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

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.

Oh boy I think I’ve reached the misery simulator part of the game.

Finished it.
I loved it, ultimately. It's not flawless - a thing this big with this level of sprawl, sort of, can't be by definition - but it worked for me. Calling it a misery simulator far too glib, like jmm said. The game is beautfiul and epic, and traumatic and miserable, but filled with moments of joy and humanity as well.
Does anyone else want a spoiler thread?

I haven't been playing it, just watching a full play-through on youtube in parts. It's amazing how thorough the set design is... They did a great job keeping models and layouts from looking recycled. There's some reused furniture models here and there but on the most part every apartment, house or unique space feels totally believable. It's so immersive and fun to try to imagine all the environments pre-apocalypse in a constant game of before/after. I love the way it snakes the player through it all as well; almost nothing is a one way in one way out. All sorts of zig zagging through a tunnel made up of random rooms or arbitrary sections of buildings and alleys/yards etc. all effectively contributes to the feeling that the city and yesterday's society is 100% ancient history. Every object or area is repurposed by the survivors as resourcefully as possible. Anyway they put a lot of meticulous care into designing the game universe. Thumbs up.

This is probably a really dim question, but some of the shops & locations in Seattle were also in the first game, right? I mean apart from the hospital. Like, there's a music shop with an upstairs where I feel certain I wrecked a few clickers one time in the first game.

Does anyone else want a spoiler thread?

We could use this thread, though we'd probably want to add a spoiler warning in the title:
No more pallet puzzles: THE LAST OF US PART II

Anyway, it's heartening to hear that Part 2 isn't just unremitting bleakness, though I'm in a section that's pretty light on levity -- the first game is unflinchingly grim too but has loads of beautiful and hilarious moments.

LOL, I was the last post in that thread and forgot it existed

I think the misery simulator is replaying the sex scene over and over as a Ludovico technique.

damn, Abby is JACKED.

Wait, are you talking about the gratuitous sex scene?

It's official: I've seen the start screen of this, which means I'll probably start "The Last of Us" this week. (I assume the title is a reference to the handful who have not played it yet.)

I played most of the first one but I found it so long that I eventually just looked up the ending on YouTube lol

I’ll also be starting it as soon as I can dispatch of the last twenty chapters of death stranding

Game on! It's interesting coming to this after "God of War," which refines a lot of the same gameplay (so far). But it's good. Funny that people want to make it into a movie, since it essentially is a movie. Again, so far. There's a lot more going on in this, plot and setting wise, than "God of War," I'll say that much, awesome as "God of War" is.

Also, I know that this is remastered, but it's still an old game. Interesting to see how the same uncanny valley issues comes into play compared to newer games. That is, there are fleeting moments of photorealism that are almost instantly undercut milliseconds later. It's kind of fascinating. I'm curious what the sequel looks like, though I won't get to it until it goes on deep sale. So, like, January maybe.

Still enjoying this, though as of yet intense though it may be I don't really feel much of a threat from it, which is fine, because I like the characters and don't need to feel totally stressed all the time. It's kind of like playing a Choose Your Own Adventure story.

Except you don’t choose your own adventure here!

And you will definitely encounter some high stress stages.

The game becomes exponentially more terrifying if you increase the difficulty.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm just not good enough at aiming and controls to get the most out of that. For example, I have "Doom" on Switch, and gyro aiming helped me immensely (even though I never finished it). Still, I repurchased it on PS4 for pennies, because the slowdowns o the Switch were getting to me, and the regular aiming was trouble enough that I had to start on a different difficulty level.

As I understand it part of the appeal of this particular game is the way the gameplay and strategy changes on different difficulty levels. Right now I'm on "normal," which is fine. As far as "Choose Your Own," I just meant that you can approach certain rooms and encounters different ways with different attempts for different results. At least so far. It's a testament to the design and writing that I like the "adventure" it has chosen for me so far. I'm way slower than most at these games, too, so I'm getting the most out of each challenge.

OK, hit a slightly more challenging part. This game is really about being patient, isn't it? And using your environment?

yes, and being an ice-cold murderer who rips fools’ skulls open. that too

I'm just starting this too. I like that health packs and molotovs are crafted from the same resources. Interesting idea.

The bad graphics makes the horror elements easier for me to take. I couldn't do Resident Evil 2, for example.

Dunkey called this the first "third-person strangling / ladder moving" game

Also running and brick throwing.

I just met Bill.

damn when you get cornered in that house at night and it’s just you versus the menagerie of infected and those two kids haven’t opened the door for you yet fuuuuuck. anybody beating that the first time deserves a diamond trophy or some shit.

What "bad graphics"? Honestly!

It looks pretty good to me.

I've not played any stealth games before, this is really making me shift gears after something as aggro as "God of War." At times it kind reminds me of "Alien: Isolation." Admittedly I moved on from that pretty early, not because it was bad but sort of because it was too good. Lots of stealth, no real cheats, that alien is going to eat you. And yet it lacked much of a compelling story, Alien film mythology aside. This game, though, advancing the story seems like more of a reward for doing some heavy lifting.

re: "bad graphics" ehh you know what i mean. You can make stuff look a lot grosser in 2020 than in 2013.

Oh, I agree with that, actually. Compared to the stuff in, say, the most recent Resident Evil, this might as well be Saturday morning cartoons.

