Naughty Dog are best known and loved for their inspired work on the Uncharted series but their most recent game The Last of Us eschews the happy-go-lucky, cinematic treasure hunt in favour of something a bit darker. In so doing they have used their trademark calibre of performance capture to tell a more poignant story of Joel and Ellie in a world filled with hardship and sorrow.
The ruins of Nepal in Uncharted 2 are breathtaking and, when the sun is setting over the entire cityscape as you traverse a crumbling building, I can’t help but marvel at how expertly crafted and beautiful it all is. You never feel short-changed by Naughty Dog’s worlds, you are always given a place that far exceeds the price of admission, but the Last of Us takes that one step further, and then a couple steps more, just for good measure.
Usually games that are so visually resplendent suffer in other areas, sometimes the scale of the areas have had to be drawn back, often making the world feel slightly restricted and compact. The length of the game can also sometimes feel quite short. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, sometimes games that don’t out-stay their welcome are appreciated, and areas that are more compact can be better controlled or authored.
Lots of studios struggle with this balance and some of the most blatant examples over the years have been rather egregious. Take Devil May Cry 3 and 4. DMC3 has an entire level where you fight upwards of four of the bosses you’ve already fought to pass the level, as well as having those same bosses pop up more than once throughout the game. DMC4, on the other-hand, used the whole second half of the game to backtrack through areas you’ve already been to. Obviously creating and furnishing an entire game is incredibly time-consuming and costly, and striking the balance between visuals, area size, and length can be so difficult, but The Last of Us does it incredibly well.
Naughty Dog design their games with strong emphasis on variation and tone. They often do this by taking you away from an area before it gets too familiar and maybe changing the time of day and the weather. These aspects help convey both the passing of time and distance traveled. The stand-out train journey with the HIND helicopter chasing you was a clever way of doing this in Uncharted 2 as it made you play in open carriages as the train hurtled along so you could see the environment whizzing past. Before you knew it you implicitly felt as if you had traveled quite some distance, which lends a sense of journey to the experience. This is incredibly important and the exact opposite of what I spoke of earlier: confined spaces and backtracking, which is clearly something Naughty Dog are averse to. They take you far and wide to make you feel that you and your companions have gone through a lot together. As I said, though, they do this geographically but also with the passage of time.
The Last of Us is a window into darkness, lies, selfishness and murder
The Last of Us takes place over a year, or more accurately, four seasons, and Joel’s and Ellie’s outfits reflect this. As the Autumn encroaches and the low-lying sun creates long shadows with a warm, blonde colouring, and the crimson acers and maple leaves populate puddles along the way, Joel dons a no nonsense workman’s jacket and Ellie sports a purple jacket. Similarly in Uncharted when Nathan and co change from airy and relaxed summer attire to heavy jackets and boots when exploring a frost-bitten Tibet. It may sound trivial but it conveys a sense of time and journey while changing the mood of the world.
Uncharted uses the change in environments to convey the globe-trotting lifestyle of a treasure hunter, reluctant to settle, but The Last of Us has a different agenda. You travel from urban to rural and remote places, and explore their varied environs. This is a clever and effective way of conveying how this outbreak has levelled class systems in society. The opulent and resplendent Hotel in Pittsburgh, the white-picket fence and rows of wheelie bins in the suburbs, and the reserved and understated University show us that the rich, the middle-class, and the young have had their way of life, their structure, ideals, and futures have been entirely ruined. It also shows us that pampered lifestyles and personalities are merely a construct of context, they show us that humans are animalistic by nature when removed from our civilised habitat. The Last of Us presents our dark side, our Jungian shadows we don’t acknowledge but are always there, and that our personality is transient or dependent upon the situation.
A lot of games shy away from such meaty subject matter as, most often, people don’t like being presented with such unrelentingly bleak vistas. We like playing as Nathan Drake who gets the money, gets the girl and goes. A happy, life affirming, positive message that triumph through adversity will result in a glorious, euphoric crescendo akin to that of the PSN game Journey. But The Last of Us intentionally eschews that notion and forces us to look at our darker side, the side that will kill for food, a selfish side that cares not for about anyone else but themselves. It presents us with this and it does it beautifully; it forces us to look at it and embrace it then hopefully, as the credits kick in, muse upon it some.
While Uncharted is a window into the glamorous, carefree, and witty world of a jet-setting thrill-seeker, The Last of Us is a window into darkness, lies, selfishness and murder. I’m just so bloody glad that Naughty Dog has the talent, vision, humour, and intellect to do both so incredibly well.
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