--Firefly woman via radio, The Last of Us Remastered
"I was sure they'd be punished for breaking our code. Instead the boss deemed that they 'procured supplies for the group' . . . He then ordered that all of us take turns, hunting other survivors in the area and bringing their supplies back to the camp . . . I didn't dare lift a finger as the only people to display any sort of morality were killed in front of all of us."
--Trial Note, The Last of Us Remastered
"Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true."
--Ellie, The Last of Us Remastered
The Road meets The Walking Dead, The Last Of Us Remastered is the optimal edition of an acclaimed post-apocalyptic game that introduces the characters Joel and Ellie. Like The Road in that each features both confrontations with cannibals and an adult and a child traveling to a distant destination, and like The Walking Dead in that each depicts a world largely overrun by infected humans, The Last Of Us injects an impressive amount of realism, maturity, and emotion into the post-apocalyptic video game genre. It showcases detailed graphics, a 10 hour+ gameplay run, and life-like urgency, yet at its heart the game is about its pair of main characters and the intense relational bond they form.
This PS3 release and PS4 remaster certainly don't have the degree o graphical detail that God of War III for the PS3 and its own respective PS4 remaster possess, but the graphics still look great. The freckles on Ellie's face, the monstrous growths on bloater and clicker faces and bodies, and the various environments and characters are detailed, excellently-animated things. I did encounter a few visual glitches where, for instance, planks of wood I rested against a brick wall phased through the wall; I found weird physics where bodies sometimes slide much farther along the ground than they would in real life when you punch someone off their feet; I noticed once that enemy AI would run in circles, though I was never fortunate enough to have the enemy AI in question be a clicker instead of a human opponent. The presence of these glitches mars an otherwise great remaster.
On the other hand, the voice acting and characterization brilliantly succeed in crafting a realistic experience that explores human psychology and the human heart amidst the setting of a horrific pandemic. The game features much dialogue, a great deal of it optional, but most of it still great at building character depth and development. Spectacular voice acting (along with engaging and personal lines) allows for immersion into a world of desperation, loss, and despair.
By the way, I spotted Jak and Daxter and Uncharted board games in an in-game toy store! Naughty Dog placed good cameos of their other titles in the game.
Gameplay
If you ever want to see what it would be like to live in a post-infection environment, this game is certainly one of your most realistic options. The game structure divides gameplay into quiet moments where the player searches for items and scenes with inevitable confrontations with human or infected enemies. Exploring for items seems urgent and crucial, especially considering the relative rarity of supplies and ammunition. Every shot matters, so the need to conserve bullets can serve as a great motivation to try to find more at every opportunity.
Players also collect gears for weapon upgrades and vitamin supplements for enhancements to Joel's abilities (health extension, crafting speed, etc). Other collectibles can be found, including training manuals that boost the effects of some of Joel's skills that the supplements don't affect. Shiv doors mark rooms with bounties of gears and other useful objects. By the end of the game Joel acquires a variety of weapons ranging from a bow to Molotov cocktails to a flamethrower, meaning that more weapons and thus more ammunition are available, so using bullets becomes somewhat less of a big deal. But choices about what weapon to use nearer to the beginning of the story can be very significant.
Do you want to explore an area with multiple infected humans knowing that you risk entering a fight with them, but also knowing you might discover some supplies? Or a shiv door with a treasure trove of pick-ups? The infected seem to use hearing as their primary way of detecting your presence, so you'll have to be quiet about it. As in a true post-apocalyptic scenario, choices like sneaking through an area without searching for ammo or upgrade material can affect your ability to get away with doing the same later on, as your very limited ammo will dwindle and your crafting supplies will be used up. Only amplifying the urgency, the crafting screen (crafting is making a new item out of two or more other things) does not pause gameplay, leaving you vulnerable to attack. However, Joel has a listening mode that enables him to detect the sounds enemies make and visualize their positions, even if they are up to dozens of feet away.
