The Last of Us

The Last of Us might be the clearest example of something I like to call a "role playing game". No, I don't mean the RPG genre. It's a pattern I've started to notice about high budget video games, but has been around for a very long time. It's when a game presents itself as having a mechanic/element, but streamlines it down so much that it no longer resembles the original idea- merely the flavor (maybe I should be calling these Vapor games or something). A clear example of this is how most open world games present themselves as having exploration/navigation, but in reality streamline it down into having on-screen quest pointers that guide you directly to everything (often including radars for nearby treasure to remove even nearby exploration, minimaps for detailed navigation, or just straight up drawing a line to show the full path). The result is a game where the player can role play that they're an explorer, but exploration isn't actually present as a mechanic (an effect I first noticed while playing an Assassin's Creed without having slept in over 35 hours: "hey this game is kind of fun when you're sleep deprived").

The Last of Us does this for survival horror. The game goes out of its way to present the idea that every bullet matters, and that you should aim carefully and make every shot count. That you should use stealth to kill or avoid opponents as much as possible to conserve ammo. Resource management, in other words. In reality this is mostly an illusion: the game is rigged so that when your total ammo count is below a threshold, enemies will start dropping random ammo. Skillfully stealth murdering an entire room of guys with guns will yield no further ammo if you're above the threshold (but ancient civilian zombies will drop them in abundance if you're low on ammo). This results in a weird meta game where, if the game has mostly given you ammo for guns you don't like, the strategically best option is to just start shooting things with it in hopes of forcing the game so start spawning ammo for the guns you do like. It all just comes off as one of the most blatantly artificial systems for producing scarcity I've ever seen. I also kind of get it, since these kinds of systems often turn into jokes when players play carefully (since developers have to balance around the dumbest possible player not getting into an impossible situation). But this attempt at solving the problem just comes off as insulting (even as someone who doesn't give a crap about realism in games, and will always prefer good systems over flavorful systems)

What really tips it over the edge is the game's aggressive checkpointing system, though. It does it even in the middle of encounters. This resulted in several situations where I found myself invested in figuring out the optimal situation, only for the game to just put me back half-way through it. So when I was excited to thoroughly explore a space, exploit the enemy's AI, and just figure out a level the game would just slap it out of my hands and tell me it was okay to sloppily bungle my way through it. This also lowers the value of the resource management on health kits quite a bit- why burn one when the penalty for failure is so low anyway? The end result is a game that is thematically survival horror if you choose to "role play" that you're playing it like that, but in reality is just another cinematic third person shooting game (with a mild "don't miss too much" mechanic).

Now you might be saying "Hold on just a second, Hawk- this game has multiple difficulty settings, just crank it up to the highest!". Which I did. And the highest one does, in fact, remove some of my gripes with checkpointing. But it mostly just made the artificial nature of the resource management even more obvious. And it also made it such that my total inability to actually aim with a gamepad became a severe detriment since head shots are pretty crucial to getting any use out of guns with so few bullets. I actually quit the game the first time I played it in 2015 when I tried to do the highest difficulty. I gave the game a second chance with merely Hard mode, and all I found was the same issues being expressed in different ways. I would not say the game is too easy, just that it isn't what it presents itself as.

So is it actually a problem that big budget games keep watering mechanics and ideas down so hard that they effectively cease to exist outside of the player's imagination? No, not really. There's room for expressing ideas with a range of complexities, including the very bottom of the scale. I'm even glad they experimented with this extreme of a simplification of resource management. It just didn't work for me.

And finally there's the story. I guess. It mostly seems to be a response to how there was a criticism of Uncharted for presenting its protagonist as a fun loving likable dude while also having him shoot, like, a thousand men to death in every game (a body count vastly exceeding its cinematic inspiration of Indiana Jones, but ultimately the problem of celebrating killers is just part of the Action genre). The Last of Us tries to correct this by making the protagonist a Sad Dad who did a lot of Bad Things to Survive In The Apocalypse, with his companion being a girl losing her innocence by learning from the violent world around her how to Kill. It's kind of just miserable and bleak, and feels excessively long compared to the average Cinematic Game, mostly so it can spend more time developing the two protagonist's relationship. Most of it was kind of flat for me, but I did love the penultimate chapter where the game stops to go all in with the best antagonist in the game who goes through several predictable but enjoyable twists. As a whole it's alright, but I also didn't feel like the bleakness had that much purpose to it.

So would I recommend playing The Last of Us? No. Not really. It literally came for free with my PS4 and I still kind of half-regret the time investment (yet I am also half-curious where  the sequel goes- but it sounds like they didn't change the game formula so I probably won't try it). I also don't really get why people found Uncharted 2 so incredible, so take that into consideration with my advice. (From what I gather half the people were floored by the setpieces like a physicsing building mid-firefight, and the other half were floored that a game finally achieved the storytelling quality of a Hollywood movie. I found the setpieces unimpressive because they didn't actually impact the gameplay that much, and achieving Hollywood quality meant nothing to me because I love trash.)