'The Last of Us' Is Raw, Real and Awesome

The Last of Us is a superb game that makes players think about every choice they make while playing. It also brings up bigger questions, like what will happen to humanity once we lose all our comforts and luxuries, and must fight every day to survive.

The Last of Us is the Naughty Dog-developed third-person survival game out next week for Sony's PlayStation 3. While the questions of human tenacity aren't new for fans of fiction like The Road and The Walking Dead, they have been tackled by fewer mainstream video games.

The Last of Us is set 20 years in the future, after America is torn apart by a fungal infection that turns its human hosts into mindless monsters intent on spreading their parasite to other victims. Players control Joel, a man approaching middle age just as the crisis hits, and is now grizzled and hardened by what he's had to endure. Joel has been asked to smuggle 14-year-old Ellie across a country still tearing itself apart years after this crisis.

Enter a World Destroyed

One of the best things about The Last of Us is the raw and believable characters. They have quirks and faults, and those are clearly on display during the game. There are beautifully motion-captured cut scenes, almost cinematic in their quality, that blow away what you'll see from most current-generation games.

Dialog spurs most of the character development for Joel and Ellie as they're traveling across the landscape or sneaking around enemies. Naughty Dog is known for doing this well, mostly in its Uncharted franchise. It's even better here. Joel and Ellie bicker, joke and chatter as they develop a close bond. These aren't just idle conversations, but insights into their characters. We see Joel is almost broken, resigned to doing what he needs to survive. Ellie represents a cross between the cheeriness of youth and an inner toughness that comes from being born post-crisis. I was struck that her character knew how to fire a gun and put a car in gear, and yet missed out on more carefree activities, like reading comics or learning to whistle.

SEE ALSO: The 15 Best Free iPad Games

The people you encounter along the way play big parts too, and non-player characters are excellently acted and portrayed. The most interesting subjects are the bands of scavengers that have taken over abandoned cities, looting and killing anyone that falls into their traps. While these can easily just be written off as throw-away obstacles presented to add challenge to the game, Ellie, in the relative innocence of a teenager, often questions their motives in ways that get you thinking.

While the game toes the thematic line of a zombie threat (which has been done to death in gaming), there are plenty of fresh ideas in The Last of Us. The game cannot simply be chalked up as survival horror, instead feeling almost literary in its concern with broader themes. You can tell the team at Naughty Dog concentrated first with telling a great story, then figuring out how they wanted gameplay to support those thematic choices.

Hunting and Gathering

You'll spend much of your time in The Last of Us scavenging. The world has mostly been picked clean thanks to 20 years of people gathering to survive, so resource scarcity is a big challenge. It definitely altered some of my gameplay choices when I realized I only had enough materials to make one health kit, or hadn't found any supplies to make a shiv needed to stealthily take down enemies.

Ammo for your guns is really precious. You'll have to resort to melee attacks — a crowbar, scrap wood or even your fists — to take down foes, and even those weapons will break after a certain number of uses. It's also one of two major reasons to avoid combat entirely, which is a valid option in the game. Combat can quickly get out of hand if you alert foes to your presence, and you can get overrun by both human and infected enemies alike.

Some foes are easier to sneak around than others. One strand of the infected humans are known as clickers: monsters whose faces have been replaced with fungal growths. Eyeless, they communicate and hunt only by echolocation, uttering a series of clicks that you'll eventually come to associate with dread. These tough enemies lead to my death several times, and I found sometimes it was worth bypassing them if I couldn't kill them stealthily. Clickers represented one of the things I really loved about the game: the stress they caused made me deliberate on strategy, and I never felt like I could run and gun my way through and survive.

In fact, many elements of the game make you want to stop and savor your gameplay. The environments of The Last of Us are gorgeous, and push the PlayStation 3's graphics to their limit. Much of the game is spent wandering through cities and towns gone to ruin, where nature has become the dominant force once again. You'll climb through decaying buildings where trees have begun to burst through the walls, and sunlight streams through the decay. Yes, it's a bleak world, but clearly there was intent to show life growing, and the hope that life represents. The landscape, full of rubble and obstacles, leads to a lot of great climbing and exploration, something fans of the Uncharted series will enjoy. The Last of Us is a vertical as world as much as a horizontal expanse, and you'll probably spend more time climbing up and down ruined buildings and dank sewers as you press on.

Every element of the game is tightly designed to keep you in the element. The earlier mentioned crafting takes place in game-time, meaning the player can't exit to the safety of a menu to construct needed supplies. You also have to spend the time to bandage yourself after injuries, and you'll stop if interrupted.

The only things that broke me out of this carefully designed, immersive game were some strange AI glitches from both your teammates and the enemy. I rounded a corner once and walked right into an enemy, who didn't see me because he was looking to his right. I also saw Ellie hide right in the middle of a gun battle, not actually out of the way of any damage, on more than one occasion.

Small glitches aside, I generally found the enemies challenging as they adapted to my play, and my counterparts equally helpful. Ellie, to my surprise, wouldn't be afraid to stun attackers with a carefully placed brick to the head, which she'd crow about afterwards. Generally, I didn't have to rescue her either, unless it was a scripted situation.

The Last of Us is a game full of depth and surprises for me, well-crafted by a studio normally known for less serious fare. I found its balance of challenging gameplay, beautiful environments and superb dialog transfixing, with a unforgettable story. Joel and Ellie are characters you'll empathize with and care for, and it makes the whole experience worth savoring all the way to the final credits.

The Last of Us is out Friday, June 14, on the PlayStation 3 for $59.99.

Images courtesy Naughty Dog/Sony