What Makes a Game Good, Anyway? Narrative and Gameplay in The Last of Us

Confession: I almost didn’t finish The Last of Us, and I’m going to tell you why. Spoilers abound here. You’ve been warned.

In the months before the release of Naughty Dog’s take on an infected apocalypse, I heard the hype. I saw some images, but avoided trailers (in an effort to resist spoilers). I cautiously read spoiler-free reviews. Everything promised me that The Last of Us would be the best “zombie” game so far, the best post-apocalyptic story, and perhaps the best game of all time.

Tall orders, all. And with a metascore of 95, The Last of Us is the best-reviewed PS3 game so far this year, and one of the best in the console’s history (finishing behind such titles as Grand Theft Auto IV and sister-game Uncharted 2). This is reviews by media outlets; when it comes to user reviews on Metacritic, The Last of Us boasts, by a narrow margin, the highest score of any game since the console’s debut, which goes far to explain why I was shocked at finding the game somewhat clunky and full of odd little inconsistencies. I stopped a couple hours in and began re-reading reviews in an effort to convince myself to keep going. I couldn’t help wondering if it was just me, and wondering, too… just what is it that makes a good game good, anyway? What does it take to elicit such high scores from so many players?

Now, full disclosure here — I played on normal difficulty, as I usually do on the first playthrough of a game, unless it’s remarkably easy. The Last of Us was inconsistent on this front — I sailed through some parts with nary an issue and found myself forced to replay others after a Clicker came along and ripped a shred of flesh from my neck — but too often these latter moments felt forced and artificial to me. Several reviewers have praised the “difficult” beginning, referencing the lack of ammo and weapons in the earliest encounters, and I kept thinking of that as my group bypassed the corpses of armed (and unlootable) soldiers. Bet that guy had a rifle, I’d think. Boy wouldn’t that make things easier. Apparently Joel did not share my need for mad loots.

Oversights like this have always bothered me in games, and they are a regular occurrence, this convenient ignoring of logical moves. What bothered me more, however, was that if I wanted to read a piece of paper I’d just picked up, I had to kneel and take it out of the backpack I hadn’t even put it in. I was bothered that my tough-but-smallish partner, Tess, could lift my hefty man body several feet in the air (one-handed, too!), and like many reviewers, I found it disconcerting that my companions could walk directly in front of enemies without disturbing anything. And I found it downright annoying that I was essentially pushed along a linear path, with “exploring” reduced to “find the spot where the triangle button icon pops up and follow directions.” This was the game that had gotten so many perfect scores? It felt, to me, like a movie occasionally interrupted by my urgent need to move a dumpster around.

Certain things are undeniably good in The Last of Us: the voice acting, the sound, the visuals (which are, in many moments, breathtaking). The story will likely elicit at least some emotion from even the most hardened of players. There are loads of interesting little touches and details. For instance, I found myself quite invested in exploring houses for the decorating scheme as much as the items inside. While I had issues with some of the gameplay, it’s solid overall. I won’t dispute that this is a great game, and one of the better experiences I’ve had in the last few years. But I’d never call it perfect. Isn’t that what a ten means? What marks a ten? When is a game good enough to earn it, and how many failings, small or large, will we accept?

In one review, referenced in the graphic above, The Last of Us was called the Citizen Kane of video games, and it’s a sentiment that’s been repeated often since. But in order to make that comparison, or to even ask if it should be made, we have to consider what Citizen Kane meant, and still means to film. In the words of the late Roger Ebert (perhaps the most passionate Kane devotee), “Citizen Kane is arguably the most important film, for two reasons: It consolidated the film language up until 1941 and broke new ground in such areas as deep focus, complex sound, and narrative structure. The other reason is that it demonstrated the auteur theory 25 years before it was being defined (of course that theory was already being demonstrated in silent days). It was “a film by Orson Welles.” It dramatized that the controlling author of a film, especially a great film, is usually its director, not its studio, producers, writers or financial backers.”
In summary, Citizen Kane took everything that had been done in films at that point, did it well, and moved film-as-medium even further forward, while demonstrating that the director is the “controlling author” of a film.

Movies and games are of course different mediums, with different requirements, and so I think we can dispense with Ebert’s second criteria. Creating a game of this magnitude requires so many hands that the auteur model simply isn’t a fair measurement. The first, however, seems as though it can be a test for a watershed moment in any entertainment media. So we ask: does The Last of Us take what has already been done, do it better, and then take gaming itself even further?

On the narrative side, yes, I think it does… but barely. There was no moment when I felt particularly surprised by anything, and I’d successfully avoided non-Tess-related spoilers. I suspected Sarah would be killed not by an infected, but by a person (so often the “real” threat in zombie/infected stories). Sam and Henry’s arc made me sad from the beginning, because I knew how it would end, even down to the toy robot. I knew Maria, from the moment we met her, would be the one to tell Ellie about Sarah, and on and on. I knew these things not because I’m particularly good at figuring out where stories are going, but because it felt as though the team made a list of acceptably heart-wrenching moments of story that work well in post-apocalyptic scenarios and ran with them. Where they acted beautifully? Sure. Were they presented well? Absolutely. And had it been a movie, I’d have watched it, graded it a B, and moved on with my life.

All that said, I confess I do like the dynamic between Joel and Ellie, and unlike some, I’m a fan of the nihilistic ending, and the way Joel remains rather static. It’s fitting, I think; a lack of true change suits his world, and his character. He’s changed in that he’s come to care for Ellie, but he hasn’t changed at heart, not really.

And don’t get me wrong: what’s done here is done better, perhaps, than any game’s done it before. But that’s also a relatively low bar in most cases, and part of me yearns for us to advance past the dependence on tropes and obvious moves as well. Perhaps, though, that’s an argument for another day. The Last of Us is a great leap forward in game narrative, not only because of the voice acting or the presentation, but because of what lies at the heart of the title: relationships. We become invested in Joel and Ellie, in their dynamic, in their little conversations and Ellie’s reactions, but also in the way the world is revealed through the people we meet along the way. Somewhere near the end of the Lincoln sequence, I began to feel it. And then I didn’t want to stop. I cared less about the problems I had with the gameplay, but I still noticed them. Why would Clicker A notice me from across the room when I’d moved a single step when Clicker B in the room before ignored me as I duckwalked by close enough to see the detailing on her clothes? Oh well. At least by then I could shiv the hell out of them, and a series of good shivvings could almost make up for that terrible sniper sequence that closes down the Pittsburgh chapter.

The Last of Us is good, but it is not good enough. Oh, it’s good enough for what it is. It’s being hailed by some as the PS3’s swan song, the cap on a generation, and that’s fine. But this is not the best that games can be. It’s not even the best this game could be, and so I think the Citizen Kane comparison is fitting only in terms of narrative, and then only just so. This is, I hope, a beginning, something we can look forward to for new consoles… or perhaps a foundation is more accurate, because this is a model I want improved upon.

When I exhausted the regular reviews, I read forums and other online discussions. I talked to friends. And everywhere, I heard the same complaints — not from everyone, but enough to make me pay attention. Why are the controls so weird? Why is the game so linear? What’s the point of exploring? If I have to play on the hardest modes to experience real scarcity, what’s the point of all the other modes? Why is the AI so inconsistent? How is it that Tess can lift a large man, but struggles to move an armchair? Why, in a world full of infected who react to sound, is this Aaron Sorkin Does the Apocalypse? We’re sneaking, not chatting (even if the chatting is great). Why do I have to play the way Naughty Dog wants me to play when there are so many obvious opportunities for choice? Is there more than the story? Is this all there is?

And yet, most of these people still professed to love the game, just as the reviewers who had complaints often still gave the game very high scores, if not perfect scores.

Is this all there is? That’s a very good question, and I think the answer is a clear no. Just as we women have to keep saying, listen, studios, we want to be better represented and we will not settle, we all, as gamers, need to keep saying, listen, studios, we want you to keep improving and we will not settle.

Except… we’re not just saying this is “good enough.” We’re not settling. We’re calling The Last of Us near perfect. And it simply isn’t.

Chris Franklin at Errant Signal wrote up some really fantastic analysis of the game, which I agree with not only here, but also in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, which for all its fantastic story has some incredibly dumb gaming moments. Franklin says, better than I could, “…you can feel the need; the desire for change and cohesion underneath the skin of this game. You can feel that pull for something *more* than hitting dudes with clubs and shivs and bullets when you play as Sarah during the opening sequence and you’re as scared and confused as she is without having to kill or hide from anyone. You can feel it when the game’s cinematography lingers on an unsaid sentence and it wants *so hard* to actually be a game about that feeling before letting you go back to shooting dudes.”

In that opening, when we are playing as Joel’s daughter, when frightening things are happening outside and there are eight missed called on dad’s cellphone — and he is missing — we are Sarah. We don’t know anything. We can’t do anything but walk around and look out the window and wonder. Because we know something of what to expect from the game, though, we do have an added fear: the unknown is known, and we are waiting for an infected to appear. The waiting is tough, and beautiful, and it had me on the edge of my seat, and I didn’t need a weapon. I didn’t need to move a box or jump on a ledge in just the right place. I had only to soak in the beginning of a narrative.

So why aren’t we getting more of that? Franklin says, “Do I think that [worthwhile] story is crammed into the loading sequences for a game that has a passable but otherwise boring set of mechanics? Yeah, I also think that’s the case. And I think maybe that’s the reason this sort of game style has survived as long as it has; because there’s enough people out there that legitimately don’t care whether their play is meaningful. And as long the story bits are entertaining story bits and as long as the gameplay bits are fun gameplay bits, the game is a ‘good game.'”

I care. If you’re here, reading this, I hope you care, too. We can play this. We can enjoy it. But we can keep asking for better. If we don’t ask, better will not be provided. Play the games, enjoy the games, but let’s call the spades what they are, friends. After all, our time, our effort, our emotion and investment… it can’t be for nothing.

*We didn’t mean to make it narrative week around here. It just happened. Honest.