chastise it. It’s speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
Of course, it works if the player agrees with said brutality, and I suspect some people did. But I often did not, and I know I’m not alone. Plenty of people describe the experience as “exhausting” and “frustrating,” and I think they’re feeling what I did, the disconnect from the evil of the characters. Naughty Dog clearly thought they could rile the player up enough with the story to make them willing participants in all the atrocity, then show them their actions in the light of day. A neat trick, if it works. For me, it didn’t.
GOOD: RESOLUTION. I love how the story came together, how each piece that seemed random on its own formed a part of the whole. I had some quibbles with the ending that I won’t talk about here to avoid spoilers, but it’s minor stuff. For the most part, I was told a satisfying, powerful story. It was a nightmare, if I’m honest, but it came from a deeply moral place.
GOOD: SET PIECES. Naughty Dog has always done spectacle well, but here they blow the doors off. This is their magnum opus. Despite the filler, there are so many sequences that put my jaw on the floor.
Naughty Dog has a signature game sequence that I’m not sure has a name. It’s when they want to put you inside of something amazing, like a big car chase, but they know that if it’s too complex mechanically, you won’t have time to enjoy the spectacle of it, so they heavily streamline the gameplay. Maybe they give you a gun with infinite ammo. Maybe you’re sitting on the back of a motorcycle so all you have to do is aim. Or maybe you just need to run, and not shoot. These sequences are simpler, easier and more controlled than the rest of the game, but that comes with a big upside: once they’ve got you strapped in, Naughty Dog can let loose, shooting off all the fireworks and “holy ****!” moments that their memory budget will possibly allow. Buildings collapsing! Armies of zombies rushing at you! Fire everywhere! You’re engaged just enough to not be passive, but not enough to miss all the pyrotechnics. You normally get through them in one try, and I think that’s by design.
These little bursts of pace-breaking insanity are among my favorite things in all of media. I’m all about immersion, and these are immersion on steroids. No movie can touch this. Naughty Dog makes me feel like I’m in the middle of the most incredible, jaw-dropping spectacle I can possibly imagine. I can’t believe I only have to give them sixty bucks for that.
IN CONCLUSION…
TLOU2 is just so much damned fun to talk and think about. It’s overflowing. I can question and critique a few aspects of it, but the people behind it clearly gave it everything and made a work of art they should be proud of. It’s one of the most important experiences I’ve ever had, in any medium. I can’t wait to dive in again.