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First Flight

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Last of Us
dir. Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann
Sony Computer Entertainment

Interactive fiction died an impetus death somewhere between a Robert Coover bowel movement and LucasArts' Full Throttle. The concept of Choose Your Own Adventure was always more exciting in theory than in execution and the dull plotting of Telltale's version of The Walking Dead proved this. Only a few options are ever available, so the resulting story effectively becomes Choose One Of Two or Three Adventures. In interactive art, creators focused on the illusion of choice at the price of artistic vision when due to the limits of technology not many choices were possible.

In contrast, the basic narrative at the heart of Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann's The Last of Us remains profoundly linear. It is the exploration of dilapidated cities where the story unravels that offer a variety of experiences given completely over to the player. In the depth of its world-building, and the unbelievable mood and atmosphere it delivers at every moment, The Last of Us is the rare experience that transcends the idea of game, evolving into a work of art occuring entirely in the mind of the player.

In the first scene of the The Last of Us, Joel's daughter Sam perishes in the chaos after a fungal outbreak that murders millions, turning them into red-eyed nonhumans that consume the survivors. This introduction indulges in all the clichés of the genre, but as the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that these familiar events are merely a prologue to what follows, getting the expected disorder out of the way.

Fifteen years later, Boston is a broken-down quarantine zone, more or less as revolting a city as it is today. The detail of a society stripped and dislocated from all the technology we are used to goes far behind Cormac McCarthy's world turned to ash.

The Last of Us has been called a depressing experience, but this is misleading. The further we get from our own civilization, the more relaxing it becomes. Naughty Dog, the Santa Monica-based developer responsible for The Last of Us, are known for harnessing the best visual and sound design in their industry, but the game moves beyond mere representation. The aural atmosphere The Last of Us synthesizes creates tremendous relief, as with finding a quiet car on a crowded Amtrak train, to find an Earth stripped of all the noise.

At one point in the story, Joel and the girl he has agreed to deliver to an insurgent group, Ellie, arrive at a hydroelectric plant. There an organized group flourishes among the country's chaos, but its denizens seem strangely frustrated for all they've been able to establish, something like children called in from recess. Bringing order to anarchy is exhausting if it's not simple.

All across the recess there is detail impossible to provide in any set or real world location. Exploring the environments, in the guise of both Joel and Ellie, feels like peeling back the layers of buildings and biomes more alive than the world that surrounds us now. Watching a movie after playing The Last of Us is strangely inadequate, like looking at a cube that from our vantage is only a square.

concept art

The story, such as it is, makes a point of being relatively restrained. Joel's charge Ellie is resourceful and earns trust from her "protector," soon they are more like a team than The Bodyguard. Suspense, creative director Neil Druckmann has realized, is something that cannot be forced by simply delaying the arrival of something the audience is expecting. In this fashion violence in The Last of Us is explosive, quick and pernicious. It consistently arrives without delay. No safe place exists in this version of the United States, where even the safest moments are prone to combust. The message that there is no hiding place looms in handwritten diaries we collect, the sudden onset of cannibalism and murder, all the unlikely places for human habitation that we find.

Animals populate the cities Joel and Ellie move through, unaffected by the cordyceps fungus. They are reduced to the behaviors man expected from other animals when neanderthals first emerged on the scene. Keeping pets is very difficult here, because the noise they make could alert the infected that lurch through dark environments, searching for their next meal. When you move close to a a dog or a monkey, it runs from you instinctively. We are reminded that we have always been a sort of plague, and the The Last of Us only makes this literal.

All of these elements only take on as much meaning as you yourself ascribe to them - it is possible to play though the story in a sort of robotic haze, doing and feeling only what you must to keep going. But it is more likely to be affected by these varied moments of sadness and joy, so much so that by the end we find it difficult to have to control Joel or Ellie, the people who have taken us to these hidden places between the disarray. It is powerful to empathize with others, but it is more powerful to be as they are. Nothing like this has been achieved in any other medium.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Brian De Palma's Passion.

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