pantyfire wrote:

Woah, there everyone, hang on... I thought 'a chalice' was £25?

That's a 'chaluce' : chalice's terrible, final form. 

Also, a 'stoney' is 15 or lower.

Just finished this myself on PS4. Not sure if it's worth a long post after all this time, but...

The only things that really kept me playing after the first few hours were the quality of the interactions between the two characters and the environments. The script, voice overs and facial animation are all better than in any other game I've played, and the detail in the locations makes them really believable (except the telegraphed combat areas full of waist-high cover and bricks and bottles).

But for the most part I think the characters and story are undermined by some uninspired gameplay decisions. It's all fairly playable for the most part (although never very engaging or much fun), but the need to force action sequences into the narrative at regular intervals, and the crapness of the zombies, leads to a lot of killing other humans with little motivation. In effect, I don't think it makes sense that humans are so often so hostile to each other given the premise - it's not The Road, food can still be grown etc. It's particularly absurd in the Winter section where And so to fit in this game Joel also has to be ridiculously violent, and murder folk without a second thought (even when you stealth it as much as possible, he's still a cold-blooded killer in the cut scenes). The only way the story can make sense is to see Joel as a violent maniac who uses Ellie-as-daughter-replacement as an excuse to kill, but actually just seems to rather enjoy it. The ending  But even then the problem is the Ellie character and again that Winter section So at this point I'm back to the game dictating the story, rather than some clever character development, and none of it really works with the more subtle relationship built in their conversations.

So apart from (possibly) a decent ending, I think you've got a story that's a slave to an unimaginative (and sometimes frustrating) game. They could have done so much more with it, like base it more around environmental puzzles (which are just silly padding here) and have more quick surprise zombie encounters that create a feeling of constant threat (rather than confining them to specific stealth/shooting gallery sections), and then don't keep falling back on average 3rd person stealth/cover-shooting just to give the player something to do.

tl;dr - I didn't like it much.

I liked it a lot, but my biggest gripe is that you can avoid almost all of the infected encounters, but in almost all of the human encounters, you have to kill everyone to trigger the next section.

The way I attempted to play it would have made much more sense within the story. Killing humans would have been an absolute last resort - kill or be killed.

There were plenty of sections where I successfully snuck past everyone, only for it to refuse to move on. Clearly it's possible, so why not let me do it? That would immediately negate criticism of the violence and body count - you chose to do it.

I agree with the cannibalism point, but I really enjoyed the visceral feel of the encounters so it wasn't a case of the whole thing being carried by the qualities of the writing and the densely detailed world for me.

Also I didn't see the pretext for Joel's actions at the end being flimsy at all; he needed to do what he did re: the firefly's L imo.

I may just be reading to much into it, but there is at least a good deal of ambiguity in the ending which makes it more intriguing than the rest of the game. I'm just not sure it fits - it may be more that the gameplay requirements are dictating the narrative.

Well I hope she didn't kill the last remaining deer.

That would be sad.

Maybe they just enjoyed the taste of human more. Venison is a little rich for some paletes.

Good points Jon. I guess i didn't think about it in that much depth. I was blown away by the quality of the script writing, the voice acting and the interaction between joel and ellie. But yes, now that you mention it, there are some serious plot holes there, like a great book that needed a great editor to convince the author to change it. Sometimes as a writer you write something great but you have to remove it from the story if it just doesn't work. Or something like that. Stephen King said that.

A sequel? Not heard! Didnt the main people responsible leave?

Also, amusingly I only found out after I finished it that Ellie was not in fact Ellen Page. And then what amused me further was reading about the Ellen Page/Naughty Dog kerfuffle.

It's pretty ridic. Beyond: Two Souls was her, wasn't it? And made at the same time? All a bit suss.

I like the way this thread's title serves as a long-lasting reminder of how to plornt

While buying the No Man's Sky score over the weekend I finally decided to pull the trigger on Gustavo Santaolalla's magnificent The Last of Us score. It's not the type of game I would normally play these days but my god Naughty Dog got just about everything right in this game that I just love it so much. Score is beautiful and now I want to play the game again.

If I wasn't going planet-hopping this weekend I'd definitely have been smashing fungal zombie heads in.

The track All Gone, ninja. It's only just over a minute long but it just captures the sad state of the world you're travelling through so well. So evocative.

years later and the thread title still makes me cringe