it'd be very satisfying to say the last of us is a bad game for a million reasons; druckmann and his insane politics, the working conditions at naughty dog, the infinite praise, the joke of the box claim of how many game of the year awards it has. it is expressly uncool to say the last of us is good, and expressly uncooler to say it is great.

to diminish this thing almost feels to me like it would grant me a sort of odd credibility pass, like i'd be able to claim the wool isn't over my eyes, that i am not one to give in to spectacle. but the spectacle is beautiful and dark, here. there is specificity in the performance, even if not in the writing. the shot composition is perhaps boringly good but it is magnificent for its set design. much has been said about how pointing the camera at any part of this game is supposed to look like a filmic shot, and much more has been joked. but this is what all the money in the world gets you when the money actually makes it onto the screen.

we talk about the way the last of us has prestige tv disease, but that's poor framing. instead, we should focus on the dynamic music of the major key gretsch guitar when you push the truck, on the level design that crackles with the energy of a much older and stranger game, on the way changing your weapon takes multiple seconds, on the tiny bits of hyper-simplified resource management that feel like a designerly way to clean up some of the messiness of a resident evil without removing the flavor of it, on the small bits of dynamic branching dialogue that are never, ever telegraphed.

we live in the age, stupidly, of the quadruple a title, now. that is what we are told perfect dark and skull and bones and whatever else are.

the last of us is the most triple a game ever made, though. it exists in a bracket where all the money that was feasible at the time to be thrown at a game could be thrown at a game but outside of the current day where there's no ceiling. there is restraint in every splash of its excess.

i want to give this a lower score but i can't without lying. it's burned into my head. the corners are memorized. i know the layout of all of the rooms and i've only played this game twice. any game that can achieve that kind of instantaneous indelibility is meaningful.

if i follow my own policy, this is the truest expression of the rule; it's not perfect, but it's absolutely immortal.

i think the first time i finished this game, i almost hated it but pretended i didn't. something about the abruptness, the smallness, the way the mechanics don't all get Really Used, like they're vestigial hanger-ons from a previous iteration that was more interested in platforming and less interested in place

i think it got an extra star the first year after finishing it. i didn't play it again. i still haven't. it just sat with me. not even the politics. not even the people, or the dialogue, or the music, or the visuals (maybe the visuals a bit) but the actions. i could still remember, a year later, entire in-game days of walking from right of town to left of town, up the hill on the way to the church to attend because i wanted to connect with something in this mess, and maybe god had an answer? to my pet cat. to spending the day inside rotting playing all of demontower and thinking "that was okay at best, why did i play that all the way" and then messing with it a little bit after that, and then sending my friend i barely know a message and not realizing that night would end in me getting too drunk to take inputs correctly and then in real life the next night i ended up doing the same thing without really ever thinking about it.

i remember the feeling of understanding that the place was beautiful and the people who rotted it out were there for the wrong reasons. a feeling i never got at the time, but that i have overwhelmingly upon thinking about my memory of this.

i remember the journal.

i remember the melody to die anywhere else.

i remember how stupid i thought the hand control minigames were and how effective they were when they show up picture-in-picture.

i remember the mineshaft and the earnest thought that one of these characters might really die.

i still haven't replayed it.

i was almost ready to call this a masterpiece in the early going.

i'm not sure it quite is that; it cowers out of being genreless and meandering and quickly becomes A Game With Design, falling into a very clean little-nightmares-lite progression with small puzzles and small chases. but the extremely good dialogue stays so, the music stays emotionally bizarre, the atmosphere stays whimsically unfriendly in an honest way, and sweetness continues to puncture the overwhelming rot. it remains to be seen if it will grow in estimation in the memory or fade but the important thing is that it will definitely remain.