I never keep up with the zeitgeist when it comes to anything in media. TV shows, movies, video games, you name it. I’ve come to accept that I will always be behind, looking at stuff years past the point of their popularity. Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for so long have probably noticed me covering things long past their prime.
And that’s okay! There’s no need to keep up with what’s current and popular unless you’re on the entertainment beat, or your friends won’t stop talking about it. Hell, the last time I tried keeping up with current gaming was with the recent Call of Duty games, and even I gave up by the time Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) came out.
But this time around, I am part of the zeitgeist, albeit indirectly. A currently popular TV show that in itself is an adaptation of a popular video game franchise. But rather than watching the TV show on a service I don’t have, I’ll just play the game it’s based on. After all, if people say “the book was better” whenever a novel gets a film adaptation, I assume the same rule applies for video games that eventually became TV shows, right?
The Last of Us is the game I’m referring to. Released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 to critical acclaim, it spawned a new franchise for Sony to capitalize on, with books, comics, and of course, that TV show that’s airing on HBO Max and recently finished its second season as this writing, which covers part of the game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part II.
I had briefly played The Last of Us before back around 2016, futzing around with it through PlayStation Now, a cloud streaming service where you could play PlayStation 3 games on a PC through cloud streaming. I didn’t get very far in it due to the visible lag I was having with inputs, so I stopped playing it on there.
Several years later, I grabbed a copy and mentioned it on a Some Stuff I Bought post back at the end of 2022 because I had heard many positive things about this game, being a critical darling, and a favorite for many. One of many games given the coveted “Game of the Year” award by numerous publications. Obviously, if something is given that much praise, it has to be just that good, right?
Folks, what you’re about to read is the journey of a woman wanting to enjoy a popular video game from 12 years ago and being absolutely frustrated with it. With gameplay being so aggravating to the point of controller-throwing anger. A miserable story that left me feeling cold and disappointed at the end. A game that left me wondering if Roger Ebert was right about games not being art.
Light spoilers for The Last of Us within.
Mild-mannered dad Joel (Troy Baker) returns home to his daughter Sarah after a long day. Cut to a few hours later where Sarah suddenly gets a call from Joel’s brother Tommy (Jeffrey Pierce) about the news that there’s a massive pandemic, the two make their hasty escape to safety. After the absolute chaos of escaping the city with Tommy, Joel and Sarah are confronted by military soldiers who shoot at the pair, wounding Joel and killing Sarah.
Cut to several years later. Joel, now an older man suffering from PTSD, eventually meets Ellie (Ashley Johnson), a young girl who is meant to be dropped off by Joel’s friend Tess (Annie Wersching), before complications occur and Joel has to take care of Ellie through the continental United States full of psychopaths, enemy factions, and the mutated cordyceps virus to take her to the Fireflies, a military faction with specialized equipment to help her.
I will say off the bat that Joel seemed like a very nice guy at the start, and I could relate to losing a family member, which can be a traumatizing experience and change any person. Troy Baker gives a wonderful performance in that regard. But as I went through the campaign, Joel always seemed to be cynical and distant to everybody at all times. Many other characters, including Ellie, and later, Tommy, try to ground him a bit more to reality, or at least to get him to lighten up, which he does a bit towards the end of the game. There’s a lot of moments where the story boils down to “Joel does not want to deal with caring for Ellie, so he wants to dump her off to somebody else so he can go back to handling things by himself, but Something Happens that forces the pair to stick together for a little longer.”
For a good chunk of the game, I genuinely did not like Joel as a character. Until the latter third of the game where he starts putting himself in extreme danger, just to save Ellie from unfortunate circumstances the pair got into, Joel just felt like a boring white dude protagonist in a sea of games that already had that market covered. Joel’s overall pessimism just sucks the air out of the room, in contrast with others like Tess, who I really took a liking to. Made me wish I was playing as her, because she was at least caring and optimistic in spite of the hellscape they were forced into.
Nothing against Troy Baker’s performance, this is the game that got him noticed by the mainstream gaming audience, but much like Ellie, I really wish Joel did lighten up more.
