Nearing the end of my top 10 favorite games write-ups now.
Other entries in this series:
10. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
9. Perfect Tides
8. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
7. Chop Suey
6. Knights and Bikes
5. Super Metroid
4. Gone Home
3. Butterfly Soup
1. The Last of Us Part II
2. THE LAST OF US PART I
In my "coming-of-age" years, I was a definite Sega fan, favoring the more teen-oriented material (and support for cheat codes) the company and their Genesis system were reputed for, so naturally the Sega CD topped my Christmas wish list in 1992. I got one, along with the much-anticipated launch title Sewer Shark. Full-motion video games (or FMV games for short) were like all Sega supported for the system initially, actually blocking efforts to port superior versions of games like Cool Spot to the platform on the grounds that FMV represented the "next level" of gaming, which was what Sega CD owners wanted to play. I thought it was what I wanted too. After a while though, I, like everyone else, figured out that FMV seemed as just a gimmick. Where the promise here had been of the ability to interact with and control the content of live-action movies, in reality you were just getting B plot films that were either largely or totally disconnected from what you actually did as the player. Sewer Shark was actually considered a highlight of the genre contemporaneously. It's a low rent wannabe-biopunk rail shooter in substance, but there are loads of cinema scenes and audio commentary that develop the story as you progress, with Robert Constanzo's role as Commissioner Stenchler being a highlight. (Constanzo is best known as a voice double for Danny DeVito.) The movie is much more interesting and fun than the game play, but neither's exactly compelling. Being younger back then than I am now, I still thought it was kinda cool. I never really gave up on FMV and my patience with the concept's growing pains was rewarded in 1995 by a space rail shooter (think the original Star Fox, but significantly evolved to be prettier, faster-paced, better-sounding, and just way better in every way, with real actors chiming in with ambient shit to say and drama to narrate instead of cartoon instead of cartoon animals speaking gibberish) that launched on the Sega Saturn with a higher-end movie revolving around a sweet romance born out of tragedy: Solar Eclipse. It's my favorite Saturn game. I'm still an FMV believer, in fact. Check out my profile and you'll notice that Immortality ranks among my favorite games released this year, for example.
Well FMV may not have been the future of video games, but motion capture, professional voice actors, and other cinematic elements definitely have been major parts of the gaming medium's evolution. I was drawn to The Last of Us from the outset by the way it married a high-end cinematic presentation to survival-action game play. Still there is the age-old dilemma of how best to merge the elements of different mediums. Like with the FMV classics of yore, there is what essentially is a movie here and game play that exists to contextualize and further immerse the player in its world. Function follows form here, and it feels like it. Without the cinematic elements present, The Last of Us Part I would be a far less enjoyable experience hardly worth my time and money. This is a game you play primarily for its story and, above all, for its characters and the relationships between them. And it's a masterpiece that wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable if it weren't a game!
That said, while The Last of Us Part I is a narrative-driven game, not an atmosphere-driven adventure like Super Metroid, as much isn't to say that atmosphere isn't a crucial ingredient to the experience by any means! On the contrary, much of the power of this game lies not only in what is said, but in how it is said. It lies often in the way the camera lingers, in the facial expressions with which a characters react to stimuli, these sorts of subtle, subtextual communications. And it also lies in Gustavo Santaolalla's subdued, minimalist soundtrack that serves to quietly communicate and accentuate the drama, nostalgia, sadness, hope, and more complicated feelings that emerge from this world with an exceptionally organic flow of dissonance and resonance. Like the cinematography, the music serves to communicate emotion more than horror, and that approach to atmosphere development brings unto this zombie apocalypse adventure a vibe quite different from that of other such titles on the market. For my taste, The Last of Us Parts I and II are unrivaled in these areas.
In terms of game play, The Last of Us Part I is pretty traditional: a linear action-adventure wherein one proceeds in a classical stage-by-stage fashion, brutally dispatching various (mostly zombie) enemies, scavenging for weapons, ammunition, and healing implements (and some optional pointless collectibles if you're into that sort of thing), solving simple puzzles, and defeating bosses every so often along the way. Stages are connected by cinema scenes rather than by an open world or central hub and you move through each stage from a definite starting point to a definite end point along what's more or less a set path, though there's some wiggle room for exploration you'll need to engage in to sustain your ammunition and such. Since experiencing the sequel, the original game's structure feel more superficial than it used to register in my mind. It does seem kind of convenient how many narrow corridors and hallways and whole buildings with naught but a single pathway through we just happen to wind up in. But if all that seems trite in written form, this is where the aforementioned atmosphere comes in.
