The Last of Us: Left Behind Archive
Playing a game while talking about it in any kind of meaningful way is kind of difficult for me, but I wanted to do a playthrough of Left Behind, which I think is the best and most important mainstream “AAA” gaming experience of the year, and talk about why I think it’s so outstanding. In short, it’s because Left Behind establishes, both through its writing and through its gameplay, that big-budget mainstream action-adventure games can tell stories that are primarily about complex, human relationships, and that gameplay elements typically used in the context of tense, violent scenarios can, with a little thought and creativity, be recontextualized to serve a completely different purpose.
Unfortunately, errors interrupted the stream, breaking it up into three parts, and causing one of my favorite moments (“Fuck you, you found another pun book?!”) to be lost. Also, I died many times during the climactic final shootout, which breaks the momentum of the stream.
Once Gone Home comes out on consoles, I’ll try to do a similar commentary-heavy stream of that. I look forward to not dying a lot during that one.
Notes
kaorei-endgame reblogged this from agameofme and added:
For everything I liked about Left Behind–which was a lot!–my eyes opened wide when she produced the new joke book, and...
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