The Last of Us 2 is a horror show. It’s as if someone took a precisely fermented batch of nightmare fuel, lit it on fire like a molotov, and yoted it across a fungal, violent Cormac McCarthy landscape only to have it make impact with an inverted demon mirror designed by Christopher Nolan himself. You can see the hunched Nolan crafting this Hell vanity in a sordid basement in one of his no doubt countless McMansions peppered through the English countryside.
“Yes, my dear. We will bend time with you, my dear. We will show them the ugliest bits of themselves, my dear”. He’ll throw his head back and cackle and then begin screaming at his brother on the phone about Westworld and how he needs more blazers and dead wife narratives. Stat!
Where to begin? The start makes sense. The first Last of Us game was heralded as the Citizen Kane of gaming. This may seem like the sort of tepid approval an English Literature major turned video game reviewer may defeatedly disburse, but there is a deeper truth here. Citizen Kane was the sort of thing that every real and true artist strives to make: A new thing that is also a good thing. Not simply a medium-definer (good), but also so far removed from anything that has come before that it is entirely its own thing (new).
Detractors will yelp at this. Bah Gawd! Have you forgotten how similar the mechanics were to Uncharted? Have you never played Left For Dead?
But anyone with a central understanding of making (versus the business of bitching and moaning) knows that things are made from things. Wallace pulls from Shakespeare, Cranston pulls from Gandolfini, and H. R. Giger pulls from his own depraved dreams that no one should ever have to see. Nor should they want to since it might muddy the magic.
The point is there are sort of three dimensional fractal thresholds between copying something, taking inspiration from it, being informed by it, and paying an homage to it. Mapping out this paradigm would take some kind of Spy Kids device (with accompanying terrible UI to boot), but it’s very easy to know it when you see it. After all, the human mind is tremendous at picking up patterns.
Naughty Dog is riding a wave of homeruns. But this is not without its problems. The Too Much Success Conundrum boils down to one central issue: You have built rock solid foundations, intense and rich characters that people care about, sculpted a pristinely horrific world, and won all the accolades a company that started with a dream and a Bandicoot could hope to. Where do you go from here? How high can Icarus fly? The answer is very. But as Icarus discovered, it comes at a cost.
First, the basics. The small stuff is good. LOU Two takes the first’s fundamental mechanics of moving, crafting, and killing and refines the hell out of them and then adds in a lot more. Upgrades to weapons are joined by upgrades to abilities in a way that recalls the Last of Us Factions multiplayer. It’s all very slick and good and clever. And for a non-open world game, there is a decent amount of sandboxy tactics available to you. You don’t know strategy until a trained canine picks up your wandering scent, comes chasing after you with a drooly OST of vicious barks and snarls accompanying, only to discover that was part of your sick, little voyeuristic plan all along. The last thing he hears is a whirring click as an improvised explosion sends him to Hell as his trainer screams in shock and you sit rocking back and forth; one part glee at having lived, five parts distress at now being Chief Dog-Slaughterer, and four parts quietly whispering the lyrics to the Killers’ song: “All These Things I’ve Done” as you rock and you rock and you rock and you-
The graphics are good. So is the sound design. And the game design. The this, the that- All of the things that should be unnoticeable if done well are pretty much all accounted for. This is one of the worst elements of production: The pieces that hold silently within them the potential to destroy the whole if they are left out of place and yet they create absolutely no applause if executed perfectly. Despite this, somewhere in the back of your ape brain you know you’re seeing a quality product even if your ape mouth can’t utter the right words in the right order to convey why. Stupid ape. That being said, the character’s faces can enter uncanny valley territory for brief moments. This may be less of an issue on the PS4 Pro. Also, on the regular little PS4, the machine sometimes goes into a frenzy of fanning itself to keep from spontaneously combusting. This happens infrequently enough that it doesn’t take away from the overall experience though. Also, there were moments of bending broken light refractions and obstinate AI pals that would refuse to get out of the way. The first was annoying. The second led to panicked yelling as enemies approached. Bad companion! Be more like Liz! Boo.