Some have contended that TLOU might as well not even be interactive because player actions are irrelevant to its narrative course. There are, after all, no dialogue choices to make nor true free-roaming that would allow the player to diverge from the predetermined sequence of events and revelations. In addition to the game's aforementioned immersive qualities, the light ammunition spread in particular serves to convey a narratively fitting feeling of desperation that incentivizes the player to avoid unnecessary fights so that those precious resources might be preserved to deal with those occasional enemy swarms that can't be avoided. These things are the connection points between the story and game play. In fact, I submit to you that without the ability to actually take control of main character Joel (and others at different points) and viscerally experience his journey...without the action-heavy parts, the quieter moments wouldn't feel as special, or as powerful. My point is that, while one area might've been the primary interest of the developers, there is a symbiotic relationship between the game's narrative and the way it plays.
Additionally, the characters talk to each other and communicate in other ways as the action unfolds to just enough extent that each stage becomes something more than just some game-y challenge to overcome and instead a meaningful exercise in character development and emotional learning. And frankly no, affording the player dialogue options would NOT help, IMO! I find that whole suggestion repugnant. Think about what that would actually look, and sound, like. Because dialogue in this game is spoken rather than text-based, there would be those frequent, unnatural breaks in conversation to afford the player time to look over, process, and select options that I think we're all quite used to feeling at least somewhat annoyed by. The conversational flow would be constantly disrupted and the mood consequently lost! Whole character arcs might be lost even by being rendered merely optional! There are games featuring what I consider a more perfect balance between player agency and character agency in storytelling (see my commentary on Perfect Tides), but not every game is meant to be "balanced" that way and I feel that this is especially true when dialogue is spoken audibly. The world of The Last of Us is meant to be about these characters and their lives, not about you and I and ours. Connecting to them is meant to be an exercise in cultivating empathy, and that doesn't occur through reshaping their psyches in our own likeness. Experiencing their journey in a hands-on way is meant to help us cultivate that empathy, not to alter their personalities. Let's be open to that.
Incidentally, I keep using the term "The Last of Us Part I" here for a reason: because I'm encouraging you to experience the dedicated PlayStation 5 version of this game specifically. To me, much of the specialness of The Last of Us lies in just how immersive an experience it was back in 2013, and while there were countless factors that went into that (a number of which I've already discussed here), one of those ingredients was really the state-of-the-artness of the little details. I can say that with confidence after playing through Part I a few times because Part I restored to my soul a level of involvement with this story that had been unfortunately been lost. The texture and movement of the grass, the way water splashes when a truck rolls through it, the careful lighting choices and the way they help convey the specific feeling of each moment, the incredible attention and care afforded to every detail of this world...just oozes love and devotion! The same can be said of the consistent smoothness of the animation in this version of the game and of the improved ally and enemy AI behaviors both. Even the shortened loading times afforded by the PlayStation 5 make a meaningful difference in that they change what once very much felt like loading screens in a video game into something that now feels like deliberate pauses for dramatic effect between story chapters instead. Some games really do need to have the technology be there to tell their stories as effectively as they can and this is one of them. (If you don't believe me, try searching for "The Last of Us Part II - PS1 Edition" on YouTube 
.) This post-apocalypse is one I want to get lost in and I find that task a lot easier in the version subtitled "Part I" specifically.
Enough though about this design stuff. Like I said before, this game is mainly about its story and characters, so let's discuss them! Before I do though, I want to clarify what my approach to doing so will be here. For our purposes here, developments that occur roughly within the first hour or so of a typical playthrough won't be considered spoiler material while content beyond that will be, and will be accordingly spoiler tagged. Which means that the bulk of my commentary from this point forward will be spoiler tagged. It's just necessary to discuss much of the story and character relationships because they're the heart and soul of what I love about this game.