A more challenging part of the game is playing as Ellie during a certain segment of the story. She has a much more limited listening mode distance and cannot use the supplement enhancements and boosts from training manuals that Joel can. She can't craft or heal as quickly; her health bar is shorter; she doesn't have access to all of his weapons, etc.
Story
The Last Of Us both opens and ends with quiet moments of conversation between Joel and a young girl--his daughter at first and Ellie later on. In the beginning a tired Joel receives a watch for his birthday from his daughter Sarah. Very quickly it is apparent that Joel loves Sarah, yet their tranquility is shattered as the night continues. Sarah finds her dad's phone with missed eight calls from "Uncle Tommy", a text from whom says he needs to immediately speak with her father. A newspaper found in the the bathroom during the beginning sequence where you play as Sarah says that "ATTENDANCE SPIKES AT AREA HOSPITALS!" and credits a mysterious infection with causing this. A news broadcast on a live TV in her father's bedroom informs her that the "infected" have increased aggression, and an explosion outside confirms that something unusual has occurred.
(SPOILERS ABOUT WHAT OCCURS AFTER THE FIRST FEW MINUTES OF THE GAME AHEAD!)
Sarah's Uncle Tommy brings her and Joel to a nearby city, a place seized by panic as some humans start attacking the others in an animalistic manner, suffering from an infection in the brain. By the end of the night, Joel splits up from Tommy as he holds a door in a near shut position against a group of the infected and Sarah is shot by a soldier who seemingly has orders to kill anyone who approaches.
20 years after the prologue, the meat of the story begins. Joel now lives in a small cluster of buildings protected by aggressive soldiers. Outside this area, a group called the Fireflies has earned a reputation as the faction that can restore hope to North America, and some say the Fireflies are even in the process of finding a cure for the cordyceps infection. Despite the presence of an authoritarian martial law, Joel and a woman named Tess sneak out together to pursue their own goals.
Eventually, Joel follows a wounded young woman named Marlene, a member of the Fireflies. She leads you to a room where you are attacked by a girl wielding a shiv, whose name is Ellie ( who identifies herself as 14). Marlene claims to have known Joel's brother Tommy very well, with him telling her that Joel is reliable. And thus she tasks Joel with bringing Ellie to the Fireflies. The Fireflies view her as highly important to their cause. Soon, the three (Joel, Tess, and Ellie) find themselves held at gunpoint before two soldiers, one of which scans them for infections. They kill the two, but not before all three are scanned . . . and the scanner indicates that Ellie is infected.
Neither Joel nor Tess initially believes Ellie that a bite she shows on her forearm is three weeks old (fallacy of personal incredulity), as Tess says that everyone turns within two days. The Fireflies, according to Ellie, have professionals attempting to find a cure or vaccine for the infection, and Marlene believed that Ellie's unnatural resilience to the bite can unlock the information necessary to make a vaccine.
The journey onward brings Joel and Ellie to meet individuals like Bill, an old friend of Joel's, the brothers Henry and Sam, Tommy, and a leader of a cannibal clan named David. By the time they finally reach the Fireflies they have witnessed a friend turn into an infected host, a companion commit suicide, and other chilling horrors. The cordyceps inside Ellie has mutated, rendering her immune to the infection; Firefly doctors prepare to engage in a surgery that will kill her but remove the fungus in order to create a vaccine. Joel kills numerous Firefly members and extracts an unconscious Ellie from the surgery, fleeing with her and returning back to Tommy's place.
At the end Joel tells Ellie that they found the Fireflies, but the group no longer needed her for a vaccine because they found someone else like her. "Turns out, there's a whole lot more like you, Ellie". He adds that "They've stopped looking for a cure" because such methods of finding a vaccine have proven unfruitful. Ellie asks for him to swear that he is telling her the truth, and Joel swears he is.
LEFT BEHIND DLC
In the main story, when winter arrives and Ellie is hunting with the bow, you can view all her items, and one is a dog tag-type necklace with the name "RILEY ABEL 000129". A DLC included in the remastered edition of The Last Of Us explores the relationship between the two in the final hours of Riley's life.
(SPOILERS)
It ends with Riley and Ellie being bit by the infected. Of course, players of the main game know that Ellie will survive, but Riley will not make an appearance in the main story.
Intellectual Content
During a bleak scenario like a severe pandemic such as the one featured in the game, would you remain generous and empathetic or would you become cruel, selfish, and indifferent? Joel's friend Bill recounts how he lost a partner he looked after and then he "wisened" up and realized that anything other than solo operations would get him killed; he views attachment as a dangerous weakness, although the conclusion of the story seems to suggest otherwise. At one point Ellie says "I feel sick" after shooting a man who was attacking Joel with the intent to kill him. Despite Joel's hardened exterior, she consistently says things that indicate her relative innocence amidst the catastrophes around her. Really, Joel seems no morally better than David the cannibal in most ways. Joel and David each mention at times how they have no other choice when it comes to some of their more controversial moral decisions, yet when Marlene tells Joel that Ellie will have to die for a vaccine to be engineered and that she has no other choice, he tells her "You keep telling yourself that bullshit". It seems that at his core, Joel doesn't really seem to believe his own justifications for many of his actions. Of course, moral obligations and truths do not change because circumstances do; they remain fixed and we are unable to alter them, regardless of our preferences or our experiences. Although the game doesn't try to provide an actual answer to many of its moral dilemmas, it does show with brutal honesty just how difficult our moral decisions can be.
During one part of the game Bill leads you into an abandoned church. I explored the second floor, finding light flooding in through beautiful windows around an organ and furniture decorated with a cross. But the emptiness of the building was significant. Where was God during this tragedy? As you stumble upon ransacked former business buildings, street ambushes of helpless strangers, and childless cribs with toys in them, the absence of distinct divine activity is noticeable. Sam and Ellie even converse about whether or not the infected humans have gone to heaven, and Ellie replies, "I go back and forth. I mean, I'd like to believe it". An unfortunate side effect of an apocalyptic infection like the cordyceps fungus would be a loss of intellectual accomplishment--formal academic studies would stop and most people would be too busy attempting to survive to sufficiently think about certain matters of philosophy (although I'm sure some forms of existentialism would be quite prevalent among survivors). The truth is that a cordyceps infection would greatly hinder the ability of the living to even find a framework by which to answer questions about whether or not the infected go to heaven, among many other things. In such an environment, the epistemological limitations of humanity would be heightened and far more difficult to overcome.
Joel and Ellie converse about the world before the pandemic, leading to some interesting observations about how and why people judge some things as "strange". The two, for instance, find an image of a girl that Ellie calls "so skinny", provoking her to question if everyone had enough food before the outbreak--and Joel says they didn't eat "for looks", abstaining from food for the sake of appearance. And Ellie scoffs at this obviously unnatural attitude! Ellie not only scoffs at pictures of skinny models, but reacts with surprise upon hearing how universities were places where people slept and studied and upon hearing about the concept of ice cream trucks. She hasn't been in forests until early on in the game and is taken aback by the first one she enters. Upon hearing about ice cream trucks, Ellie says to Joel, "Man, you lived in a strange time". The game brings to attention in subtle ways how perceptions of what is "normal" are entirely subjective. It may be that if we saw reality objectively we would all realize that some things are inherently weird and others normal, but our perceptions of what is weird and normal are entirely dictated by arbitrary internal reactions and/or our upbringing--familial or social experiences.
One of the game's central themes is the tendency of human nature to get attached to something. Everything from the way Ellie becomes a surrogate daughter to Joel to the fact that Joel saves Ellie from the operation and destroys the Firefly's chance at creating a cordyceps vaccine reinforces this theme of attachment, and throughout the story they share many emotional moments that emphasize the tenderness of our social relationships. One example of a very personal, intimate moment between the two is when they watch giraffes from the top of a building. Joel tells Ellie at one point that, despite the tragedies of the world they inhabit, "No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for". What I find interesting about the narrative of the story is that, at the same time, it tries to display the deep connections two humans can develop as it shows as a defining characteristic of humans (or at least the two humans in question), even as the same two "protagonists" act in ways that are unavoidably selfish and amoral.