“But it’s a video game,” you may ask. “How does it play?” Well, The Last of Us has probably the most clunkiest gameplay I’ve played out of the 360/PS3 era. And I’ve played some janky games on that platform in my time, believe me.
It’s a third-person stealth action shooter. The stealth is probably the most competent thing on offer, with Joel having magic “detective vision” abilities by holding R2, which will show enemies in a nearby range through walls to better plan your strategy. Throwing bottles and bricks for distractions or outright stunning individual enemies becomes essential, and it doesn’t take much for Joel to stealthily take out enemies by grabbing them and using a finishing move by tapping Triangle twice or Triangle then Square. There’s only one weapon – an old-school bow – that can silently take out enemies at range, all the other weapons are loud guns and will immediately alert everyone to your presence when used.
Which leads me into the combat. This has probably the most frustrating, inaccurate combat system on offer, and I played the first Uncharted game where the gunplay was fairly clunky and the melee combo system in that game had such precise timing that it was better to mash Square to take out foes than do the fancy Square/Triangle/Square combo. A good chunk of weapons are practically useless at range unless you unlock upgrades to reduce weapon sway. I’ve had countless rounds somehow slip right past through an enemy as they charged at me. If you get nailed by more than one enemy at a time, you’ll get stunlocked and have to press specific buttons to escape, otherwise you’ll perish in their hands very quickly.
Also, if you’re fighting enemies with weapons, it won’t take much for them to stunlock you either: Due to the aforementioned weapon sway problem, it takes a while to aim a shot while in heavy combat. I’ve had an enemy shoot at Joel, stun him so he gets knocked down, and make me have to readjust my shot so it actually hits the target. And even then it could still miss the target in a way where it really wouldn’t have in other games. I can’t tell if Naughty Dog were trying to be more realistic in their survival shooter game, but if they were, there should’ve been more leeway on that front.
Thankfully Joel is not completely defenseless. There’s a simple crafting system to craft shivs, nail bombs, medkits, even improving equipped melee weapons. Finding items is fairly easy, but there’s a lot of places in the game where I would go slightly off the beaten path hoping to find hidden goodies, only to find nothing instead. Worse off, the glass bottle weapon looks too similar to the crafting items at a cursory glance, and I swear I’ve accidentally swapped a brick for a bottle thinking it was a crafting item one too many times.
But it’s not the dudes with weapons or the enemies who will beat you senseless with a baseball bat that you gotta worry about. It’s the cordyceps-infected monsters like Clickers or Bloaters. Clickers work by sound, so the ideal way is to either stealth kill them with a shiv – provided you have one crafted – or use explosives like molotov cocktails or nail bombs. If you get spotted by a Clicker, you have only a few seconds to dispatch him before the Clicker grabs Joel and instantly kills him. Unless you buy the upgrade that lets you use a shiv to escape that immediate death, but even then the timing on that is so strict that I’ve died in places where I swear to god I hit Triangle at the right time. I’m start to get Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune flashbacks again…
Bloaters are even harder, as they require hitting weak points, which again is a problem thanks to the aforementioned weapon sway. In a lot of cases I just used molotovs and a flamethrower to make those less of a pain, because they do have an instant kill animation if they get close to Joel, and there’s no way to get out of those when it happens.
Granted, I am playing the original PlayStation 3 version from 2013, patched to the most recent update. Some of this might be problems with my old DualShock 3 I got secondhand years ago, but a lot of my frustrations with this game come from how clunky the combat was compared to even past Naughty Dog titles.
And since I know there will be people who will ask: If you’re gonna go into the comments and say “Oh, they made this less annoying in that Part I remake,” I am going to slap you. I spent $7 secondhand for this, I am not spending $40-60 on a remake/remaster that might have a better combat system. Especially since that’s not the main problem here.