Anyway, The Last of Us Part I opens at the onset of a fungal pandemic outbreak known as cordyceps (which is inspired by a real virus that affects ants) that turns people into aggressive, zombie-like creatures known simply as "the infected". It centers on the perspective of one Joel Miller: an aspiring singer who is raising a daughter, Sarah, as a single dad on the outskirts of Austin, Texas and doesn't seem as weird as the inner city residents. Once the neighbors contract cordyceps (which the player witnesses through Sarah's eyes), they're forced to flee with Joel's brother Tommy at first by car, but with infected overrunning their escape route, the three soon wind up fleeing on foot until a soldier shoots and kills Sarah, who dies in her father's arms. Two decades later, cordyceps has ravaged the world and killed off or infected the vast majority of its human population. Joel and his partner Tess work as smugglers who operate out of a military-run Quarantine Zone (or QZ for short) in Boston, Massachusetts. When a gun-running operation goes sideways, Marlene, the leader of a pro-democracy rebel group called the Fireflies, offers to double their cache in return for smuggling a 14-year-old girl named Ellie to another group of Fireflies. Joel and Tess agree, but as their journey begins, events compel Ellie to reveal that she is immune to cordyceps and that the Fireflies she is to meet believe she therefore may be the key to developing a vaccine that can at last end the nightmare that has been the pandemic. At this point, the first time I played TLOU back on the PlayStation 3, I felt like I already knew where the story was going: Eventually Ellie, the Chosen One, would grant unto humanity this vaccine with her chosenness, inspiring humanity, including a grizzled, cynical old Joel, to rally to a cause bigger than themselves -- that of the Fireflies -- and overthrow Fedra (the military) in a campaign perhaps led by Joel, Tess, Ellie, and a few other allies accrued along the way, regaining their fuller humanity in the process. Something along those lines. And in lesser hands, something like that might've indeed been the outcome.
The Last of Us (both installments) is about the meaning of subjective meaning of "us". How big is one's definition thereof and how big should it be? Part I explores different sorts of characters and their definitions of "us", along with Joel's own changing definition. Joel had something of a rough life even before the events of the game, marrying and having a child early in life and being forced to skip a college education as a result before his wife ultimately leaves him to raise Sarah on his own. The loss of Sarah is traumatic for Joel. By the time we meet him in 2033, he no longer trusts people generally and really only cares for himself and his new partner Tess. But when Tess gets infected along the way to finding the Fireflies, she sacrifices herself for the completion of their mission, revealing in the process that she's come to believe in the cause of the Fireflies. Because Joel cares for Tess, he agrees to continue their mission to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies despite the unexpected personal cost. From here, Joel and Ellie encounter a few people who help them on their journey and others who...don't. Bill and the deceased Frank seem instructive on what can result from going completely anti-social and deciding that their is no "us". Henry and Sam, meanwhile, seem to instruct Joel on the danger of letting anyone, including Ellie, get too close. Joel's relationship to Tommy comes to a head over the value of a cause bigger than one's self and one's own. David's cult testifies about the challenge, and potential price, of inclusion in a group. Ultimately Joel fails to expand his priorities. He starts out valuing himself and Tess and his journey ends with him dooming humanity and lying to Ellie so that he can relive the experience of raising a daughter of sorts. His primary interest is himself and it has taken the movement of heaven and Earth for Joel to open himself up even to Ellie. Yet the game does not simply condemn Joel for his obvious failings. Instead, it shows us the world through his eyes and makes it easy for us to understand and relate. In fact, I think most of us would've made the decision Joel did in regards to Ellie's survival if we're totally honest with ourselves. In short, the game doesn't offer easy answers. It offers instead empathy, even for distrust. And it doesn't merely pretend to offer this empathy either like so many other games offering some kind of fake choice about who to spare do, but imply judgment about, either. Where so many others offer player "choices" yielding what are transparently supposed to be "good" and "bad" endings, implying judgment, this game truly allows us to make our own.
Now let me talk about Ellie. I really want to because of all characters in video games, I'd say that Ellie is perhaps the one I most connect to. In a ton of ways, she's so much like a younger me. I love that she's such a geek; into comic books, video games, dinosaurs, space travel, and puns. 
