Culture

With The Last of Us, developer Naughty Dog replaces the lush temple vistas, charmingly witty characters, wholesome fun and will-they-won’t-they dynamics of their previous franchise Uncharted with lush overgrown cities, gloomy-but-still-likable characters, brutal strangulations, and adult man/14-year-old girl relationships.

It follows the Uncharted mould in the sense that there aren’t really any earth-shattering new gameplay mechanics. It’s more about applying extremely high-quality production values to every facet of the game. The environments are saturated with mottled shades of green, and soaked in as many perfectly shimmering puddles as could possibly be packed into an interpretation of a post-apocalyptic United States.

The opening has a brown-haired, unshaven male (sound familiar?) forcing a cabinet against a wall to stop an unseen threat. You hear the voice of a much younger girl who stumbles into frame. Her name is Ellie, and Naughty Dog hopes to steer clear of vulnerable damsel stereotypes. She’s still a small girl, mind, but she has a knife and she knows how to chuck a mean brick.

The mixture of cover-based shooting and close-up combat with a healthy dash of stealth has returned from Uncharted, and there appears to be a remarkable integration of combat with convivial story beats. At the sound of an empty click from Joel’s handgun, a foe storms down the hallway towards him only to take a cinderblock to the side of the head from Ellie. before she biffs it. Joel’s takedown manoeuvre takes the environment into account: he smashes his victim’s head into a bench in a way that’s actually quite unpleasant to watch.

This game is far removed from Nathan Drake’s pseudo-charming “Oops! Got your neck!” quips in Uncharted.