Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Two things are notable about the first episode of The Last Of Us. Our hero Joel does not do any platforming, in the sense of hauling himself up onto concrete slabs in half-destroyed houses, and he does not do any mass gun-based murdering of dozens of random guys standing around shipping containers. To be fair, he does punch one guard to death, but the guy was asking for it, and that kind of murder is at once not violent enough for videogames (knives or bullets being preferred) and much too violent for videogames, even the most crazed and disgusting of which don’t offer a firstperson view of your character punching a man repeatedly in the head until his skull caves in.
When the Last Of Us trio venture beyond the wall in the first episode, they stealthily creep through an abandoned building site, at one point hiding in a metal tube while a chopper flies overhead. Imagine if a game made you get to the metal tube at just the right time: if you failed, the chopper would open fire and shoot you, forcing you to try again from the last checkpoint. Well, you don’t have to imagine, since this is what nearly all videogames already do. But if some putative game adaptation of the TV adaptation of the game The Last Of Us did so at this point, it would become achingly, infuriatingly clear that the game wasn’t a game at all, it was just a series of arbitrary checkpoints – in the military sense of obstacles set up by occupying forces – standing between you and what happens next in the story. Why not just, you know, tell the story?
The Last Of Us therefore succeeds as television to just the extent that it jettisons absolutely everything that was gamelike in its source material, taking only the broad outlines of scenario and plot, and so perhaps making clear in retrospect that The Last Of Us was never an especially good game in the first place but hypnotised people into
The Last Of Us was never an especially good game in the first place but hypnotised people into thinking it was
thinking it was because of its unusually wellconceived scenario and plot. (The game’s writer, Neil Druckmann, has co-written the series, and happily the original composer, Gustavo Santaolalla, also collaborates on the TV soundtrack.) Most previous videogame adaptations, after all, have ended up resembling simply live-action videogames, with Angelina Jolie dangling from wires while somersaulting and pistol-shooting, or an annoying blue hedgehog with hastily redesigned creepy teeth going around very fast, and this only goes to reinforce the general view, still held out there in the land of
Serious People, that videogames are just throwaway kinetic glitz. You can imagine someone who has never played a modern videogame, though, even a Serious Person, watching The Last Of Us and thinking: ‘Wow, this is based on a videogame? I guess they’re not as stupid as I thought’. It is, in that way, a triumph in the broader ongoing struggle for games to win cultural respectability.
In a way, Disney Dreamlight Valley does the same thing as The Last Of Us but in reverse, taking its solid-gold source material – characters from modern masterpieces such as Moana and Wall-E, as well as Mickey and all the rest – and jettisoning everything that was playful and lovable about it, so insanely determined is it to make a videogame. And make a videogame it does, in the worst possible way: it’s recognisably a videogame in the sense that you pilot a character who stumbles around bumping into furniture and has to approach an NPC or object in just the right way to make the “press X to talk” prompt appear on the screen, and who is constantly sent on humiliating fetch quests in order to open doors. It’s supposed to be a bit like Animal Crossing, but it’s Animal Crossing with all the joy and fun and elegance sucked out, a grim exercise in sweating IP for only the most masochistic of fans. If this is a ‘life simulator’, give me death.
The Last Of Us gives us lots of death, of course, but in the profound and transformative way of the best drama, including a beautiful portrayal of love between two men that is remarkable precisely for treating it as perfectly ordinary. Of course, the story of a fungal pandemic that has destroyed society hits harder, too, post-COVID, with Pedro Pascal’s permanent exhaustion reflecting our own, whether we are just making our way through a post-apocalyptic world or awkwardly shuffling an avatar in order to be able to pick up an object. Most of all, it’s a story about being tired.