Developer/Publisher: Naughty Dog/Sony Released: June 2013

Played on: PS3

After years of games with great survival-horror moments but dreadful story, other games with too much story and not enough gameplay, and games with stories about good people in cutscenes who massacre hundreds of enemies in gameplay, The Last of Us seems to have struck the right balance and has the potential to mature the form. Naughty Dog, best known for their work on the rollicking Uncharted adventure series, make a brave detour into a dark and unforgiving world, and the result is one of the finest games of the generation.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, it was great to play the game so close to release knowing very little about what would unfold and then excitedly sharing my experiences with the one other friend who had played it. The short version – there has been an infection that has spread across the USA effectively turning people into zombies, you play as Joel who needs to escort a young girl, Ellie, across the country and survive the trek without being killed by “infected” or the other humans that inhabit the post-apocalyptic American wasteland.

The plot description is completely standard fare, this sounds like a story we’ve heard and played a hundred times. The Last of Us shows us how to do it right – by investing in its characters and world. Joel and Ellie are extremely well communicated characters – not established through verbose dialogue or excessive cutscenes, but through the slow exploration of the world, punctuated by believable dialogue. Joel is hardened by witnessing the world around him deteriorate as he struggles to survive, and this is the only world Ellie knows yet she maintains a semblance of childish optimism – but rarely are their experiences explicitly communicated, we interpret their stories from their encounters with others, their behaviour as they navigate the world, even down to how they move, and the depth you can read from a character’s highly detailed and expressive facial animations.

The world itself is a glorious and harrowing place to explore – nature has reclaimed the abandoned cities, and the ruin of the old world is celebrated by the birth of another, one without humans. As “cinematic” as many game developers want their games to be, film can’t reach the levels of world building that gaming can, giving agency to an in-story character to move around the world and explore it their way. The Last of Us deliberately give you a lot of space in between action, which heightens the impact of the action when it happens, but also gives you a chance to spend some time with Ellie or some of the other characters that inhabit the world, and to explore this highly detailed world Naughty Dog has created. You find notes or objects left behind by former inhabitants of a home you slowly rummage through, or peruse the covers of vinyl records in a long abandoned store while Ellie laments their inability to listen to them. Not everything can be interacted with, but the level of detail and intricate design each space in the game has is remarkable.

When you’re not walking and exploring – you’re fighting, hiding and running. The combat in The Last of Us is mostly well balanced and believable – fighting humans and infected is always challenging, it is best to be stealthy and either try to sneak past or shiv them when they least expect it. The combat set pieces are well designed – you can approach each conflict using different tactics from different locations, and it adds to the replayable appeal of the game. Each situation is tense and feels like everything is at risk. Even pointing and shooting a gun is hard, and it should be. The crafting system and scarcity of useful items ensures you have to be very careful about the resources you use and make hard decisions about whether to craft something that might heal you, or hurt others.

There are lots of niggles that remind the player they are in a game but they rarely interrupt the enjoyment of it. Sometimes you kill just one too many baddies and it feels a little absurd, the “listening” tool that helps you know where people are and to sneak around is a great mechanic but a bit unbelievable, there are lots of repetitive environmental puzzles, and your ally characters are usually invulnerable and don’t get detected by the infected when they walk right up to them. These are in no way game-breaking, and are only worth mentioning because in a game so well realised and accomplished, the small things that feel out of place are more noticeable.

It’s hard to believe this game is running on the same piece of hardware that ran the first Uncharted game, which at the time felt like a revelation of its own. The Last of Us pushes the PS3 hardware as far as it can go with visual and aural fidelity that does not impede the smooth gameplay. There is a long loading screen when you start the game, but after that loading screens are few and far between. My PS3 did make some very loud noises while playing the game, I don’t think the fan has ever had to run this hard. I’d resigned to the idea that my PS3 would break during this game, but it still felt worth it. (It didn’t break, it’s all cool.)

Importantly, this is a linear game. Sole writer Neil Druckmann has a story to tell, and while you might miss some of the side-stories within the game, you are funneled through from place to place and will experience the same major moments as everyone else playing the game. You might be forced to do things while playing as Joel that make you uncomfortable, but while the game gives you agency in some respects, it ultimately dictates Joel’s decisions for you. Again, this is Naughty Dog balancing some conflicting ideas here – the choice of a player vs the inevitability of a linear narrative – but the developers stay rigidly committed to the story they want to tell and craft an endgame that is devastatingly confronting. The Last of Us proves that being a triple-A game doesn’t mean you can’t take risks and challenge your audience.

Verdict: Close to a perfect game. Certainly the best PS3 exclusive, and easily one of the best of the generation. I’ve been vague on details for those who are yet to experience it, and I look forwarding to playing this again in 5 years time to see how it holds up, and to see how far gaming has progressed since.

Should Bradley play this: Absolutely.