Naughty Dog's 'The Last of Us' is dogsh*t

Middlebrow video games need to stop chasing the dragon of "being cinematic"

Remember the movie Light of My Life from 2019? No? I wouldn’t think so. Let me give you the SparkNotes:

In a post-catastrophe future, a father shepherds his daughter through a dangerous world beset by raiders and… look, it’s The Road. It desperately wants to be The Road but pathetically winds up being more of The Scenic Route to Nowhere, with all the haunted grey grimness of that novel but none of the sting, none of the bite, like a cover of “Dead Flag Blues” played on the kazoo. It has a (frankly overly-enthusiastic) 67 on Metacritic, and you will never so much as think of this movie from the second you finish reading this post until the day you die.¹

It’s The Road.

Yes, the underlying dynamic conceit has been done many, many times to various degrees of competence—Lone Wolf and Cub, Six-String Samurai, Logan, and so on—but Light of My Life is ultimately just The Road. Basically every review of the film, even the positive ones, were quick to make the comparison, and now the movie is consigned to nigh oblivion, floating in the Netflix void to occasionally haunt the end of someone’s recommendations queue like a ghost’s fart. But had Light of My Life simply been a video game instead of a movie then Casey Affleck could have easily coasted the rest of his career as someone who had seriously advanced the medium of video games and taken the form to new heights. I mean, why not? It’s basically what happened to The Last of Us.

The Last of Us is also a naked rip of The Road.² And, like Light of My Life, The Last of Us fails to match the impact of its inspiration. The game goes for The Walking Dead angle of using zombified humans as a metaphor for both the inevitable doomedness of the protagonists, and to contrast against the true inhumanity of the story’s human villains (“who are the real monsters?” and so on), but this ultimately falls flat because the raiders in the game never really “shock” me into truly feeling their inhumanity. In The Road, the man and the boy find human livestock in a cellar with cauterized amputated limbs as they’re being slowly harvested alive for meat. There is later a description of an infant roasted on a spit. One of the man’s express concerns is that, if captured, raiders would likely rape, kill, and eat his son, possibly even in that order! That’s the kind of dread that crawls up your ass and lays eggs. And sure, The Last of Us has cannibals too, but they feel so ultimately thoughtless, so “standard” in their execution, and you just don’t “feel it” in quite the same way when you encounter them. It’s the post-apocalypse, so here’s your dreary landscapes and ruins, here’s your boilerplate raiders to populate them, I guess we’ll have to dive into some cannibalism eventually³—it feels almost perfunctory, really. I frankly had a more visceral emotional reaction in Fallout: New Vegas walking through the raider-infested Vault 3, seeing the signs of the families who once lived there, butchered meat next to teddy bears which once belonged to the vault’s children. I really felt something in there, even if it was probably while I was clipping through the floor and then promptly crashing my game. But I’ll give Naughty Dog this: though I couldn’t bother finishing the game myself, I wound up eventually watching a Let’s Play (honestly not much of a change to the actual experience) and I thought the game had one very powerful moment right at the end.

Joel delivers Ellie to a group of survivors (the Fireflies) in Salt Lake City and learns they plan to kill her to harvest a portion of her body which may help humanity find a cure for the fungal infection which is wiping them out. Joel, who has imprinted on Ellie after his own daughter was shot by raiders, loses his shit and winds up going on a rampage through the facility to stop the surgery and save Ellie. When Ellie regains consciousness, Joel lies and tells her that the Fireflies’ project had been a proven failure. The game ultimately deals with various forms of humans becoming inhuman, whether literally or figuratively—the infected, the raiders, the soldiers of FEDRA, the survivors looking to harvest Ellie, and eventually even Joel, who gives up his humanity in damning all mankind in order to save Ellie. In lying to her, Joel preserves her innocence, protecting her from the truth of what he has done so that she may live her life unburdened by that knowledge. It winds up being an extremely tragic metaphor for parental self-sacrifice, and the single most moving part of the whole game.