For my 12th birthday, my dad taught me how to use a rifle (...though we were hunting animals, not people...) and gave me a journal with the hand-written title "Groaners" on the cover. That's because I enjoyed sharing jokes -- often puns gathered from joke books -- that were so lame they'd cause him to groan rather than laugh. It became a way of bonding for us. And we needed ways of bonding. (Speaking of, I thought about including a joke about lesbian periods back when I was discussing lesbian period pieces in my Butterfly Soup commentary, but I wasn't sure people could absorb it.) There was also a whole chapter of my youth when dinosaurs were absolutely my shit. It went from being like whales to snakes to dinosaurs to Godzilla, in that order of obsessions. I read everything I could about them, watched educational science videos about them (having to fast-forward through the parts about e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n and the Earth being more than 8,000 years old because my parents insisted that stuff was all lies), and all but forced my mom to take us to the natural history museum where they had dinosaur skeleton exhibits and stuff like practically every weekend for quite some time, which we made a whole day of each time because it was so far away. (It also helped that they furthermore had this awesome omnimax theater where they'd show short education films about topics like lava in a way that felt like being on a ride through a volcano. And the planetarium was right there too!) At a young age, I'd have fun by chasing my friend pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex hunting down some wimpy vegan dinos. I read the Dinotopia novels. And yes, the original Jurassic Park was my favorite movie for at least a year after my dad took me to see it. And yar, I too was confused about why T-Rex vision was based on movement and shit in the movie because I knew it just wasn't in reality, people. It was thus that I learned about a thing called "artistic license".
So then, of course, there is Left Behind, which to me is the game's most interesting chapter both structurally and substantively. Structurally, it combines early events of the winter wherein Ellie needs to find medical supplies for an injured Joel at an abandoned Colorado mall with a series of flashbacks to defining life events that took place three weeks before she met Joel that being at an abandoned mall triggers for her. Left Behind is the only part of the adventure that leaps back and forth between different points in time throughout; the main adventure of Joel and Ellie being told in a pretty straightforward way characterized by a chronological sequence of events (albeit with time jumps and many references to past events). This approach opened things up to the less strictly linear storytelling of the sequel, which was just the only way to make that game work, in my opinion.
In terms of narrative substance, the aforementioned defining life events entail Ellie's friend Riley surprising her at their Boston military boarding school after running away a month prior. She takes Ellie on a sort of guided tour through an abandoned mall, revealing that she's joined the Fireflies and that this will be their last meeting in the process. Riley's tour ranks high on my list of sweetest chapters ever written in video game history. This mall tour is Riley's goodbye to Ellie and it's just about everything she's ever dreamed of, and some things she couldn't. I love every aspect of it: the merry go-round, the photo booth, the arcade and its simulation of a Mortal Kombat type tournament fighting game, the Halloween store, the water gun fight, the dance...we even learn who gave Ellie her joke book (Riley)! It's definitely the most creative aspect of the game! Ellie and Riley fight over Riley's decision to join the Fireflies once it's revealed that she has to leave the area indefinitely, ultimately leading Ellie to implore her to stay. When Riley rips off her Firefly tag in response...being a sap, I cry every time. Ellie kisses her in response, revealing that she is gay in a development that caught me off-guard back in 2014. It perhaps merits acknowledging the real-world historical context that marriage equality did not become the law of my state until a (highly reversible) Supreme Court decision was made a year later. Sincere validation of same-sex love was pretty sparse in video games at the time and this truly compassionate degree thereof felt audacious contemporaneously. The main game had already established the developers as sympathetic to the gay community, but here was a fully-developed, nuanced, sweet, legitimately funny, joyous, sad, infuriating, and above all sincere lesbian love story with a AAA budget and top-notch voice acting, graphics, and sound. It was special in a way that really can't be fully recaptured in 2022 (or later if you're reading this after the turn of the year). Anyway, the music they're listening to winds up alerting infected to their location. As they desperately try to flee the mall, both are bitten and, after briefly considering suicide to avoid turning, commit to spend their final hours of sanity together instead. The larger narrative context implies that Riley eventually succumbs to her infection while Ellie discovers that she is immune to cordyceps and goes to see Marlene, choosing a brilliantly powerful moment to end on that, you guessed it, still makes me cry. (I'm a crier, sorry.) It is poetic in its tragedy! Contextualization in the main game makes it clear that Ellie never truly got over it and is awaiting her own chance to sacrifice her life for someone else, as Riley did for her. This is what Joel has taken away from her.