I haven't gone back to play the original since 2013 but it was pretty gnarly at the time

One thing kind of mildly annoying about this game - and it's by no means unique to this game, since it's endemic to survival games - is resource management. There is no way to know if you need to horde certain items because they are rare, or if you're supposed to use them as you find or craft them, which can be a little frustrating. For example, using up your bullets might spawn an ammunition pickup in the near future, or maybe not, which could leave you with no bullets when you need them, which could in turn mean having to start that stage over again. So far on "normal" mode at least I seem to be finding plenty of resources, but maybe I'd be finding even more, say, crafting material if I used up more of my bombs, bandages and whatnot.

I just got through the graveyard, which was fun.

On Normal i wouldn't worry too much about the resources

btw, when i said gnarly i meant it was beautiful (horrific). realizing that statement could've meant the opposite of what i meant

I'm fairly confident that the resources in TLOU are fixed and depend only on the difficulty level. That is, a resource will show up at a certain place whether or not you're running low on it in your inventory.

So I don't need to horde, per se, but I should still use stuff only when I absolutely must?

Hoard arrows, shotgun shells, hunting pistol ammo (and also health kit components) and worry less about the rest. Later on you'll be able to craft ammo which helps quite a bit.

Albert seems to be talking about Part 2.

For Part 1, a rule of thumb is to not craft anything until you know you need it, though you generally can't go wrong with health kits. (I don't use molotovs in most cases, mostly because I save them for harder enemy types.)

Over the course of playing, if your inventory happens to be maxed out when you find more of that item, go ahead and craft something out of it so you can pick that item up. The inventory maximums are there to reinforce a sense of privation (like, really? I can't carry more than a dozen bullets?), so you will almost never be swimming in resources.

heh, I find it hilarious that this world is practically 50% crumbling bricks, but bricks (or attack sticks) you can use aren't always readily available.

wait is this thread not for Last of Us 2 spoilers (as indicated in the other thread...?)

I (and a couple of others) am playing the original game for the first time, partly to to get to the second game but also to get it over with so that people discussing the second game don't spilt the first. So ... no spoilers on the thread, please!

The other thread with Part 2 in the title is the one that has Part 2 spoilers.

I see that now, I don't know how I confused the two in retrospect?

Creeping right along with this game. Things (not at all unique to TLOU) I find hilarious: when you're crouching, afraid of getting spotted and killed, and Ellie is just whistling or standing around doing kid shit. Or how you might sneak up to a big garage door, and then the cut scene is loud as fuck as you lift and yell "the coast is clear!!!!" That kind of stuff. But I do appreciate that it has these built in breathers, unlike, as I might have noted, something like "Alien: Isolation," which is relentlessly stressful as fuck, even at its slowest. Anyway, good game so far, I like the characters. In a lot of ways "God of War" which I just finished before this, refines a lot of the best aspects and features of this one, but it's also a totally different sort of world, which makes the stakes feel a lot lower.

I just hit "FALL," which I imagine is halfway or so? I really like how the difficulty level of this game is calibrated, at least set at "normal." If I take too long in a place, the L3 prompt appears, offering a hint (even if I am usually just taking too long exploring or something). If I keep dying at a certain stage, eventually it will remind me that I can ramp down the difficulty at any time (which is always a nice option, even if I've never taken advantage of it). And if there's a stage with several levels of danger and I die at a certain point, it doesn't kick you all the way back to the beginning, or even back more than a few seconds, which helps a lot.

Hilariously, I just realized that if I am in a new area, crouching and paranoid and using my super hearing, but Ellie is strolling along, then I am probably safe for the time being.

The new game is much better with companions not “breaking the rules” of what you can do, what you’ve noticed, whether enemies are alarmed if they see them, etc.. Though a few times I have noticed enemies stumbling right on top of my companion but not killing them nor raising the alarm - it is rare though. In the first one, runners or clickers could walk right past them and nothing

Btw, a couple of more observations. One, this game is so well written that it can take a pretty familiar apocalyptic scenario and make it much more engaging/intense/affecting than the majority of movies doing the same sort of thing. Two, very predictably and realistically, the people are worse and in may ways more dangerous than the monsters. Three, how come in these apocalyptic worlds, everyone is always hoofing it, or hot-wiring cars, or riding motorcycles and riding horses, but no one ever takes bicycles, which seem like they'd be really practical?

I think I'm creeping toward the end of this. But I'll probably wait until tomorrow because I've enjoyed it (in an appropriately intense way) so much. Confession: one reason I'm steaming through is because I want to watch that 3.5 hour Tim Rogers video on TLOU.

All done. What a great game, made best by incredible voice acting and solid writing. The gameplay almost comes second. It was interesting playing this right after God of War. God of War of course owes so much to this, and the gameplay is even more seamless and complex. And yet, when God of War's main storyline ended it took me totally by surprise, which I think betrayed it superficiality.

I should probably play God of War! Feel like I need to get through GOW 2 and 3 first... just like the Souls games, so many to catch up on.

I didn't play any of the other ones. As I understand it it's a ... soft reboot? Hard reboot? That is, different enough that it doesn't matter, but with enough callbacks to past games to make fans happy.

Oh, I should clarify that God of War's ending took me by surprise because I was not expecting the game to end when it did. Not that the end itself was surprising or anything, just happened and I thought, oh, is that the end?