So of course they completely undo it in the sequel. Two years after the incident at the Fireflies’ facility, Ellie returns there and discovers the truth, straining her relationship with Joel, and negating any point the ending of the original had. Its emotional power is completely snuffed out. If only I had a popular video game cultural reference to succinctly express my feelings about this decision. Oh, hang on a second—

Yeah there we go.⁴

The Last of Us belongs to a certain class of video games exemplifying the trend called (often disparagingly) the “dadification of games,” the unearned “maturity” of a medium aging with its audience, leading to complete farces like God of War’s Kratos turning from wish-fulfillment pornstar into a “mature” character whose relationship with his son we have to take painfully-seriously. Every murder simulator wants to be a tender story about parenting now. Parenting is a “serious” theme afterall, covered in “serious” art ranging from Joan Didion’s Blue Nights to uhhh Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, and so if you tackle it it must mean you’re serious… right? It reminds me of the old lede for Jodi Picoult’s obviously self-edited Wikipedia page:

Although she is often characterised as an author of chick-lit, over her career, [sic] Picoult has covered a wide range of controversial or moral issues, including abortion, assisted suicide, race relations, eugenics, LGBT rights, fertility issues, religion, the death penalty, and school shootings.

What Picoult (like many a game developer) fails to realize is that “mature” content does not a “mature” artwork make. Dealing with “race relations” doesn’t make your book To Kill A Mockingbird any more than doing so makes you Black. It’s not enough that your game features a Sad Dad in it and gestures at the signifier “fatherhood,” it has to actually “say” something or “do” something that comments on or demonstrates this theme in a particularly meaningful way. But The Last of Us gets by all of this and gets “taken seriously” by appealing to one of the most vacuous fixations of gaming culture: it is, like Naughty Dog’s previous series, Uncharted, “cinematic.” It’s “serious” not because it engages with its themes meaningfully, but because it is “like a movie.”

Gamers want video games to be movies so badly, because over 150 years movies have become a “respectable” medium, and so oftentimes a video game being like a movie is treated as the height of gaming’s artistic legitimacy. Part of this owes to the fact that many gamers and a lot of the people who make games are not the most culturally-adroit people in the world. In a previous post deriding gamer culture’s deficits I quoted Graham Linehan (or, if you prefer, Hatsune Miku) complaining about the stories in the Grand Theft Auto series:

I have a theory about what’s happening, which is I think a lot of writers, not only in games but also in films, have stopped reading books, they’re just watching films… the only thing that will give a game world and a story a bit of texture and depth and bit and traction is research. And by research I don’t mean watching Scarface twenty times in a row.

The truth is that, had The Last of Us been a movie first, it would presently exist in the dustbin of film history alongside Light of My Life (a movie you’ve already forgotten existed even after having read about it a few paragraphs ago), just like Uncharted could hardly even be called a sub-par Indiana Jones, it’s not even sub-par National Treasure. The Last of Us feels like awkwardly “playing” a movie. Doing what The Last of Us does in order to be “cinematic” is like making a movie that’s mostly just text on the screen and calling it “literary.” It eschews the language of the medium it is utilizing.

Here’s a game that does right to these ends what The Last of Us does wrong with the same subject matter: Shelter 2.

When you begin Shelter 2 you play a pregnant lynx trying desperately to escape from a pack of hungry wolves—finally getting to safety, you give birth to four beautiful cubs. They never spoke a line of dialogue but I started to project distinct personalities onto them, watching them frolic as we would go on the hunt. One day I heard the wolves begin to howl. Panicking, I lept onto a high rock, and called on my cubs one by one to join me. One was too late. Chills ran up my spine as I watched my child snatched by a wolf and carried off crying into the distance. I paused the game and held my head in my hands. Later in the game, after emerging from a dense fog, I looked around me to find that one of my cubs was missing. I searched frantically and found no sign of her, and had no choice but to accept than she was gone. Eventually my two surviving children, old enough to look after themselves, started to wander off, leaving me alone. My eyes were growing dimmer. In the sky I could see the starry outlines of the spirits and was guided to a field where one of my lost children ran to see me, and then I was no more. Very little of this was even scripted, none of it was given to me via hackneyed cutscenes written by Hollywood rejects, it was simply brilliant emergent gameplay.