Fear of abandonment though is probably the way in which I most relate to Ellie. It's unfortunately among the most common realities of living with BPD. When Ellie confronts Joel with the reality that everyone who's ever been important to her before has either died or left her in some other way, it hits home with him in a transformative way. It hits home with me too. That has been very much the story of my own life. The central aspect of BPD is not having a clear sense of who you are and instead relying on others for that. To that end, at all times I have what the BPD community calls a favorite person. My favorite person can change and it could be anyone. It could be a friend, a girlfriend, a family member, a co-worker, or even just an acquaintance. I don't need to be around my favorite person all the time or anything obsessive like that, but I do need that person to be in my life. Without my favorite person being present in my life, my whole sense of identity can begin to destabilize and collapse to the level of existing in a dissociative state, like I'm living outside of my body. It's serious. And because it is serious, I've been known to take extreme measures up to and including physically blocking the door to prevent my favorite person from leaving me. I begin to worry about people leaving me easily. If someone is five minutes late arriving at an agreed-upon location, my mind will irrationally dwell on the prospect that they've forgotten me instead of the more likely possibility that they got stuck in traffic or something. If my favorite person doesn't call me back within 24 hours, maybe they're leaving me and will never speak to me again! And unfortunately, I often make matters worse for myself because my instincts tell me to distrust people and guard myself against possible abandonment by preventing anyone remotely suspect from entering my life in the first place. That's where I feel more like Joel than Ellie, at least in Part I. It's not the only area though. (Besides the Texas accent, ah mean. Ah got that part too mostly. Speaking of which, I'm glad Joel's isn't radically exaggerated like the Texas accent typically is on TV and in movies and commercials. No, I don't say "howdy y'all" or "yeehaw".)
Joel's around 50 years old in TLOU1. Traditionally, I've seen Ellie's relationship to him as a sort of one that I aspired to have with my dad. My dad never really recovered from the Vietnam War psychologically and was largely absent from my life in that he spent an awful lot of it drunk. It felt very much like I had to earn his attention and interest. We had some good times together, but largely I'd characterize my efforts as a failure. Ellie succeeds in reconnecting her adoptive father of sorts to the emotions he's spent the pandemic era shutting down where I failed. What does it all mean? Well in part it means that I feel like I never did get nearly the affirmation that I needed as a kid and have to make up the difference now before I can feel whole again. That's what it feels like anyway. Joel has been, in a sense, a sort of fantasy father for me, admittedly. You bet your ass I cried (there it is again! 
) the first time Joel called Ellie "baby girl" following the harrowing encounter with David in the kitchen.
The closer I get to Joel's age in this game though, the more I find myself sharing his interests and concerns. Joel is never happier than when he's raising a daughter, be it a biological or surrogate one. I'm at a stage of life right now where marriage is top of mind (and something that might just be happening in the not too distant future, incidentally 
) and raising a kiddo of my own is getting to be next after that. It occurs to me that there aren't that many games that are really about marriage and parenting. The Last of Us Part I is part of a small breed of such titles that have you as the player taking on that kind of a role in a sense, as are the more recent God of War titles. There's likewise BioShock Infinite and some others. They're most all about fathers or father figures though. That's part of what makes Returnal such a standout game in my mind. Some have said that Returnal revolves around lore. Yes and no. It's thematically a game about motherhood, work-life balance, and navigating trauma within that. I wish there were more games that dealt with these topics, like from the perspective of parents (and moms in particular), not always their kids.
Although cordyceps is intended to represent any kind of human crisis really, somehow this franchise feels more impactful to me today than it used to now that we've all been through an actual global pandemic, from which I doubt any of us have emerged truly unscathed (mentally if nothing else). If there's one thing we've surely learned from going through one of our own here in real life, it's that there aren't easy answers. There is human nature to contend with, not just the virus itself. The younger I get, the more firmly I believe that human nature is a real thing, and a real thing that makes perfect worlds impossible. In the end, humanity finds itself forced to live with cordyceps and manage the danger, much like its characters have to find ways of living with their personal demons without letting them take over.
