Love and hate: A series of The Last of Us letters

Dear Leigh,

You heard me mention it six times?! OK, I'll admit it. The Last of Us got me through moving house. Squatting to lift an umpteenth cardboard box, sweat stinging your eyes, is a lot more fun when you imagine you've got to leave because it's just not safe. The task of bagging the nameless metal things pinning together my Ikea furniture could have killed me. Collecting and cataloguing miscellaneous gun parts, counterintuitively, kept me sane.

I've heard it's pretty common to lock into these kind of micro-fantasies. I think the common one is looking out of a car window and picturing yourself running or flying alongside it. Ground zero for all of my more elaborate role-playing has got to be the jogging I did when I was 15. From song to song I was a commando, a wizard, a 100-foot mech. Such is the power of imagination!

Then again, now that we've got games like The Last of Us, who needs to imagine anything anymore? I remember the first night we loaded it up. You, me and Brendan locked into a stunned silence by the stark craftsmanship, the immediate horror of that intro. A silence that redoubled itself because none of us could remember the last time we'd been stunned by a game.

Ridiculously, by the end of that first chapter I could feel tears in my eyes. I was unsure whether that was the awe I was feeling, the voice acting, the scale of the misery portrayed. "TWENTY YEARS LATER," declares the game, as an unchewed Kettle chip in my mouth devolves into a starchy pad.

It was a wild night. The box wine was left untapped as we all just ... enjoyed a video game. So why haven't I discussed it since?

To be honest, I think the most notable thing about The Last of Us might be that there's not much to discuss.

It doesn't ask any questions, because it has all the answers. What would the world be like if a disease turned humans into fungal zombies?! Well, we'd probably have all the post-apocalyptic stereotypes, wouldn't we? The oppressive government, the feral gangsters, the hero.

What's The Last of Us trying to do, except be flawless? What is there to discuss?

– Quinns

Leigh,

Heh. That's why you shushed me whenever I mentioned Resident Evil 4? You were resistant to my idea that this game might be the most important touchstone, because its mouthbreathing B-movie plot would surely contaminate The Last of Us. Leon's ghost demeaning all of us with his youthful backflips.

But I think we do have to discuss Resi 4. Let me play the utilitarian scientist of zombie fiction, with my tray of gore-flecked instruments, you the quivering assistant. "We must do this," I tell you, snapping on my rubber gloves. "It's the only way." The room's bare lightbulb glints off my scalpel as I make incisions to remove the game's plot, revealing the mechanics. Never mind zombies. The Last of Us is a spiritual successor to Resi 4 in everything from the control scheme, to gun customisation, to inventory management, to its combat powered by crowd control. You're made to feel desperately outnumbered, and through your panic you have to play a terrifying game of risk / reward whereby you have to keep all your terrible enemies at a distance, but can do more damage the closer they are. Both are games that experiment, lovingly, with giving the player a bastion of masculinity to control, and a uniquely feminine AI partner to protect. But for me, what's most exciting of all is the joy both games take in their pacing.

Resi 4, like The Last of Us, is an action game that refuses to be defined by its action, a trick even BioShock didn't manage. What's that they say about New Yorkers and rats? Because in BioShock you're never more than 20 feet from a splicer. Resi 4 and The Last of Us first craft great stretches of panic — where the player learns to fear enemies that can be scattered like loose stones or packed tightly, and who can even launch ambushes that you have no choice but to run away from — and then offer stretches where you can catch your breath.

I remember Cliff Bleszinski referring to these moments as "palate cleansers," and that's what they feel like in Gears of War. Those short corridors where Marcus Fenix & Friends put the guns away and walk and talk for 20 seconds are gaming mouthwash. In Resi 4 and The Last of Us, they're grand landscapes crafted with as much love as the rest of the game. You rest, catch your breath, grateful for the game's generosity.

These are very similar games. There's just one thing missing from The Last of Us.

Resident Evil 4 actually created all of these concepts. Back in 2007, it played like nothing else. That's what made it so special. Possessing the same ferocious attitude to innovation that I'd only seen before in Metal Gear Solid games, it was just never satisfied with itself. And yes, it made mistakes, but like you say, mistakes are as rich a source of discussion as the ideas.

Now it's 2013, and we have The Last of Us, and it's simply interested in being perfect. There's actually nothing in it we haven't seen before; it's just all executed better than ever before. Which is ironic, given the game's subject matter. It's a flawless representation of flawed characters. A spotless manifestation of a disgusting world.

