trivard676We’ll admit – we’re disappointed. Crushed, even. Game director Bruce Straley and creative director Neil Druckmann speaking with Eurogamer have tried their best to let us down gently.
While we still feel that the game holds a lot of potential as another type of game, The Last of Us is not a horror game.
We know what we saw in the trailer – but even if the game includes monsters and zombie-like people, they aren’t the focus of the game. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic setting, there are monsters and survival is a key element, but the game is more focused in a different direction.
Druckmann points out
If the game was about the monsters, we would have not showed them [in the trailer]. The story’s not about them, so we thought let’s get it out of the way.
So that really leaves us with one burning question. What is the story about then?
Short answer: These two
The game is a love story – but not the kind you’re probably thinking of. It’s more of a bonding story – the relationship between the two people in the trailer – Joel and Ellie. A story that will pull at the heart-strings and test the father-daughter dynamic that these two people will share. There will be monsters and infected people, and the game will be the most violent Naughty Dog game yet, it will still be relatively tame, heavily story-driven and place a heavy emphasis on art style.
According to the interview, the Naughty Dog team worked extraordinarily hard to keep the whole The Last of Us project a secret. When Druckmann lost his iPad that contained a trailer for the game on an airplane, panic ensued. The iPad was never recovered from the airline. That panic intensified when the team behind The Last of Us saw the trailer for Dead Island and got to thinking that someone beat them to the punch.
However unlike Dead Island, which was nothing like the awe-inspiring trailer (unfortunately) Druckmann insists that what you see in the trailer is what you’re going to get in the game. Alas, no details were revealed on actual gameplay other than scavenging, surviving and killing.
Druckmann stated that they approached this ‘relationship-building’ idea because they felt that no one was getting to the heart of the matter. No one was really exploring emotions – the human condition – in games. The Last of Us will tell you about feelings.
It’s not the first time we’ve heard of a game directors wanting to take games in a new emotion-heavy direction and dissing the medium’s story-telling abilities as a whole, as Druckmann mentioned in the interview.
How well the audience will take to Naughty Dog’s emotional apocalypse is hard to tell. We liked Heavy Rain for taking a step-outside the box. However we all know that when you move too far in one direction, trying to make something like an apocalypse too emotional, you get…mixed results.
LIFE IS WORTH LIVING!
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