2013 Year in Review: Game of the Year, The Last of Us

I downloaded The Last of Us one day onto my PS3 on whim when I turned it on to play Injustice: Gods Among Us.  It was an impulse buy.  Boy, am I glad I followed that impulse.

 

Zombies have been big in recent years.  The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, no matter the genre fighting the dead is a popular story. 

The gaming realm has focused most of its zombie smashing energies on providing online-based antics rather than a story driven experience.  Even the classic Resident Evil series is more memorable for its thrilling game play than the convoluted plot lines.  The Last of Us breaks that mold.

Technically, the mindless flesh-consuming villains in The Last of Us aren’t zombies, and that’s part of the beauty of it.  They actually aren’t the primary villains either, also part of the beauty of the best game to come out this year.  A large swath of the global population has been infected with a “zombifying” virus, much like in the Resident Evil series.  Unlike Resident Evil, The Last of Us draws inspiration from a real life cordyceps fungus which effects ants.  Science fiction makes it possible for the virus to take the leap from insect to human, chaos ensues and the game begins.

On a technical level, The Last of Us is fantastic.  It looks amazing.  The voice acting and sound is of the highest caliber.  The weapons system is easy to understand and lends itself well to the survival/horror genre.  The upgrading system encourages multiple playthroughs and world exploring.  The only place where the game disappoints is in the multiplayer game, which had the opportunity to be an immersive, world building system but instead was relegated to a simple CoD style team deathmatch system.  But most players will spend little time on the multiplayer experience, because the story mode is just that good.

**Minor Spoilers** Ahead. (Minor spoilers are spoilers that will only really bother you if you’re a whiney jerk, as opposed to a real spoiler, such as Darth Vader is Luke’s sister in Star Trek.)

The game begins with the outbreak, but the story doesn’t really get going until several years later.  After surviving the initial wave of chaos and making it through the subsequent decades as a smuggler the protagonist of the game, Joel, is enlisted by a questionable ally to transport a young girl across the country.  Joel and the young girl, Ellie, portrayed in stellar performances by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, embark on there journey through cities that are either under strict martial law or completely lawless.  In turns running from armed soldiers, marauding groups of scavengers, and the always present infected humans, Joel and Ellie make there way from Boston towards their final goal encountering many equally well written characters who either become valued allies or terrifying enemies.

As they near the finish line both struggle with their past choices and what will become of them when they do reach their final destination.  The weight is especially heavy on Joel, who is still struggling with the loss of his own daughter at the outbreak of the virus.

All of their decisions and struggles culminate in what is one the most realistic, subtly shocking, emotional, and fantastic endings ever to find its way into the medium of gaming.

Even without the incredible story, The Last of Us still would have been one of the top games this year.  With the ending, no other game even came close.

2013 Year in Review: The Infinite Dilemma of Bioshock III

Few titles were more anticipated this year in the realm of gaming than the third installment of the Bioshock series, Bioshock Infinite.  Partly because the original Bioshock is widely considered one of the greatest achievements in modern gaming.  Partly because the trailers looked incredible.  Partly because its release date was pushed back multiple times because it just wasn’t awesome enough yet.  It finally came out early this year and, I just now got around to finishing it (twice).  So, was it any good?  Mostly.

The game play is injected with a faster pace and enough new gadgets to make it feel fresh while still being familiar to fans of the series.   The graphics and visuals of the world created by Bioshock Infinite don’t quite reach the level of imagination and creativity that made the first Bioshock so mesmerizing but the sky city of Columbia is breathtaking on any other scale.

 Yeah, it looks good. (actual screenshot)

While the game play itself can be intense and challenging at times (good thing) and one of the first things I noticed after the game got going was the increase in gore (decapitations galore!) the decision was clearly made to move the game away from the survival-horror genre that helped to make the first game so memorable.  One of the most impressive things about the original Bioshock was the atmospheric sound editing and voice acting.  The nerve racking sensation of being trapped in a dark room with five bad guys and only four bullets in your gun; you know they’re in there, you can hear them, you just can’t see them.  Haunting images like the Fort Frolic bathroom and Dr. Steinman's Operating Room stick in the player’s head long after they turn off the game.