Or maybe I'm being unfair. If Resident Evil 4 was the work of a madman, so was its plot. A half-remembered dream of James Bond in Evil Dead. Maybe you could say that The Last of Us is as much of an innovator, but makes its own headway in the world of storytelling, not mechanics. One of the first commercial video games to tuck so much exposition into what's left unsaid, and unseen. To treat us like adults.

... Something I'm not totally convinced we deserve, considering our own place in the story is to have fun killing some 500 individuals with nailbombs.

Grumpily yours,

– Quinns

Leigh,

I'll have you know that Resident Evil 4's option of making the president's daughter hide in a dumpster is a metaphor, for ... the economy.

OK, I got nothing. We're agreed that The Last of Us makes its headway in the world of digital storytelling. I'm just not sure it's a story we care about.

So, you're right to say the codependency between Joel and Ellie is interesting, but you're wrong calling it a theme. It's not. It's a thread, barely visible. You have to look at the game just so to see it, silhouetted against a billionth muzzle flash. The Last of Us remains, as you say in your critique, "the story of a man holding a gun at the end of the world."

The achievement of Resident Evil 4 was to put a gun in my hand, heavier than I'd ever felt. Animal Crossing gave us two a pop-up village of our very own, to tell stories of. The Last of Us is intent on telling a story. But for me, that means its peers aren't games, but the realm of apocalypse fiction, where it's much, much harder to impress.

Let's look at some of the stated influences for The Last of Us, starting with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The story of father and son, hiking across a post-apocalyptic landscape, each of them "The other's world entire." But if you want to draw a comparison to The Last of Us that runs any deeper, we start bouncing off the invisible walls of AAA video games.

The Road's protagonist is an inversion of Joel. He's a man who cannot possibly survive, who isn't armed, who travels with a literal shopping cart full of old baggage. "You think you're going to be good at this," his wife tells him, before she kills herself. "You think you are, but you're not." The book is a fitting end to McCarthy's oeuvre, from a man who's always written about tough Americans searching for something. In his final novel, this is taken to its extreme — a blasted land where everyone is tough, but where everything is gone. The Road ends with the protagonist dying, his masculinity proving useless, his dream dead.

Children of Men is another cited influence, though apparently they were content with taking Alfonso Cuáron's action sequences and speckling The Last of Us with animals. Gone is that story's rediscovery of fascism, family and femininity. And again, Children of Men is such a powerful survival story because the protagonist cannot possibly survive.

Even within the considerably smaller field of zombie fiction, The Last of Us' contribution comes mostly from its sound designers, artists and animators, lavishing their precious fungus with more detail than any of the bandits in the game. But the zombies here really are dead. They're not an allegory. They're just an enemy. Which can be fine! Good zombie stories can, as you say, be used to question how we might cope. The Walking Dead had a lot of fun with its sampler menu of terrible dilemmas. Dead Rising and State of Decay have had even more fun, allowing players to define themselves by whether they go out of their way to save NPCs. There is none of that here.

Or maybe my frustration is simpler than all that. I'm thinking about my favourite moments in The Last of Us, now. Moments like looking up at those glow stars on your daughter's bedroom ceiling. Wondering at the relationship between Joel and Tess. Hunting a deer as Ellie, in a quiet parallel of the scene before, where Joel staggers through the building, bleeding out.

God, I remember that scene best of all. Piloting Joel's giant, leaking frame through the ground floor of the university, bouncing off walls, slumping onto desks. "I'm going to die," I thought. My heart in my throat, awestruck at the craftsmanship and power of this scene.

But he doesn't die, of course. The games industry is not yet ready to pry the gun from the man's hand.

I don't think I dislike The Last of Us for what it is. I'm putting it in context now. I dislike it for what it could have been. This is the product of the finest professionals we have. Naughty Dog's stellar roster, plus Nate Wells, art director of BioShock; Mark Davies, lead designer on Enslaved. Academy-award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla for the soundtrack. All of these people working at the very top of their game. And we get something intimidatingly polished, but what lessons can other designers take away?

You're always telling me you find flawed games the most interesting, because you can learn about the designer as you play. Surely you're feeling like a bit like a zombie yourself — hungry for brains to chew on.

— Quinns