The performances bring that sort of excellence that one has (almost unfairly) come to expect from Sony games of this caliber (God of War and Spiderman are different animals altogether but hold up to LOU in this regard). One wonders how harshly Druckmann tasked this veritable Seal Team of doomsday actors with maddening repeated takes like Kubrick’s poltergeist (ghost is too noble a word for any corporeal manifestation of the Bastard Kubrick) had possessed him until he got their myriad gestures and facial tics just right. Perhaps he won them over by using a microphone XLR chord as some sort of Freudian lion-tamer whip. The voice actor is, of course, at heart a veritable coward and would immediately succumb to this display of aggression. Why else doth they not show their naked faces? It is easy to see Druckmann in this role of the Tamer King. He is clearly a self-styled conqueror of the human spirit. After all, no normal person would be able to write a game this ghastly and terrifying.
Druck and Co.’s two central theses seem to be:
1. We care deeply about the player’s holistic experience.
2. Subverting expectations can be fun and sometimes shattering.
The first calls to mind Ken Levine’s Bioshock Infinite. The devs mapped out an intricate system of what your AI pal, Elizabeth, would look at as you went about your adventures with her. Say you walk by a wall with a painting. Elizabeth would most likely look at and comment on the painting rather than a bit of random plaster… Sometimes… It all depended as the placed markers increased the chances of her looking at something, but not necessarily absolutely forcing her to look at it. This culminated in your correspondent’s Great Experience: From the outset there was a desire to want to go through the entire game with the mad abandon of a person who hates single player games (feels like time is being wasted. Idk. Don’t judge me. I am better than you). And yet even your humble correspondent took pause during a portion of the game where you walk across a street to see if there is something to pilfer from some errant hotdog stand and then turn (presumably to shoot a Lutece) only to see Liz staring at the perfect orange pink sunset as it cast perfect lighting all around the environment. She let out the slightest “wow” and the moment was enhanced infinitely (lol) by how utterly easy to miss it would have been if your correspondent hadn’t traipsed over to that woebegone hotdog stand in that random corner. And there were no doubt many other such moments missed or lost to the impatient rush of wanting to complete the game ASAP so as to mentally own the story in exchange for the smallest amount of time invested (this is how all art is meant to be enjoyed). That tiny moment gave your correspondent pause and for a few moments, we looked at the sunset and could almost see the digital markers in the sky…
LOU Deus has these moments. It is chock-full of these moments. The most obvious ones are subtle and restrained (usually in the cutscenes), but the best ones weave the same magic that Bioshock Infinite did: They’re so small, you could almost miss them. And oh boy are they dense with meaning.
And this brings us to the meat of the matter: The Story. Good mechanics and graphics and performances can only take you so far. So how is it? Does it surpass One? This is where the conversation gets very difficult. There is a lot more story here than LOU One. And it’s a lot more ambitious too. There were a handful of moments in the writing (in-game when your character walks about discovering things) that had your correspondent shake his head since they felt rushed and silly.
But as a whole it succeeds. LOU Number Doh is a gut-wrencher. It is a beast of a story, a giant that walks softly and carries an incredibly violent stick. It finds those strings in your heart of hearts and mercilessly plays them like the Devil with his fiddle. If games were fighting techniques, LOU the Second is a fist soaked in blood jabbing you in the nose and throat with wild abandon.
There has been much conversation around this game’s choices with regards to dangerous words for the apolitical mind. Words like diversity and representation and liberalism. Much has been made about bringing politics into games. To those who find themselves on the outrage brigade or shaking their heads at the death of a masterpiece because of these reasons your correspondent has little to say beyond knock knock. Who’s there? Goan. Goan who? Goan fuck yourself. This is not a perfect game. It is true. Occasionally, the Drucks tips a bit of a heavy hand with allusions that are clumsy. But those are earned bumps in the road. Good art doesn’t come from a place of avoiding risk. This may turn some players off the game entirely, but if your tolerance for risk-taking or narratives removed from the well-trodden status quo is that low perhaps you should meet my good friend Goan again. The world does not start and stop at your comfort-zone. Especially this game. If Pixar can show a bunch of rotten kids some 3D human cars and top the box office then maybe it’s time for a rethink about how tossing more than one kind of person into the mainstream mix isn’t the end of the worl- oh wait…
But stand warned, dear reader, this is not an optimistic game. Its world is covered in filth and grimy anger and vengeance and the few glimmers of hope are often sickly feigned mirages... But occasionally it does offer a vulnerable spark that is something a bit more. A peek at something hopeful and fragile and good. And with the right kind of crafting and crouching and rummaging and scrounging you can start to build on it and find something not quite so broken. Your correspondent will leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem that sums up this harrowing game and its gritty, heartbreaker journey quite aptly:
I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
A thundercloud
And they’re going to hear from meRing the bells that still ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
