The Last Of Us Part 1 – better as a show than a game? (pic: Sony)



A reader attacks the gameplay and the storytelling in The Last Of Us and argues that its lack of interactivity means it should’ve been a TV show all along.



So, The Last Of Us HBO series has been given rave reviews and looks like it will not only be one of the most authentic video game adaptations ever but one of the best in terms of overall quality. I doubt I’ll ever see it though, not only because I haven’t got Sky but because I am not a fan of the original game. I suspect it probably works better as a series but for me The Last Of Us is both bad at being a video game and bad at telling a story, or at least an interactive one.



I’m not trying to be an edgelord by saying this – I know I’m in the great minority, but I don’t believe my point of view is completely unheard of – but for me The Last Of Us is everything I dislike about modern games. We’ll take this in two chunks, gameplay and story, but I can certainly agree that in terms of the graphics and acting the game is superb, but that doesn’t really matter when they’re not supported by the rest of the experience.



There’s clearly a lot of talent at Naughty Dog but it saddens me that so few of them their seem to be actual game fans, instead they all seem to be wannabe movie directors. When the game director recently said he was interested in the way Elden Ring told a story everyone was surprised , not least at the fact that he had played a ‘real’ game. Perhaps that’s being unfair but while Elden Ring exists for the gameplay The Last Of Us seems to see it as nothing more than a brief palette cleanser before the next dialogue sequence.



Anyone that’s played an Uncharted game will know that The Last Of Us plays very similarly, except with more of an emphasis on stealth and a very simple crafting system. Like everything in the game it’s very slick and accessible but after you’ve done a couple of combat sequences with both the clickers and ordinary humans you’ve basically seen everything the game has to offer in terms of gameplay.



There’s some light platforming as well, but little in the way of real puzzles, so hiding behind bits of furniture and lobbing Molotov cocktails, then finishing off enemies with a few punches, becomes locked in as the only thing you do in the game. The settings and context change, and there’s a few new weapons, but that’s really it. For Naughty Dog the story is far more important and interesting to them, and that brings me to the next problem: it’s not very good.



Like I said, the script and acting is great but the actual plot… it’s just a generic zombie apocalypse story. No matter how much Naughty Dog try to pretend they’re not zombies they are and so you get all the usual tropes of people underestimating them and it turning out that it’s humans that are the real monsters, as the clickers just mindlessly kill whereas the human characters are doing everything out of greed and hate.



The beginning is very affecting – I’m not pretending it’s not a well made game – but the only time the story does anything interesting or unusual is right at the end, with literally the last couple of scenes. I’m not going to spoil them here but it all comes down to a very difficult decision, a real moral dilemma, and yet despite this being an interactive video game you have no influence on it whatsoever.



Considering the director of The Last Of Us also worked on the show I really don’t know why he didn’t just skip games and go straight to making movies. How can you make a video game, an interactive experience, and let the entire story run on autopilot?



In short, why was The Last Of Us a video game at all? It certainly wasn’t because of the original and highly varied gameplay. But it also wasn’t because it was an interactive story that could only be told via the medium of games. No, it’s just a zombie movie where you get to shoot people in-between dialogue sequences you have no control over.



I don’t get, I really don’t.



By reader Cronstein









The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.



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