I usually don’t get really angry at a game, but The Last of Us had me doing a lot of “okay what the fuck, that’s bullshit” moments. With enemies being hard to hit, shots unexpectedly missing, long and obnoxious reload times on the weapons, moments where I try to switch weapons in a panic only for Joel to get repeatedly hit by a melee guy and make it impossible to shoot… It was annoying. Controller-throwing annoying. I get it, stealth is the way to go, combat is only encouraged if necessary. But even the Uncharted games had half-decent gunplay, it really felt like Naughty Dog went backwards here.
Thankfully Ellie is a support character who will help distract an enemy or two, even open fire once she’s given a gun, so she’s a bit more useful than an Ashley Graham from Resident Evil 4 type, but she’s not as effective as like, Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite. (Remember BioShock Infinite in a bit, I will come back around to that later.)
I already harped on the whole “Joel doing sad dad things” problem earlier, and that’s really the biggest problem I have with this game: There’s glimmers of hope that appear in spots, but a lot of is a cynical depressing mess. I get it, it’s a post-apocalyptic game, not everything’s gonna be Sunshine and Rainbows, but Joel’s personality combined with the overall tone and setting – probably the best thing the game has going for it – just gave off an overall vibe of “everything sucks and nothing will get better.” Considering I’m writing this in 2025, with how things in the United States gives off a neverending “shit’s fucked” vibe, I picked probably the worst time to play The Last of Us.
Thankfully it’s not all endless doom: Ellie gives off a sense of hope and optimism even through some of the tough times. A shame they’re just brushed away by Joel, and that kinda bums me out. Everybody in this game is cynical, or depressed in some way. There’s moments where it feels things might improve, only for them to immediately go south quickly. A later bit where Joel meets with Tommy and sees their electric dam stronghold shows things are looking good… until you suddenly walk past a bunch of waist-high cover objects and throwable bricks showing things aren’t gonna stay calm for long. Way to easily choreograph that one, guys.
Even if I was playing this in a year where Hope and Change was still a big deal, I’d still leave this game feeling cold. Just when it feels like things might turn around and get better, there’s another conflict that has the game reminding you back to that “everything sucks and nothing will get better ever” problem.
Which brings me to the ending. I’ll spare going into too much detail, but there’s a point towards the end where Joel literally lies to Ellie once again. Even after all they’ve been through, that he fought life and limb to save Ellie as not to repeat what happened to Sarah, he still does not trust her. My dislike for Joel went from “man, lighten up, dude” to “man, fuck that guy” really quickly.Then it just cuts to credits awkwardly, gives me the PlayStation trophy for beating the game on Normal, before kicking me back to the main menu. This is probably the most disappointing gaming ending I’ve experienced since Far Cry 2 back in 2009. (I still don’t get why gamers, especially game developers, love Far Cry 2. I liked its style but thought the game itself sucked.)
I usually don’t like being down on games like this. But my experience of The Last of Us went from interesting, to frustrating, to outright loathing. When I got to the last bit of the game’s story, I had been thinking about when I finish a game, if I feel up to ever replaying it in the future. There’s times where I’d immediately jump in and play again, or I’d play some old standbys like Quake every few years. Once I saw the ending and rolled credits, I immediately took the game out of my PS3, put it back in its case, and swore I would never ever want to play this game ever again. I can kinda see how people thought this was art, but in the end I just see a frustrating mess of a game that I wanted to banish to the shadow realm.
So early on I mentioned about Roger Ebert, which wasn’t out of nowhere. You folks know who Roger Ebert is, right? Famous film critic, one half of Siskel & Ebert and later Ebert & Roeper, wrote a satirical sequel to Valley of the Dolls, was well-respected in the cinema scene. To most gamers, he’s most well known for making headlines in 2012 for proclaiming that “Video games can never be art”:
[These] do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.”
Ebert passed away in 2013 after a long-standing bout with cancer, of which game developer Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal, Gears of War, Lawbreakers, Radical Heights) made this ill-fitting tweet:
Not only is this a tasteless post – he later deleted it after some backlash – it’s also not true. I wrote about BioShock Infinite back in 2021, and while I complained more about the linear progression of the game and the abandonment of exploration that made the previous BioShock games good, I did dabble talking about the story briefly. Mostly as a confusing “both sides are bad, actually” story that had no idea how to properly grasp with its somewhat controversial subject matter.
