The Best Of Us

I finished The Last Of Us Part 2 yesterday.

I can't get the music out of my head, among other things. 

The game is sprawling. It sprawls across hours and hours. It's longer than you think it is. It affected me. It contains a vertical slice of something.

Part 1 was revolutionary to me, a new kind of game storytelling -- it pushed the boundary of what I thought games could be. The end of Part 1 does this thing where you have the sudden realization that you are not the main character, though you have acted as them and been them for the whole game. You have identified with them and told yourself that you made the choices. The game's physical and emotional environment is immersive, so you fall into feeling this way. Then, at the end, you experience a break -- the story forces the main character to do something that feels repulsive, inhuman. You are forced to reckon with the fact that you are not Joel. So it contains a subtle kind of fourth-wall break where the story veers away from you as the player, and you watch the characters become not you.

I don't know how I expected Part 2 to follow that. I was very suspicious going in -- I thought, "this game is going to try and trick me into identifying with the characters. That's how it's going to get its hooks in me." So I was on my guard. And it still fooled me. I think it was because the game switches between two characters pretty often, so you never really feel that you are one person. In fact, you are two people who are actively trying to kill each other. And they are both deserving of sympathy. So who are you, as the user, playing as? You're playing as the conflict. But you don't realize it until nearly the end. This is especially clear in moments when the two protagonists are fighting.

In those moments you want to continue the story, but same as in the first game, you don't really want what's happening. There's a particular moment when you're in one of these fights and a prompt comes up to push the square button as fast as you can. One of the characters is struggling to slowly stab the other in the heart. And I was dutifully mashing the square button. But I suddenly wondered, "What is it I'm hoping will happen if I mash it fast enough? I don't want what's happening here to succeed. I just don't want the story to end here". So it became clear that I wasn't playing as the character, I was playing as the conflict -- as the story. I was mashing to continue the story.

Some games interact with the player by forcing them to be fast enough to react, or to memorize a sequence of attacks. And what you get from that game is whatever fun you have while you're learning. The Last Of Us 2 has that, but it is also long and arduous. It is boring with its beauty. The beautiful landscapes stretch on and on, endlessly, the way it does in a car ride that is miserably long. Yes it's beautiful, you think, but all we're going to do is murder everyone we meet. Because these characters live in a world about sneaking up behind people and stabbing them in a throat, and they do it constantly, and I as a player got the sense that that is the real horror, that they cannot stop, that they are driven onward through this infinite swamp of violence -- performing the same horrible feats over and over. 

This game wants to ask us a question, and it takes forever both to ask and to answer. I think the question might be summarized as, "When can hatred stop?". In reality we should be free to choose to stop hating at any time, but I think we all know that it just isn't that simple. Because the people in the story feel like real characters, the question then changes to "Is this game a good enough painting of reality to show us how to be better humans? Or is this game a false version of reality that cannot help us?". The most powerful argument, the closest you get to answering this question, is playing the game. I can't give you the answer by telling you the plot of the game. It would be a bit like reading you a a list of colors, and expecting you to understand what it feels like to look at a painting.