Is Neil Druckmann an evil genius? The Last of Us eight years later

Neil Druckmann directed a work that won a ton of GOTYs. Twice.

SPOILERS AHEAD AFTER THE FIRST FEW MINUTES. The game is 8 years old, worrying about spoilers at this point is on you, but it doesn’t hurt to warn.

The focus of this review is on the first game, obviously. But let’s be clear that if you’re looking for the review of one of the most awarded games on the face of the earth, it will be very hard to get here before any site riding on thousands or millions of views on the subject.

I’m going to play the second one to do the review, but I believed I’d only do it justice by playing both. I also don’t intend to do a traditional review, but rather try to analyze the technique behind Neil Druckmann’s directing work.

About the second game in particular, I already know practically all the key spoilers and who lives and who dies. I also followed closely the absolute festival of horrors coming from both those who defended and those who accused The Last of Us Part II. And that’s the thing:

The 1 has absolutely the same things as the 2.

Everything people openly complained about in The Last of Us Part II is in the 1. The progressivism, the social causes, it’s all there.

And now getting to the title of this article: dude, Neil Druckmann is a genius for having done this. Or rather: for having done this in a work that is now eight years old that had anything but little notoriety and people never focused on this detail.

The Last of Us 1 is a work that is not so clear on the aspects it focuses on, but that does focus on several aspects.

Alright. Did that come out vague? Then relax, I’ll un-vague it:

Throughout the entire work, Druckmann handles progressive themes in a way that has zero interruption to the narrative or the structure of the story being told. Or, as an argument used by many people: “it’s no problem as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story itself by being forced”.

Is Ellie a lesbian? Yes. Is Bill gay? Yes. The nicest thing about the story is precisely the fact that absolutely none of this is made evident. There are millions of hints to keep it implied – in Bill’s case – but Ellie up to that point is a child and has zero involvement of that kind with Joel.

Let it be absolutely clear that nothing I’m going to mention here, in isolation, means anything. And not even the complete set – even with a deep progressive inspiration – gets in the way, even marginally, of the story being told.

And what a story!

From the very first moment, when it’s not even him we control yet, Joel is presented as a clear, objective man. He’s busting his back to raise his daughter apparently alone, but the brief glimpse we get of his life is not only short, but also through her eyes.

By the way, what a sensational montage of opening moments. This is where Neil Druckmann shows what he’s about. There must be a name for this thing but I have zero interest in looking it up on Google to pretend I already knew it. The shift between the feelings the game wants to convey in the introduction is absurd. Very little focus on tutorial, just the basic interaction for someone who’s never held a controller in their life. The tone changes are clear, and happen while Sarah walks around the house, after being put to bed by Joel.

When she wakes up, the feeling of comfort between a father and a daughter playing with each other is gone, replaced by unease – not because we know what the game’s theme is – but because it’s a teenager waking up alone in the house.

As she wanders around the room there is a birthday card from her to her father, which details a bit more how he doesn’t have much time to be with her because of work. As soon as she leaves the room, an explosion in what seems to be a neighboring district startles her, but it’s still SEP – Somebody Else’s Problem. The unease grows, and as she goes down the stairs, she hears a neighbor’s dog barking incessantly… Until the moment the dog is suddenly silenced.

So, to explain it better: Video games have a tremendous need to captivate in the opening moments. You only really play the start of a game after you buy it, but you only do the free advertising for your friends – and readers – if you played the game and found it good.

A large part of that second responsibility lies in building the opening moments, and Druckmann not only gets it right but is infallible in The Last of Us.

After already being introduced to a feeling of dread, the player meets Joel, bloodied and in a hurry. With no time to explain, he protects Sarah from a zombie neighbor by shooting him.

Alright, is it that cliché where nobody has ever heard of zombies in their life? Yes. But Joel, not only there but throughout the rest of the story, shows that simply stopping to try to reflect on what is happening or why it’s happening is not a trait of his. He is objective in a way that is clearly cold. He refuses to help people with a child on the side of the road so as not to risk them being infected. He kills a neighbor without even stopping to brood over the act. Joel’s greatest survival trait throughout the story is adaptability.

And that’s before Ellie enters the scene.

Ellie’s story is well structured and she is a character who has a deep, truly familial bond with Joel. The transition of protagonism from him to her would be sensational if… Well, that’s for the next review.

But continuing: as I said before, all the progressive elements in the first The Last of Us are positive. Ellie makes a sort of “critique of the beauty industry’s standards” comment about a model on a poster here. Riley’s favorite heroine (Left Behind DLC) is a woman and black. All the Fireflies’ leaders are women. By now some guy talked a lot about this in a 2018 video, before the release of The Last of Us Part II, so if you want more depth than I’m giving on the ideological question, he did his part a long time ago.

Timing. The timing of events throughout the story is ideal. It really is hard to get emotional over a game whose whole plot has been practically worked over on the internet, but the evolution of the relationship between Ellie and Joel is astonishing. The story takes well-connected directions that bring zero feeling of contrivance.

Each section of the game’s story – which are well defined and separate – shows different evolutions and the ways the two’s relationship deepens. There is an infinity of details that help the narrative.

Joel, an old war horse, is truly disgusted to enter a city of cannibals and run across bodies hanging in a butcher shop. This is reflected, in gameplay, in a fact the game doesn’t point out at all, which is that Joel does not run among the hanging corpses. He is forced to walk.

The blending of narrative elements with gameplay events is constant. They are not separate situations where you jump from a shooting scene into a cutscene.

The gameplay is not revolutionary, but the crafting mechanic is tremendously well used. You always find yourself searching for resources to make items. Some items use the same types of resources.

There was certainly a lot of difficulty in diversifying enemies, because humans act exactly the same way regardless of the different gangs you face. The “zombies” come in 3 types: runners, clickers and bloaters. Runners, well, run. Clickers are immune to stealth attacks as long as you don’t have a knife and Bloaters are the armored version of the creatures: shooting the hell out of them or well-placed molotovs finish the job.

The interaction between characters is kind of complicated because you’ll find yourself talking with someone at what would be a serious point in the story while at the same time rummaging through drawers looking for collectibles and crafting items.

Man, it’s really hard to try to bring together everything that was done in a single text, but the narrative quality of the story is impressive. No need for me to tell you to play it, because although a lot is already known, it’s impressive to play paying attention to how Druckmann executed everything he did in an identical way in The Last of Us Part II.

The biggest watershed was precisely the leak of the game’s scenes. If not for that, The Last of Us Part II would certainly be as unanimously acclaimed as the first, but that’s still the impression of those who haven’t played it, and only absorbed the events through the leaked scenes.

We’ll see what my opinion will be in a few days.

More than recommended. Great game.