 Take a moment to digest this, then understand this is one of the mild images from the twisted world of Rapture.

The story is…

Well, the story is compelling enough to keep you playing and maybe even want to play it again when you’re done.  The voice acting is fantastic, just as in the rest of the series.  The ending is probably the most talked about ending to a videogame in years and while it is woefully convoluted, it will certainly leave you thinking (more on this later).  The place where the game falls tragically short of it’s two predecessors is in the department of characters and atmosphere.

Bioshock Infinite has two, interesting, complex, well written characters.  Booker DeWitt is easily the most fleshed out protagonist of any game in the series.  Every other character, however, is completely one dimensional and exists only to further the plot and the story as it relates to those two aforementioned characters.

 We learn a lot about Booker and Elizabeth, but what about everyone else?

One of the best parts of the game experience with the Original Bioshock (and to a lesser extent, Bioshock II) are the many side stories and characters that the player learns of while exploring the city-under-the-sea Rapture.  Just from listening to a few clips of dialogue from audio diaries - left behind for the player to discover – so much is learned of characters.  Their daily lives, what motivates them, their goals, their fears, their dreams.  It creates a world for the player that feels like a real place, that has a history, rather than just one room after another filled with bag guys.

The original Bioshock also had the advantage of being connected to a famous piece of existing literature.  The entire world of Rapture in the game is built up to be a scathing critique of Ayn Rand’s libertarian fantasy, “Atlas Shrugged.”  It is fascinating to see the creators of the game bring Ayn Rand’s dream society to life only to have it devolve into a ruin of drugs and corruption filled with megalomaniacs and psychopaths.  There are even two characters named after Rand (One, Andrew Ryan, a primary villain of the game.  Another, Anya Andersotter, a minor character – who bears a strong resemblance to Rand herself - that exchanges sexual favors with lowlifes in order to try and gain information for killing Ryan).

The Ending:  We've been here before and we'll be here again.

Bioshock Infinite perhaps was trying to make up for this lack of source material with its highly ambitious ending.  An ending that borrowed themes from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and John Gardner's Grendel just to name a few. An ending that was nearly terrible, but ultimately just missed out on being truly great.  I could talk a long time talking about the ending, but in the interest of keeping this spoiler free (and under 50,000 words) I'll control myself.  It was saved from being terrible thanks to a post credits scene that brought the theme of the game full circle (pun intended).  But fell short of great, because even with the post credit scene soooo many questions were left unanswered.

The Coin Flip. It's a exercise in trying to change the inevitable and probably the most important scene in the game for understanding the ending. Only problem is that it happens in the first half hour of the game and is never referenced again. 

Ultimately, Bioshock Infinite is a fun game and one that I will return to play again, and probably more than once.  But, I’ll never be able to disconnect it from the first two games of the series enough not to think of it as a heartbreaking missed opportunity.  I really wish I could’ve learned more about the world and the characters that made Columbia what it was.  And what’s worse, the parts were there to make these things happen.  There had to have been more to Comstock than the player discovers.  It was plain to see that character like the Lutece twins and Preston E. Downs had fascinating back-stories that the game only would have benefited from sharing.  Much of this ironically was probably held back because the creators were worried it would take away from the impact of the ending when, in all likelihood, it would have made it that much more satisfying.  The original Bioshock games were great jigsaw puzzles of mystery with pieces strewn about for the player meticulously put together to create a beautiful story.  Bioshock Infinite tried to do the same thing, but the final product was missing just a few key pieces.

The more a world opens up to you, the more invested in it you will become.  So much of Columbia remains a mystery for the player, when it could have been an exciting and fascinating place.

At least we’ll always have this totally badass trailer.  *AND* This beautiful version of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows".