The Last of Us is one of the most critically acclaimed big-budget games of the last year. All the same, itâs gotten its fair share of criticism. Is it too difficult? Too much like a movie? Are female characters relegated to the sidelines? And why the heck arenât they just called zombies? I took these common complaints to the gameâs creators.
SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR THE LAST OF US. YOU KNOW THE DRILL BY NOW.
Last week I got on the phone with The Last of Us creative director Neil Druckmann and game director Bruce Straley to talk in-depth about the process of making the game.
Weâve already covered several of the things the three of us talked about: We covered the many ways the gameâs climactic sequences could have been different, from the final lie to the operating room shootout to those awesome giraffes. We also talked about the DLC plans (vaguely) and which characters might feature in a sequel (even more vaguely). And of course, we talked about those cursed phone-sex numbers that made their way into the game.
Why Not Just Call Them Zombies?
Zombies are everywhere. Zombie movies, zombie games, zombie TV shows. And yet theyâre almost never called zombies. Theyâre called ârunnersâ or âwalkersâ or âinfectedâ or some other term that means zombies without actually being âzombies.â
I (half-jokingly) asked Druckmann and Straley, why not just call them zombies?
âI guess itâs the baggage that comes with that.â Druckmann said. âI mean look, when we talk about our inspiration and the kind of stories weâre into, we donât hide that we were inspired by 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later and Walking Dead. When we talk about that BBC video, we refer to them as zombie-ants. But I think as soon as, in the narrative, in the fiction of the world, if you call them zombies, at least for us, it conjures walking, dead people, coming back to life. And [The Last of Us] is more about this disease, this infection thatâs grounded in reality.â
âI think it separates it from the stereotype,â Straley said. âWhen you say zombie, youâre suddenly thrown into B-movie, jokey, shooter domain. And weâre not making another zombie film, another zombie game. Weâre not making another zombie trope-thing, we wanted these characters, a story and a world.â
âHonestly itâs one of those things where sometimes we say âpost-pandemicâ to not say post-apocalyptic, but it doesnât matter,â Druckmann said. âUltimately itâs the story of Joel and Ellie, and that stuff doesnât matter.â
âAs long as that stuff resonates and people,â Straley said, âthey get the message that it is a story about these two characters and this world and humans, thenâŠâ
âThey can call it whatever they want,â Druckmann finished.
How Hardcore Is Too Hardcore?
One of the unusual things about The Last of Us is how difficult it is, particularly for a big-budget âtentpoleâ game. Itâs terrifying and tense, and at times will stop even seasoned players in their tracks.
No single aspect embodies The Last of Usâ difficulty as fully as the clicker. Easily the most terrifying enemy in the game, the clicker is a blind, powerful monster that hunts by sound. If it touches Joel, it tears his throat out. Game over.
Straley said that they had been iterating on the clicker constantly, and that while they knew their goals, for a long time they hadnât quite nailed the formula. The game wasnât working how they wanted it to. In fact, they were still trying to work it out just before time they let the press go hands-on with the game.
âWeâre doing basically a big public playtest with the most critical motherfuckers in the industry,â Straley said, âand it really came down to the final hours.
âIt really just wasnât fun,â he said, âand we werenât getting the tension that we wanted. Without the one-hit kill, we just werenât getting the tension, the stakes werenât high enough for people. We were debating it back and forth,â He laughed. âIt was controversial!â
Straley: âWe needed a Chainsaw Guy from Resident Evil 4.â
âThere were two things,â Druckmann said. âWe didnât have an enemy like the clicker, and we had a push-off mechanic, where as you were wrestling with infected you could push them off. And by removing the mechanic and making the clicker one-hit, all of a sudden you had all this tension. And people were now using all the stealth mechanics that initially they were just not using.â
âWe needed a Chainsaw Guy from Resident Evil 4,â said Straley. âWe needed somebody that was just gonna destroy you when you touch him. Thatâs where we were equating it to.â
The first prolonged infected encounter in the game (as outlined in my helpful tips post) is jarring and savage: Joel is dropped into a room full of runners, as well as a single clicker. Heâs got minimal ammo, and the player hasnât yet been required to take on a clicker head-to-head.
https://lastchance.cc/tips-for-playing-the-last-of-us-513462640%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
âI saw Bruce stressed out many nights over how you train people for this game,â Druckmann said, âand whether weâre making it too hard, and how do you appeal to the hardcore gamer while still [letting in] all these people who are somewhat casual gamers that play Uncharted.
âCan you appeal to both?â he asked. âIs it possible?â
As with most aspects of The Last of Us, the key was iteration. âWe have a Naughty Dog audience,â Straley said, âa fanbase that wants to play the game and just chill out on the weekend. And the story and the world definitely had to have a sense of tension, [to have] survival aspects to it. And we [at Naughty Dog], as players, we want to play something thatâs challenging. We want to hit the wall sometimes and have to re-think. Thatâs whatâs fun about games. [It was a challenge], the balance of this game, and trying to find that tone between the survival-horror hardcore niche and trying to make it as accessible as possible.â
Just Another âCinematic Gameâ
Chief among the criticisms leveled at Naughty Dog games is this one: Theyâre more movies than games, and you could just watch them and get the same experience. I asked Druckmann and Straley, do they think thatâs a fair complaint? And are cinematic experiences like The Last of Us and Uncharted limiting what games can accomplish?
âNo,â Druckmann laughed. âWe pride ourselves that we use every tool that we have. We see being cinematic as being like film, but using the visual language that cinema has established that is well-known to people to tell better stories. And that means subtlety. That means show instead of tell. A lot of games suffer from very heavy-handed expositional dialogue, which, to us⊠that dialogue is very un-cinematic.â
Straley chimed in: âI think people get caught up in⊠I donât really know how to say this. I think itâs easier to say things like that than it is to do them. How many games are there that truly tell the sorts of emotional stories that Naughty Dog is known for, inside of a completely open-ended world? I donât know. Iâm trying to think of a game where [that happens].
âYou can create your own narrative, and thatâs the argument, right? And the beautiful thing about this medium is that you can create a little puzzle game using colorful blocks, or you can create a character-driven game, or you can try to create an open-world game where you create your own narrative as a player and get more investment by interacting with something in the environment. Suddenly I have an attachment with that thing in the environment. But why not try to do all of those things? And thatâs kind of like what we do.â
Druckmann: âSometimes the implication with that criticism is, âThis would work better as a film.â And for us, we feel strongly thatâs not the case.â
Straley compared the arc of progression in their gamesâgrowing a tool-set, increasing skills, overcoming more difficult enemiesâto the narrative arc of the story, saying that, âThese are gameplay concepts, but at the same time, this is Joseph Campbellâs breakdown of story. So when you look at the similarities between these two, a narrative in a novel or a movie and a narrative and interactivity in a game, and you see the parallels between them. Weâre just trying to exploit what weâre discovering. Our medium is still so young, man, I think weâre all poking and prodding to try to figure out how to really juice it.â
âTo expand on what Bruce is saying,â Druckmann added, âsometimes the implication with that criticism is, âThis would work better as a film.â And for us, we feel strongly thatâs not the case. You talk about that giraffe sequence, I donât think that would be as effective in a passive medium. I really donât. I think thereâs something about you playing through that, you experiencing that, you having played alongside Ellie and Ellie having saved you in combat multiple times, you form a bond thatâs not the same as if you were to just watch it on the screen.â
A Game âBy Men, For Men And About Menâ
Of other criticisms leveled at the game, one of the most resounding came from The New York Timesâ Chris Suellentrop, who in his review lamented the ways that, for all its strong storytelling, The Last of Us still relegates female characters to the periphery.
âIt does some things better than any other game Iâve played,â Suellentrop wrote, âbut I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters.â To his eye, despite the initial appearance of a mixed-company narrative, âAlmost throughout ⊠it is actually the story of Joel, the older man. This is another video game by men, for men and about men.â
That last line is particularly punchy: Just one more game by men, for men, and about men. I asked Druckmann and Straley if they thought that was a fair assessment.
âThat statement was⊠I think it was unfair to us,â Druckmann said, measuredly. âWe have a pretty high percentage of women that work here in the studio, and we all felt that weâre doing a dual-protagonist story. Weâre presenting Joel and Ellie as the protagonists, so thereâs just that game âby Men,â thatâs already not fair.
Druckmann: âYou could make the argument that itâs just Joelâs story. But for us, our artistic intent was to create a story both for Joel and Ellie.â
âAnd then a game âabout menââŠâ he continued, âyou could make the argument that itâs just Joelâs story. But for us, our artistic intent was to create a story both for Joel and Ellie. They both have pretty significant arcs, they both affect one another, and they both are really changed by the end. And ultimately the final decision is made by Ellie, not Joel, when she says, âOkay.â
âAnd the last part of that statement,â Druckmann said, âwhich is âfor men.â We fought hard to get female focus testers both for gameplay and for marketing. We had to specifically ask for [them]. We reached out to our agency and said, âWe need both female and male focus testers.'â Druckmann said that they also asked their marketing partners to focus-test the gameâs marketing for both men and women. âWe felt like we did the opposite of that statement.â
The Daughter In The Refrigerator
Related to that, I asked about the fact that the game begins with another potentially problematic trope: The âwoman in a refrigerator,â a trope recently illustrated so well by critic Anita Sarkeesian. At the start of The Last of Us, Joelâs daughter Sarah is killed by a soldier. Itâs an event that in many ways provides the dramatic impetus for Joelâs entire inner journey.
As I said in my write-up of the gameâs ending, I think that the ending of The Last of Usâand really, the entire journeyâdidnât just redeem that opening trope, it depended on it in an honest way that most video games donât. But I was curious what Druckmann and Straley thought. I asked, had they seen Sarkeesianâs videos, and did they worry about the fact that they were opening The Last of Us with such a shopworn video-game trope?
âBut it becomes more complicated when you have a fully three-dimensional character that has different wants and needs and has interesting contradictions. And thatâs what we tried doing with Sarah, with the time we had with her. And again, we felt like we used the power of mechanics in the fact that you embody Sarah, and you see how she moves and how she reacts. And you can look at her room and see all the stuff that sheâs into.
Druckmann: âAt the end of the day, you have to be a slave to the story. ⊠Abstract it enough and you can find these tropes and these conventions everywhere. So all you can do is say, âWhat is honest?'â
âHereâs a girl that has a lot of agency; she went out of her way to somehow get money and buy her dad a watch. They have this relationship where they can banter with one another. As much as we could, we tried to really flesh out her character. So that you know, weâre working toward that moment when she eventually dies, [and] you donât feel like⊠I think that scene wouldnât have worked if she was a very flat character.
âThe other thing: Where that trope is usually used in games is to fuel a violent revenge story. Thatâs almost all of the examples that were used in Anitaâs video. Where here itâs like, yes, Joel becomes a violent man, but it wasnât necessarily because of Sarahâs death. Itâs because of what the world has done to him. If anything, Sarahâs death has shut him down. He didnât go on this [rampage], âIâm gonna go kill every soldier, Iâm gonna find the guy that ordered the soldier to shoot my daughter!â No, itâs about this man that has completely shut down and is pretty much dead inside, until he meets Ellie.â
âAt the end of the day,â Druckmann said, âyou have to be a slave to the story. You canât worry yourself about these things⊠abstract it enough and you can find these tropes and these conventions everywhere. So all you can do is say, âWhat is honest?â What was honest for the prologue was to show a snippet of what this family had to go through, how they were ripped apart, so that you can imagine what happened to the rest of the world. But youâre seeing it from a very personal viewpoint. And then you just try to make those characters as real and as grounded as possible so that you can buy into that drama.â
The âCitizen Kane of Gamesâ
One of the more enjoyable things to come up in the critical response to The Last of Us was the hoary old Citizen Kane of Games meme. The comparison is as well-worn as any of the zombie tropes in The Last of Us, and yet whenever a game this good comes out, inevitably some critic or other will compare it to Orson Wellesâ groundbreaking 1941 film.
Like clockwork, Empire releasedtheir early review of the game and concluded by saying that in addition to being one of the best games of this console generation, The Last of Us âmay also prove to be gamingâs Citizen Kane moment.â Across the Internet, a thousand heads met a thousand desks.
I asked Druckmann and Straley if they thought that was a fair assessment. Is The Last of Us is the Citizen Kane of games? At first, Druckmann laughingly tried to turn it back around on me, asking what I thought the comparison meant. I said I was more interested in what he thought.
âItâs already been attributed to several games, and now it has become almost a joke?â Druckmann said. âLike, I think Metroid Prime was called the Citizen Kane of video games.â
(Heâs right, it was.)
âWho knows, right?â he said, more seriously. âYou hope you leave some kind of mark and you inspire people. Look, weâre into narrative-driven games. We hope that thereâll be more games like this, games that take story seriously, that really work hard to combine story and gameplay. I hope it leaves some kind of mark, and it inspires more people to make games like this, and to try to push it forward even further.â
Then he laughed. âThereâs gotta be a Wayneâs World of games.â