There are plenty of other games that have extremely powerful things to say about being a parent through their stories and mechanics—That Dragon, Cancer, Lisa, My Child Lebensborn, The Stillness of the Wind. All of these are extremely emotionally-challenging experiences, all of them doing so much more with the medium than just being a mediocre CGI movie with generic stealth-focused cover-shooter interludes like The Last of Us. You do not need games like The Last of Us to make games into “art.” There are plenty of games which have already achieved this. LSD: Dream Emulator, Deus Ex Machina, Death Stranding, The Beginner’s Guide, Earthbound, Pathologic, Shadow of the Colossus, Kentucky Route Zero, Tales from Off-Peak City, Killer7, Silent Hill 2 (the original, not the fucking remake)—these are all real works of art within the gaming medium that are easily as valuable as any of the best films, books, music, whatever. The fact that gamers desire validation from Hollywood is itself a confession of their feelings of deep inadequacy. No matter how much they may defend the merits of their chosen medium, they still experience a repressed self-doubt, brought about by the genre’s continued (albeit slowly ameliorating) ghettoization.

The Last of Us itself has predictably jumped to a a new medium—the “prestige TV show.” Prestige television consistently receives the sort of fawning critical appraisals from mainstream tastemakers that game developers thirst for, despite having even more questionable real merits. Do video games really need to genuflect to a medium in which fucking Stranger Things and Severance are taken seriously?

Is The Last of Us the “best video game adaptation ever”? Ask yourself: has this question ever been serious posed about an adaptation of a book? Video games shouldn’t have to be adapted to earn respect, in doing so the medium defers to its sister mediums and takes their inherent “superiority” for granted. To hell with that. Have some God-damned self-respect.

1. Awkwardly, considering the movie is about a little girl, the title calls to mind the sweaty-palmed opening paragraph of Lolita, which describes its subject in the same words (followed promptly by “fire of my loins”).

2. Itself already a B-tier novel in Cormac McCarthy’s œuvre next to such brilliant works as Blood Meridian.

3. These tropes are all so routine—post-apocalypses are so fucking tired as a setting. Everybody wants to build a ruined world but nobody wants to dig through the rubble and find anything truly human in it. Fucking Adventure Time, a TV show for children and bored stoners, wound up lazily developing itself into a post-apocalyptic narrative. I get it, we’re staring down the barrel of societal collapse, but Christ, all these books and movies and games are making me wish someone would pull the fucking trigger already! It’s all starting to feel less like art and more like a Pinterest board.

4. The game’s sequel, divisive even among the fans of the original, involved the daughter of one of the men Joel killed in the climax of the previous game coming back and wasting Joel in an act of revenge, leading Ellie to pursue her own revenge, and leading the game to become a miserable cycle of internecine conflict like an Albanian Blood Feud. Series creator Neil Druckmann is Israeli and sought to make the game reflect the endless and tragic “cycle of vengeance” he saw plaguing the region in which he was born. Ah, yes, just a “cycle of vengeance” with no clear hero and villain—I wrote a piece for Canadian Dimension not long ago about why that particular equivocation is a bunch of bullshit. The truth is that Druckmann isn’t just any Israeli, he’s a West Bank settler, and following October 7th he posted an Israeli flag with the caption “Israel forever,” and it was revealed that he donates money to the Hasbarist ZAKA organization. Like many liberal Zionists, Druckmann can’t escape feeling a degree of guilt and shame for what his ethnonationalist project gets itself into, and so in order to placate this cognitive dissonance he becomes obsessed with a kind of “both sides” narrative that allows him to tut-tut while ignoring that his side is the root of the problem—a charade that dissolves whenever his side is shaken, revealing the unrepentant nationalist within. Within a few weeks of his post Druckmann tried to turn face by donating to both Israeli and Palestinian emergency response teams (lol as if they need it in equal measure), but the mask had already slipped, it was too late to try to put it back up again.

Of course, plenty of politically-odious people have managed to make great art—Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Filipo Marinetti were unrepentant fascists and created some of the greatest literature of the 20th century. Zionism seems to have a remarkable lack of creative potency. Is it any wonder that Elie Wiesel, a Zionist, was just a poor man’s Primo Levi, who was an anti-Zionist? Israel itself has produced an astounding dearth of culture worth consuming—the only art I have any degree of admiration for that I can think of off the top of my head is the music of Yonatan Gat and Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir.