An astonishing, powerful, and moving story, coupled with tight, cohesive, and varied gameplay. The best game of 2013.
Everything in The Last of Us revolves around and furthers the story. From the very first moments, The Last of Us makes it clear that engaging the player in the lives of the characters, and making the player care deeply about them, is its ambition. To this end, segments of the game resemble or take inspiration from games like Heavy Rain or older, adventure-style gaming. Rather than constant combat, there is extensive exploration and well-integrated cutscenes that have sharp dialogue. Over time, the player completely inhabits the characters and, in a rare feat for games, completely inhabits their emotions. I found myself talking about the game with fellow gamers and saying, "I needed to find Ellie," "I was worried about her," "I was so scared for Joel," etc. And the "I" in that sentence was not merely me-as-gamer, but me-as-Joel or me-as-Ellie. To appreciate how rare and exceptional this transference is, imagine a gamer playing God of War III -- an incredible game in its own right, albeit for different reasons -- and saying, "I was so furious with Zeus, I wanted to tear his head off." It just doesn't work like that in many other games. The character's emotions, even when expressed on screen, are external to the person playing. Not so here.
I cannot say much more about the story without spoilers, but suffice it to say, the game has one of the best overall narrative arcs I've seen in a long time. The last game I can remember that felt comparable to this one, in sheer storytelling power, was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The Last of Us has many moments that left me stunned and even devastated. Indeed, at one point in the game, my mouth was literally hanging open for several minutes. I may have called games "jawdropping" before, the way one might rotely type out "lol" at a friend's joke recounted online, but this may be the first time I've really done it.
Happily, however, Naughty Dog did not tell a story but neglect what makes games uniquely powerful: which is the gameplay, and the interactivity that is the hallmark of the medium. The game is at heart a third-person action-adventure and, although different from Naughty Dog's Uncharted trilogy, traces many of its elements to that series. The basic idea is to explore landscapes and either fight enemies or sneak around them. Combat in particular feels like a refined version of Uncharted, with a fully realized and versatile stealth-combat system that felt somewhat tacked on in the run-and-gun atmosphere of the Uncharted series. I can honestly say that every weapon in the game (with the possible exception of the bow, which I never mastered) is useful, and that no single weapon is so overpowered that it becomes a crutch. Meanwhile, the variety of special items or grenades allows for substantial variation in play style, while never becoming overwhelming. By the end of the game, I loved mixing and matching my combat styles, laying nail bombs as traps for unsuspecting enemies, Molotov cocktails to burn multiple foes, and smoke bombs to sow confusion and fear among them while I snuck around and knifed or strangled them to death. Throughout the game, combat is exciting and tense, and the player-character remains weak enough that some mix of stealth and direct confrontation is necessary. The game also adds a nice touch to encourage some stealh: when shot, the player-character is knocked back or momentarily stunned, and thus it's not as easy to play this game Call-of-Duty-style, guns blazing, with no concern for how many times one gets hit.
The game also encourages variation in play through the crafting and resource system. The player-character can carry only a limited amount of items, and picks up the raw resources for those items by scrounging around the environment. (For instance, alcohol + a rag are necessary to make a Molotov cocktail.) At higher difficulty settings in particular, this requires the player to conserve their resources and tactically decide how to approach each combat scenario. Yet inventory management and crafting are not so complex as to slow down the pace of the game. Again, everything is clearly and consciously designed in service of story -- the design of the game is not to have the player stand around for more than a minute crafting or searching excessively for resource items.
As for the technical aspects of the game, the graphics and sound are first-rate and spectacular, as one would expect from a Naughty Dog game. The voice acting is a notch above, and Joel and Ellie in particular are voiced by excellent actors who convey all the emotions behind their lines. The one negative comment I have about the game is that there are multiple glitches or bugs that can sometimes hamper or even stonewall the game. Twice, I found myself "stuck" in a portion where advancement was impossible because of some mistake. For instance, at one point in the game, I had to clear an area of enemies before advancing. I died, the game reloaded, and the enemies were gone. But the doorway out would not open because the game did not register the enemies as killed. These sorts of minor bugs were an annoyance, but thankfully solved simply by reloading the encounter (which erases at most 3-5 minutes of progress, and is therefore minimally frustrating).
Another small but noticeable technical flaw is long load times. It takes several minutes just to get to the home screen and almost feels like loading up an older version of Windows. And then you have to load a saved game, which also takes a fair chunk of time. I know Naughty Dog prides itself on not having a mandatory 10 GB game install like some franchises out there, but I can't help but wondering whether having some files accessible on the hard drive would have ameliorated this problem. At the very least, it would have been nice to have the option.
All in all, I cannot say enough about how important, and how beautiful, this game is. Even writing an ordinary review feels like a strange exercise, because this game is not easily weighted as one-third story, one-third gameplay, one-third graphics and sound. I've said it several times before, but everything in the game coheres into a whole, the sum more than its parts, and all in service of one of the best stories gaming has ever seen. This may be the best game on the Playstation 3 to date. It's certainly one of the most artistically accomplished, and, I fervently hope, a sign of more to come.