Right, I need to get something off my chest about The Last of Us, and I know this might sound mental coming from someone who spent most of the 2000s insisting that proper games needed keyboards and didn’t hold your hand through every bloody cutscene. But here we are, and I’ve got to admit – this game absolutely destroyed me in the best possible way.
I remember being properly skeptical when all the hype started building. You know how it is when you’ve been gaming since the Spectrum days – you’ve seen every “revolutionary” game claim come and go. Half-Life was supposed to change everything. So was GTA III. Don’t get me wrong, they were brilliant, but the gaming press loves throwing around words like “game-changer” every other Tuesday. So when Naughty Dog started making these grand pronouncements about emotional storytelling and whatnot, I was thinking “yeah, right, we’ll see about that.”
The thing is, I’d been following Naughty Dog since the original Crash Bandicoot days – though I didn’t play those properly until years later because we didn’t get a PlayStation until 1997, and even then it felt like betraying my beloved Amiga. But the Uncharted series had won me over eventually. Solid adventures, great characters, proper Indiana Jones stuff. Still, nothing prepared me for what they pulled off with The Last of Us.
The anticipation was mad, wasn’t it? Every gaming forum I frequented – and at 49, I probably spend too much time on RetroGamer forums arguing about PAL conversion frame rates – was buzzing about this game. The trailers kept dropping, each one more impressive than the last. My son was still living at home then, doing his A-levels, and even he was getting excited about it, which was saying something because he usually couldn’t be bothered with anything that wasn’t FIFA or Call of Duty.
When I finally got my hands on it… bloody hell. The opening sequence alone had me questioning everything I thought I knew about video game storytelling. I’m sitting there on my sofa at half past eleven at night because that’s the only time I get uninterrupted gaming time, and within twenty minutes I’m genuinely emotional about pixels on a screen. Proper emotional, mind you, not just impressed by the technical achievement.
See, growing up with games that had to tell entire stories through a few lines of scrolling text – I’m thinking of classics like Elite or The Sentinel – you learn to fill in a lot of gaps with your imagination. But The Last of Us didn’t need you to fill in gaps. It just grabbed you by the throat and didn’t let go. The voice acting, the facial animations, the way Joel moved… it was like watching a film where I was somehow responsible for the main character’s decisions.
And that’s what got me, really. The weight of responsibility. I’ve played thousands of games over four decades, but I can’t remember many where I felt so connected to what was happening on screen. When Ellie was in danger, I genuinely felt protective of her. Not in a “oh no, I’ll lose a life” way, but in a proper paternal sense. Which is ridiculous when you think about it – she’s a collection of code and polygons – but there you go.
My wife wandered into the living room during one of the more intense scenes and asked if I was alright because apparently I was gripping the DualShock so hard my knuckles had gone white. Try explaining that to someone who thinks Tetris is the pinnacle of gaming sophistication. “It’s just very emotionally engaging, love.” She gave me one of those looks that says she’s questioning her life choices.
The technical side of it was brilliant too, of course. Coming from an IT background, I could appreciate what they’d achieved with the PlayStation 3’s hardware. That machine was a right pain to develop for – split memory architecture, that mental Cell processor – but somehow they’d crafted something that looked better than most PC games at the time. The lighting, the environmental storytelling, the way infected moved… it was all so convincing.
But you know what really impressed me? The pacing. Modern games have this tendency to throw explosions and setpieces at you every five minutes because developers are terrified players will get bored. The Last of Us had the confidence to let moments breathe. Quiet conversations, exploration, building tension slowly. It reminded me of the best Amiga adventure games in that regard – titles like Beneath a Steel Sky or Simon the Sorcerer that trusted players to engage with the story without constant stimulation.
I ended up playing through it three times that year. Three times! I hadn’t done that with a game since… probably Speedball 2, if I’m being honest. Each playthrough revealed new details, new conversations, new ways of approaching situations. The AI was clever enough that encounters felt different depending on your play style. Stealth, action, bit of both – it all worked.
The cultural impact was obvious even then. Gaming forums were full of people having proper discussions about themes and character development rather than just arguing about graphics and frame rates. My local GAME store couldn’t keep copies on the shelves. Even people who weren’t regular gamers were talking about it – colleagues at work, parents at my kids’ school events. It had crossed over in a way that very few games manage.
When the HBO series got announced years later, I wasn’t surprised. The source material was already practically a television drama that happened to be interactive. What did surprise me was how well it translated – and how watching it made me want to go back and play the game again. That’s the mark of something special, isn’t it? When different versions of the same story enhance rather than replace each other.
Looking back now, more than a decade later, I think The Last of Us proved something important about where gaming could go. Not that every game needs to be a tearjerker about surrogate fathers and daughters, but that the medium was mature enough to handle complex emotional themes without embarrassing itself. We’d come a long way from the simple “save the princess” narratives of the 80s, though there’s nothing wrong with those either.
Part II was… well, that’s a whole other conversation, isn’t it? Divisive doesn’t begin to cover it. But that original game? Still holds up perfectly. Still makes me think about what games can achieve when developers really commit to their vision. Still makes me proud to be part of a hobby that can produce something so memorable.
My daughter, who’s now at university studying literature, recently asked me about games with good storytelling for some research project. First thing I mentioned was The Last of Us. She actually played through it last Christmas when she was home, borrowing my old PS3. Didn’t say much about it afterward, but I caught her wiping her eyes during the final sequence. Sometimes you don’t need a detailed critique – that reaction says everything.
0 Comments