Note that I wrote about Infinite before I had played both of the Burial at Sea expansions, which not only play worse than the main game, but also have an outright worse story that brings down the original BioShock story along with it. Oh well, at least we got baguette boy out of it.
BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us came out the same year, months apart from each other, and both of these games were heralded as artistic creations worthy of proving Roger Ebert wrong. But after actually reading Ebert’s words on the subject, as well as poring over some of Ebert’s writings and opinions on those aforementioned Siskel & Ebert shows, I think they would prove his argument even more right.
This push to make games more cinematic, more like Hollywood, just makes it a hollow copy of works we’ve already seen on those other entertainment mediums, and done better too. As time goes on, the opinion of games like these are less “works that really show that games can be art” and more “works that thinks it’s telling something impactful but in reality is very simple yet thinks it’s saying something impactful.” They games feel like they’re just being inspired by existing art rather than being standing out as art by themselves. A game like Portal despite being a puzzle game, is a much better definition of a game being art than The Last of Us.
If Neil Druckmann or Bruce Straley got to show Roger Ebert The Last of Us – either through letting Ebert play it, having Ebert watch someone else play, or even a montage of clips that makes it play out like a movie akin to what Rockstar Games did with Red Dead Redemption – I could genuinely see Ebert point out the similarities in story between The Last of Us and some of its inspirations like The Road to Perdition or 28 Days Later, and dismiss the game as a B-grade clone of those, while also criticizing some of the more gamified elements. He’d probably give The Last of Us a 2 stars out of 4. Maybe 2 ½ if he’s feeling good that day.
In essence, these feel much like the big full motion video games boom of the 1990s: That too felt like games trying to be like Hollywood movies, but also missing the point that what makes a video game good is not how cinematic it all feels. That’s how I feel about The Last of Us. It’s a game that tries to be a serious Hollywood-style video game, and while it does succeed at that, it just feels like a copycat of existing works with absolutely clunky gameplay.
I’d probably find more enjoyment out of playing Naughty Dog’s infamous Way of the Warrior for a half hour than playing The Last of Us in its entirety ever again. Games are meant to be fun, first and foremost, and it seems folks lost sight of that in the chase to prove Roger Ebert wrong. As a result, we had a chain of games during the early to mid-2010s that tried to be serious and cinematic, but at the cost of actually being entertaining. These games will likely age worse as time goes on compared to its contemporaries. Much like BioShock Infinite was a critical darling at launch only to be universally acclaimed by most to be the worst game in the entire franchise.
It’s really unfortunate that The Last of Us is Naughty Dog’s legacy as a company now. The company that pioneered the PlayStation with the fun and silly Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, and Uncharted franchises are now shackled to this dark, somber serious tone of AAA gaming thanks to The Last of Us. Even games like Uncharted 4 were victims of this tonal shift despite that series being mostly known as a silly Indiana Jones clone. Granted, maybe they’ll start lightening up with their upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, but I’m not holding my breath.
The Last of Us is available on all modern PlayStation platforms and PC in various iterations. I couldn’t tell you the difference between The Last of Us Remastered, The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us Part I Remastered, but I figure they’re about the same but with some quality of life changes and graphical updates to really make use of your PS5 Pro. Though honestly you could be playing anything else instead. Hell, I’d recommend I Am Alive, a game that came out in the same year and is also a post-apocalyptic game, over this. (You can read what I wrote about that here.)
Now that I’ve written this and gotten some stuff off my chest, I’d rather switch over to something with a bit more levity. Some humor. Some fun. Maybe it’s time to finally tackle Yakuza 0.
This is not an article teaser by the way, I’ve been meaning to tackle the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series for a while, and this just seems like a good time as any to play it, to get the bad taste of The Last of Us out of my mouth.
Screenshots courtesy of Giant Bomb, and may come from promotional images that differ from the final game. I do not have a capture device for stuff like this, otherwise I would’ve taken my own screenshots.
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