I have played so many games, and so many zombie and survival horror games that it has become nearly impossible to impress me as a gamer. There are so many 'me too' games out there that while having entertainment value, do not really tie me up in their world and that immersion factor and feeling of discovery and wonder are absent. Not so with The Last of Us.



I knew in the first 2 minutes of the game that I was going to love it and I'll tell you why. I began the game as a little girl looking for her daddy. The house wasn't just empty, it was forboding and menacing in it's emptiness, even the sound was dead, like the walls were closing in on me but they did this without anything other than a hint of tone. Walking past a television I stop to watch the news cast, still getting a hang for the controls, and wondering how much detail they put into little things like radios, tv's playing etc. When the news reporter is interrupted by an explosion which I see first on the TV, then a bright light from the window, followed soon after by the sound of the explosion. Exactly like reality. I had goosebumps.



Such a simple thing as an explosion, is so often done hollywood style that we forget that thunder is only heard long after the lightning is gone and large explosions are seen first, then heard, then felt.



The attention to detail is amazing, just look around that bedroom when the game begins, all of the little things on the book shelf, it looks like a little girls bedroom, and this for a location you only spend a moment in, and then never see again.



I was immediately gripped by the story and the characters which had a truth to them seldom seen in movies let alone video games. I came about as close as I've ever come to crying about 10 minutes into the game. You know the scene I'm talking about. I felt anger, and confusion, and a sense of loss all at once. I was hooked.



I also have to give kudos to the foley and sound work. Characters move about often and the positional audio is really good, better than many blu-ray disks. I'm playing on a 7.1 home theater and it sounds like I have people in the room with me. The game is minimalist in it's use of sound and music and this lends it a stark but beautiful reality.



The game reminds me strangely enough of Half Life 2 more than it reminds me of any zombie games. The city you live in post infection, seems more like City 17 in HL2, complete with an overbearing police presence and a failing resistance movement. The tone of this one is much more serious though. It reminds me of the kind of narrative you might see in a novel, where the author can do almost anything they want in telling their story, no matter how brutal and how much it might upset a fan. These raw nerves seldom survive the transition to movies or television. Remember the rape scene in Stephen King's "The Stand" in the book? Never made it to the mini series. The one where the survivors kidnapped women and turned them into sex slaves. There is none of that censorship in The Last of Us. You live in a brutal and unforgiving world and it's raw nerve is exposed for all to see in it's ugly and uncensored glory.



I have almost nothing but praise for the game but I have a few quirks that annoy me.



1. Like any buddy system game, I am constantly running into my ai player. Every time I turn around it seems like I'm tripping over a woman and a little girl, or a crazy old bastard and a little girl. In interior scenes, and especially when dealing with clickers, it can be aggravating to have your movement blocked randomly.



2. The save system leaves a lot to be desired. I've heard of day 1 problems with lost autosaves but I wouldn't know because I manually save my game. The problem is that I can't just do that. I hit pause, then save, and the screen freezes for 30 seconds or so and then I see "Autosaving, don't turn off" repeated 4 times while the system continues not to respond for another 15 seconds, before finally, almost a minute later, taking me to the 'save' screen and letting me save to a slot. It does this each and every time and it annoys me.



That's all I have. Buy this game, it may be the best of 2013 on the PS3, certainly one of the top 10 of the 360/PS3 generation.