Again, similar to The Order: 1886, the end of the game shows a character decide to suppress the truth--and even to tell a very untrue tale--for the sake of another person. Even the synopsis of the last collectible comic book you find in the final portion of the game--while appropriately playing as Ellie after Joel drives her away from the Fireflies--tells of someone keeping a secret truth from others for the sake of an illusionary peace. Ellie blankly says to Joel, "Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true." And Joel responds in the affirmative. He lies, hiding from Ellie the fact that he forcibly interrupted the surgery (and the fact that there was a planned surgery) and gunned down many Fireflies. Ironically, concealing the truth from others can end up causing immense hurt later on, the very thing people sometimes seek to avoid by hiding what is true. Joel and Marlene both make morally hazy decisions near the end of the game, both doing what they think is right--with one adhering to utilitarian ethics and the other possibly condemning the human race to the cordyceps infection indefinitely.
I wrote the following in my review of The Order: 1886:
"Sometimes truth seems unbearable--after all, it can shatter our preferences, deny us our longings, and contradict our hopes. Truth has the power to devastate us or to liberate us. Sometimes it can seem easier or even morally right to conceal the truth in the name of bringing comfort and hope to others, but we must remember during those moments that there is ultimately no such thing as an escape from the truth. Eventually, in one way or another, it will hunt us down and force us to acknowledge its existence and its inescapability" [1].
Conclusion
I spent just short of 17.5 hours beating the game on normal difficulty and about an additional 2.5 hours completing the Left Behind DLC on the same difficulty. This is certainly the most impactful and masterful post-apocalyptic genre game I have ever played. Its greatest strengths are twofold: (1) its focus on the human emotion and drama that comes from attachment and (2) the realistic urgency of scavenging ammunition and crafting supplies. Developer Naughty Dog designed a game with desperation and heart, and many players may find themselves touched by the relationship that Joel and Ellie come to share.
Perhaps Ellie alone is the one character who retains some innocence. The Fireflies, the alleged last beacon of hope for a decimated world, were willing to operate on a young girl without her consent and kill her in the process in order to deliver mankind from the infection, and Joel was willing to perhaps damn humanity for the rest of its existence by killing the doctors and Marlene in order to escape with Ellie's unconscious body. Joel also maliciously tortured two men and then killed them afterward, even confessing that he had participated in ambushes of unsuspecting people earlier in his life--one of the only things that seems to separate him from someone like David or his men, in a sense, is that Joel does not cannibalize the bodies of his victims. Every time players express disgust at someone like David, they might remember that Joel is very much like him in many ways. Joel is no hero and is not a morally good person, yet Ellie seems to remain unchanged for the majority of the game. The Last Of Us definitely shows how trauma can change people, dissolving their moral resolve until they pursue courses of action they otherwise never would have.
Yes, the post-apocalyptic landscape is realistic and bleak, with warring factions, cannibals, moral dilemmas, and decaying remnants of an extinguished society. But the settings fade into the background as the relationship between Joel and Ellie intensifies, the bond between them eclipsing everything else. Ultimately, their relationship is the core of the narrative, and players will likely remember it for decades as one of the finest in recent gaming history.
Content
1. Violence: A lot of shooting and brutal fist fights, with gore resulting from using certain weapons or attacks. In one scene a member of David 's faction chops off body parts from a corpse for his group to consume later.
2. Profanity: F-bombs and lesser profanity galore.
3. Sexuality: Ellie steals an erotic magazine and, looking inside, comments on what seems to be the large size of a man's penis. In the Left Behind DLC, Ellie and her close friend Riley kiss, implying that their relationship either had or was moving towards lesbian dimensions.
[1]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/game-review-order-1886-ps4.html
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