The Last of Us - it's the time of the season

that’s going to be the cleanest fucking fretboard in zombieland

lol Leee

in the walking bits i keep unconsciously trying to keep 6 feet away from everyone

i'm waiting to hear y'all's reports back b4 i buy this new but yr excitement is infectious

The first one is sitting in a drawer. Have to Finish death stranding first

i love everything about this so far.

Same. Not a whole lot different from the first game so far, except the narrative has been slacker, and the combat encounters seem more dynamic.

Oh and the trick of sitting on your upgrade vitamins until you're low on health to save on a health kit doesn't work quite as well because the health upgrade is the third level on a skill tree now.

Yeah i think i was expecting it to be a really different game somehow given various things i’ve read so i’m very pleasantly surprised that i still get to creep around and shiv monsters and snap fools’ necks. There’s a nice emphasis on scrambling and exploring. it feels more open somehow. and good god the first time you realise that your only move is to run? fuuuuuuuck

been watching some playthroughs. this looks incredible

Is expecting to binge the game this weekend, and after putting in about 8 cumulative hours yesterday, my hand started to hurt. 😟

I'm not sure why I like TLOU so much when I hated playing the Uncharted games.

cause it’s got heart? but also gameplay-wise it’s more MGS than uncharted imo

Hah, that sounds reasonable on both counts!

It’s also got heavy horror energy. Christ almighty. I’d sooner let my kids watch Alien than play this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tero0sRNi8U

I watched a full stream of Part 2. I don’t really want to pick at the flaws right now. This game takes big risks, and I think I need to sit on it for a while. I can appreciate what the Kotaku and Polygon reviewers are saying, but “misery simulator” is also (deliberately) glib. There’s a lot more going on than that. Themes that could seem trite on paper turn out to be far more absorbing when given time and a world in which to develop. A lot probably depends on how far you can buy into the depiction of violence, as well as the verisimilitude of the crazy lengths these characters are willing to go to. But it must have essentially worked on me since I was just really sad at the end.

wait.... isn’t it like 25 hours or something??

Yeah, I was stuck inside this weekend.

Oh I see what you meant. I meant a full playthrough, over a few separate streams.

Is there a stream you preferred? I don't think I could invest in the time to play it but I could have it on in the background while doing other things.

just a little light evisceration over dinner

Yeah the thing that strikes me as myopic (though I've been studiously avoiding reading reviews as a stringent anti-spoiler policy, so I may be missing some of the current context) is that the critics are forgetting about the first game. The gameplay loop is fairly basic, and resources are deliberately scarce. In other words, the not-fun qualities aren't new to Part 2, on top of which is overlaid a story that, on paper, is trite. But you get into the game, the polish and care and overall execution given to the conventions are notable.

I didn’t realise til yesterday that you can tweak a million individual difficulty settings using the “accessibility” menu. I’m considering slightly reducing the amount of resources I get but keeping everything else the same. Still haven’t come across my first roll of tape yet though!

Same here re: tape and blades!

The narrative slackness I mentioned earlier is, I think, caused by the semi-open worldness of some stages, with optional areas for you to clear, which don't really advance the main story and only offer some modest character building.

I’m super fine with it. Love taking down WLFs.

Hoo boy the stage before the movie theater is INTENSE.

man whenever you have to descend into some flooded basement it’s like “oh fuck”

but yeah I really enjoyed that whole pre-theatre set of sequences - partic the TV tower

i am completely in love with Dina, obv

The hotel basement in Part 1 is actually too much for me! It's one of the sections that I always dread going through because I can barely hold it together when I play it (suburb sniping is the other one that I dislike, but more because of how stressed it makes me).

The subway portion in Part 2 OTOH is intense but still fun.

agreed. it’s high drama. something great about moments when the high tension of sneaking turns into a firefight. you try to delay that transition as long as possible. not as fun when it’s just pure fight-dodge-figh.

not as fun when it’s just pure fight-dodge-figh.

AKA Uncharted!

I sat down to play this last night.. went through the whole theatre sequence, which was lovely, and then... I put it down. It's a little too much. I just didn't have the desire to get back into the ultra-panic. I'm sure that will change. But I need a break.

Yesterday I googled "the last of us scary moments" to see if anybody had video documentation of that portion of the first game where (I think it's in the school?) you finally come across a mushroom in full maturity, a seated corpse with full extended fungal bloom, I remember wanting to throw up. (It made a similar scene in "Annihilation" feel tepid in comparison)

i am REALLY not a fan of these dogs

this is a great piece, probably the most insightful review i've read:

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020/6/12/21288535/the-last-of-us-part-2-review-ps4-naughty-dog-ellie-joel-violence

I think the problem is really that it's a game and not an HBO show. That would make it easier to calibrate the level of violence the characters inflict against their stories/journeys to be more proportionate, understandable and selective. Naughty Dog wants to tell a story the way those famously gritty and violent comparable hit shows do. However, for it to be a game with content, they need to jam a considerable amount of encounters and situations for you to fight your way through. Enemy types are developed for the sake of variety of mechanics and increased strategy. When those varieties need to make sense in the context, one obvious idea for instance is including dogs, because obviously the military style enemy set would utilize them. And each enemy set comes with their unique play-style challenges, so this is a perfect idea for this category. On the mechanics side, the dogs create a challenge where the player needs to worry about being more easily tracked and found. OK, but all enemies need to be defeat-able. Therefore, merciless dog killing in a game that makes a great effort to look believable. That's a recipe for sadness. And the amount of human murdering- well, the need for there to be game content in between plot points means you kill hundreds of believable human beings with very peripheral personal involvement with the main characters. And rather than go "unsympathetic henchman" which is typical with the overly militaristic enemy trope, they've set a precedent within their games to humanize all the extras or minor roles, and they're doing that because popular gritty Golden Age of Television shows influenced them to tell the story that way. So the collision of story and gameplay content makes for a very disturbing combo imo.

