The Last of Us - it's the time of the season

June 19th!

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2020/04/27/release-date-updates-for-the-last-of-us-part-ii-ghost-of-tsushima/

Oh and apparently there's a massive story spoiler that got leaked over the weekend on Youtube, so beware.

It's gonna be an annoying two months trying to avoid those spoilers.

first review i've seen.

https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-part-ii-the-kotaku-review-1844006193

let me just excerpt a few phrases that jumped out at me on first skim...

Everything in The Last of Us 2 takes work. Every weapon reload, killing blow, and crafted item takes time and button presses. At times the game is painfully slow; even in the most action-packed sections you put in effort to move things forward. You’re paid for this work in a grim story and explicit violence. It can be exciting and beautiful, but mostly I just felt like shit.

...This gives the game a sense of effort and scale that make traversing a few city blocks feel like a huge adventure, but it’s also exhausting.

...As suggested by interviews with its creators and its own marketing, The Last of Us 2 is meant to feel very, very bad.

...My playthrough of The Last of Us 2 felt terrible to experience. Over the course of my 27 hours with the game, it grew to the point of feeling nearly unbearable. This wasn’t because it asked me hard questions about my own capacity for harm or revenge, or pulled some Spec Ops: The Line-style moralizing about video game violence. Despite Druckmann’s promised “philosophical questions,” I never felt like the game asked me anything. Instead, it told me “brutality,” repeatedly and louder, until by the end I couldn’t hear what it was trying to say at all. Characters make hideous, irredeemable choices, over and over. Everybody suffers, physically and emotionally, in graphic detail. This is all intended to prove a point, but the only point I got from the game was simply to be required to stare at violence, and play through violence, and then do that again, and more, and again, and more.

BACK OF THE BOX QUOTE
“What if every terrible thing you can think of, but more of it?”

TYPE OF GAME
Misery simulator

honestly i'm sure kotaku is struggling and knows that they'll get more traffic if they run a negative review, because every other outlet is going to give it a 9.0 best new music or above

wow what a difference a misreading makes. at first glance i thought that said "everything in the last of us 2 works" and then i reread and it means practically the opposite.

i was v momentarily excited lol

I'm hard-pressed to recall a bad review that left me more intrigued about the work being 'panned'.

Sounds like Green Room: The Game (i.e. not fun but also 'fun' isn't the point)

polygon's review is more negative than kotaku's i think!

i'm in the middle of the first one now (never got that far), but my least favorite part of the game are the "puzzles", and i really dislike watching the animations to climb up a ladder or help someone else up over a ledge several dozen times per hour. it feels like half of the game involves finding the ledge and tapping a button to help someone climb over it.

the relentless cynicism/negativity/depression of the series doesn't bother me so much, but hearing that the gameplay remains much the same is enough to convince me not to bother

I'm hard-pressed to recall a bad review that left me more intrigued about the work being 'panned'.

Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu Poll

I guess tbf I never got very far into the first game for pretty much the reasons you give.

who didn't find green room fun??

Not really a fan of the Naughty Dog style but I did play and (mostly) like the 1st one way back on PS3.

That said I have absolutely no interest in playing another one. Especially right now.

It's the feel bad game of the summer!

thing is, death stranding was also supposedly a "feel bad" game, but it's actually really fun (imo)

xposts Green Room was bracing af but fun is not the descriptor I'd use. Like riding a rollercoaster where survival is maybe a 50/50 proposition at best.

i would never play it but i appreciate the concept of a miserablist hyper-violent video game that is philosophically anti-violence. you love killing enemies in video games? well here, experience the full range of sights and sounds involved in murdering this cute dog. you like that?

So many horror games veer explicit torture porn, there's something to be said for the experience being bad vs fun or "escapist, " though don't know if it makes for a better game.

thing is, death stranding was also supposedly a "feel bad" game, but it's actually really fun (imo)

would never play it but i appreciate the concept of a miserablist hyper-violent video game that is philosophically anti-violence. you love killing enemies in video games? well here, experience the full range of sights and sounds involved in murdering this cute dog. you like that?

― na (NA), Friday, June 12, 2020 11:56 AM

haha, yeah, that reminds me of (something someone said here?) the idea of a game where you spend the first 5 minutes killing something and then spend the rest of the game in a panic about what happened, trying to cover it up, and/or coming to terms with it and trying to forgive yourself

that was some kind of adult swim web game, i forget the name

i liked the first one if this got raves across the board maybe i'd bite but it feels like it'll be $30 soon and the reviews seem inconsistent and don't make me excited to play. "misery simulator" sounds like fun but i think i just want a sequel to afterlife

I haven't played the first one yet, so I figure by the time I do this one will be, like, $20.

skimming the reviews, making me reconsider. i love the first one, so i was going to get this for release day...

mainstream reviews are almost universally positive, but the sites I generally trust have much more mixed reactions (Polygon, Ars, Eurogamer)

Didn’t eurogamer give it an essential?

Overall positive yes

Are the problems reviewers have with the gameplay, or are objections related to thematic aspects of the story and presentation? The last high profile games I can think of that got some very mixed reviews were Rage 2 and Days Gone, and I guess Death Stranding, but fans really seem to have grown to like those second two, if not the first.

when the gameplay consists of brutally murdering people i don't think you can disentangle that from the thematic aspects in this case!

I guess, but plenty of games consist of brutally murdering people. Like, I remember hearing good things about Far Cry 3, so I watched a couple of videos and it seemed massively unpleasant, like, referring to women as bitches before stabbing them in the neck sort of stuff.

the kids can’t go to bed quick enough to suit me

idly mulling whether to start on “hard” once i get down to brass tacks later on

Yeah I thought about it but went with normal.

FWIW a few minutes and I murdered a bunch of kids, in a snowball fight.

A few minutes IN.

reading the reviews it sounds like this game spawned from the violence-in-videogames-what's-it-all-mean discourse that popped up every once in a while for a decade but the world has moved past that by now. maybe the world's also moved past naughty dog style cinematic experience games. in any case it takes a really long time to make a game

I caved and bought it. See you guys in a week or two.

that’s going to be the cleanest fucking fretboard in zombieland

lol Leee

in the walking bits i keep unconsciously trying to keep 6 feet away from everyone

i'm waiting to hear y'all's reports back b4 i buy this new but yr excitement is infectious

The first one is sitting in a drawer. Have to Finish death stranding first

i love everything about this so far.

Same. Not a whole lot different from the first game so far, except the narrative has been slacker, and the combat encounters seem more dynamic.

Oh and the trick of sitting on your upgrade vitamins until you're low on health to save on a health kit doesn't work quite as well because the health upgrade is the third level on a skill tree now.

Yeah i think i was expecting it to be a really different game somehow given various things i’ve read so i’m very pleasantly surprised that i still get to creep around and shiv monsters and snap fools’ necks. There’s a nice emphasis on scrambling and exploring. it feels more open somehow. and good god the first time you realise that your only move is to run? fuuuuuuuck

been watching some playthroughs. this looks incredible

Is expecting to binge the game this weekend, and after putting in about 8 cumulative hours yesterday, my hand started to hurt. 😟

I'm not sure why I like TLOU so much when I hated playing the Uncharted games.

cause it’s got heart? but also gameplay-wise it’s more MGS than uncharted imo

Hah, that sounds reasonable on both counts!