I think the way popular discourse talksa bout The Last of Us stinks

tl;dr the last of us is good and I’m tired of pretending that it’s not

Like, okay, don’t get me wrong, the way that the mainstream gaming press has talked about both the games and its TV adaptation as if it’s the second coming of Christ absolutely deserves to be made fun of – as does the way Neil Druckmann huffs his own farts – because The Last of Us is not that good.

But, like. It’s pretty good! Y’know? For all of the ways it leans on, at this point, very tired tropes, I still found it a very compelling experience with some genuine artistry in the way it presents itself, so it kind of sucks that making fun of the franchise at this point also seems to necessarily include the assertion that the game is bad, because I just don’t think that’s true.

I mean, sure, the main tropes it relies on, “sad dad with gun” and all that, are very well worn, and I get the fatigue with that kind of story premise, but I think even with those tropes in play, The Last of Us¹ manages to tell a really engaging and compelling story about the often harmful and destructive decisions people make when they live a deeply alienated existence, which is fully realised thanks to genuinely believable and well-written characters – for as much as he is defined by an all-too-common archetype, Joel is a good character, sorry.

I’ve also seen criticism of the gameplay being very barebones, highly scripted and largely “in service of getting to the next cutscene”, and while I don’t necessarily agree with that last one, I do understand how the scripted, linear nature of the game can be off-putting, but I think this kind of gameplay structure actually works in service of the narrative extremely well. Specifically, I think that the scripted and linear gameplay structure places a very intentional barrier between the player and the player character – a layer of separation and abstraction that changes the role of the player from one of direct agency over the player character’s actions to one of simply acting out a script.² The player is not in control of the player character’s actions, they are simply defining the specifics of the actions that the character was already going to take. This, in turn, means that the player is able to directly engage with the actions of the player character without being truly responsible for them, intensifying the emotional impact of the story’s darkest moments by making the player feel as though they’ve simply been brought along for the ride. The final section of the first game is the best example of this, because in this moment, the game very clearly believes that Joel is in the wrong, and the player is made to guide Joel through the moment he becomes a monster, regardless of whether or not the player wants any part of it, because it doesn’t matter what the player wants – this is what Joel wants, because it’s all he knows.

I dunno. The Last of Us isn’t the masterpiece that the press says it is, and we all know that the only reason it’s going to be breaking the “video game adaptation curse” is because it was already written like a prestige drama (also DOA: Dead or Alive exists and that movie fucks). We should make fun of those things. But The Last of Us as a video game is, at least for me, a reminder that sometimes AAA video games can just be good.