And the amount of human murdering- well, the need for there to be game content in between plot points means you kill hundreds of believable human beings with very peripheral personal involvement with the main characters. And rather than go "unsympathetic henchman" which is typical with the overly militaristic enemy trope, they've set a precedent within their games to humanize all the extras or minor roles, and they're doing that because popular gritty Golden Age of Television shows influenced them to tell the story that way. So the collision of story and gameplay content makes for a very disturbing combo imo.

yeah, for sure. i don't experience it as "disturbing" so much, although i could definitely see how others would. it bothers me more that the relationship between the story and the player is non-sensical.

when a game asks the player to sympathize and care about the fate of games characters like they're real people, there are only a couple routes that make sense:

- the avatar can be a good person that doesn't kill people (unless necessary), and you're roleplaying a good person, or at least not an evil one.
- the avatar can be evil and kill people on purpose, and you're roleplaying an evil person.

games like this ask you to be a good person that kills dozens of people and carries on with their life. it's not revolting or wrong or anything, it's just weird

the more realistic the characters get, aesthetically and with writing/performance, the less the game makes sense

I'll save the Polygon review till after I beat the game.

they've set a precedent within their games to humanize all the extras or minor roles

Minor roles who get to interact with the protagonists in cut scenes, yes, but cannon fodder enemies, no.

- the avatar can be a good person that doesn't kill people (unless necessary), and you're roleplaying a good person, or at least not an evil one.

I don't think the either game argues that the protagonists of TLOU are necessarily good people! The series does, however, make us sympathize with killers.

But this game does seem to want to reverse our perspective on the cannon fodder enemies - the WLFs, at least. We see a lot about how they live, individual enemies call each other by name, they chatter about relationships and stuff while you're sneaking around, they cry out when their buddies are killed. It's a disturbing tension built into the fabric of the game, and I don't see an easy resolution. That's what I was trying to get at with "buying into" the depiction of violence; it's hard to take the violence completely seriously when it's also so constant and brutal, and it's also hard to understand killing hundreds of people in order to bring to a head the specific moral crisis involved in seeking revenge on one specific person. But I had largely the exact same anxiety about the first game too, and I doubt that the creators are unaware of all this.

The hotel that pops up in the flashback after the scope tutorial with Tommy seems heavily modeled after The Overlook from the Shining... was it also in the first one?

i just did this bit last night. the comparison didn't occur to me! now i wish i could go back and check it out.

Re: the polygon article, I actually mainly just really liked their breakdown of the gameplay. I agree with them that the sneaking and the planning is where the game shines and it's annoying when you get railroaded into a straight up fight.

After one too many times finding resources and seeing 'full' next to them I've finally dialled up resource difficulty in the settings. It feels a lot more balanced now. It's genuinely thrilling to find a blade, etc

And I really don't think this game wags its finger at you for being a bad person. At least that hasn't happened in my game yet. They make the feeling of sinking a tricked-out baseball bat into some fool's skull FAR too satisfying for me to ever believe that they don't want you to, in some way, feel good about it.

Oh absolutely, I had a wolf beg for their life and I was blithely and sanguinely, "LOL nah."

@Tracer, I googled and around 5min mark you'll see this hotel from Pittsburgh in the original game which I may have been remembering wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MTWUlDDQzw

I've played "Fade Into You" and "Just Like Heaven" on the guitar minigame,
if I could remember any other chord progressions I'd have given those a shot too.

slight spoiler..

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so i finally got to that scene with nora. when ellie comes back she says she got the info, but... how? nora refused! leading to the “moment of moral indecision” we see (which isn’t really, because anything else would be MORE cruel, given the slow gruesome transformation that awaits)

My interpretation below.
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Even though the scene cuts to black, I assumed she kept hitting Nora afterwards, who eventually broke, which explains why Ellie is so shaken when she's goes back to the theater. Up to this point, she's killed as a matter of survival, but never in such a cruel and calculated way where she's had to inflict pain and suffering. (The closest experience she's had was with David, and that was another horrible trauma that left its mark on her.) It's a heartbreaking scene for me, that she had to transform into Joel, and her realizing the cost on her when she was alone with Dina.

Right okay. Feel like those three blows would have finished Nora off toot sweet but you must be right.

Something this game is really good at is that the combat never feels like a shooting gallery. The enemies aren't amazingly bright but they're mobile and relatively unpredictable. The first game settled into a bit of a pattern of cover, wait for them to stick their heads out, pop them, move on - which we've all seen in a million games like RDR, Uncharted etc - but the gunplay here pretty much always feels panicky and cumbersome and not guaranteed. Enemies will just go ahead and walk around things and get behind your cover, or close in from multiple angles.