Take a look at the next game from Naughty Dog, The Last of Us, and there are similarities with the Uncharted series to be found. You can see the studio’s signature in the animation of the main characters, the detailed, motion-captured acting, the studied interaction between the protagonists and their environment, and the focus on creating a cinematic and emotional experience. First Looks: The Last of Us
In other ways, however, The Last of Us could not be further away from the adventures of Nathan Drake. This isn’t a summer blockbuster action adventure with echoes of old thirties serials and Raiders of the Lost Ark, This is a tense, brutal game of post-apocalyptic survival, where every bullet and every blow has an impact, and is one of the most genuinely shocking games we’ve seen at this year’s E3.
Survival Horror
The game is set in a future USA ravaged by a viral attack, its cities overgrown, its human population turned desperate and feral, and the survivors threatened not just by each other, but by hordes of infected, zombie-like creatures. It focuses on two survivors: Joel, a grizzled, middle-aged anti-hero and Ellie, a fourteen year-old girl, and on the relationship between the two as they traverse the game’s bleak world.
Ouch...
Bleak, that is, but beautifully rendered. The demo we saw running is spectacular, with the decaying urban scenery covered by pockets of vegetation, rippling pools of stagnant-looking water, crumbling wooden staircases and interiors so decayed and abandoned that you can practically smell them.
Traversal appears to work in much the same way as in Uncharted, and it’s in the more ‘platformy’ sections that comparisons become most evident. It’s in the combat, however, where the experience really diverges. Uncharted has always been partially a shooting gallery, with dozens of bad guys to blast in a classic duck-and-cover style.
In The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie don’t have it so easy. Ammunition is in short supply, and your fellow survivors aren’t weak or stupid. In the section we saw played, with Joel and Ellie infiltrating an apartment crammed with hostiles, our hero resorted to grabbing one as a human shield, killing two allies with gunfire, then knocking the first out with a pistol whip to the back of the head. There was hard-hitting fisticuffs, a desperate tussle and - finally - the notorious shotgun blast to he head that you might’ve seen in Sony’s E3 trailer. It’s gruesome stuff, but - weirdly - not gratuitously so. In The Last of Us, the violence feels like it’s intended to shock.
Known Unknowns
Without actual hands-on play, much is a mystery. Even watching someone working the controller, it’s hard to work out how the combat moves are mapped out, and how much of what happens is pre-programmed or down to smart context-sensitive controls. Naughty Dog has also revealed few details about the wider gameplay or the setting, or about how far having two lead characters will impact gameplay. We were told that the world isn’t open as such, but that the game does allow multiple approaches. In fact, in another room at E3 Naughty Dog was demonstrating the same section handled with a stealth approach, with Joel and Ellie trying to sneak through the area undetected.
What does come through is that this isn’t an ordinary game. The Last of Us is tense, dark, visceral and scary in a way that even many so-called horror games are not. With this and Quantic Dream’s Beyond, Sony had one of the most exciting line-ups of genuine, all-new titles at the show, and this one has the makings of a landmark game,
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