Watch it: The Last of Us documentary

How do shadows fall in a scene? Are the characters looking at each other when they speak?

These are the questions that Naughty Dog's developers asked themselves during the development of last year's The Last of Us.

The heart of The Last of Us is the attention to detail in every scene. It's the little things that make a character sit into the world or that translates good acting into a believable performance on screen.

Area 5, the team behind the successful Outerlands Kickstarter project, made this 90 minute documentary. Originally released as part of The Last of Us's season pass you can now watch the whole thing on YouTube.

The programme also talks about how much work went into making the player understand the feelings and motivations of the characters.

Bruce Straley, the gameplay director says "What are the things that we can do on the joystick to make you feel the same way that these [sic] characters' going to feel when we get to this next pinch point in th story?"


But wait there's more. Left Behind, the single-player story DLC for The Last of Us released on . The production values here aren't quite as high, but if you're looking for more Last of Us here you go:

2013 in review

At the start of 2013 I wrote about the rise of successful story-driven indie releases. My examples from 2012 were Dear Esther, To the Moon and Cart Life. The Walking Dead had been a hit that year too although I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I said I hoped that it was a trend that would continue. And I couldn’t have been more right.

2013 saw the release of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Papers Please, Kentucky Route Zero, and Gone Home among others. It saw the trend move out of the indie scene and into the blockbuster space. 

Major character-centric triple-A titles launched this year. Some, like The Last of Us, excelled by creating human moments in an inhospitable world. Others, like Bioshock Infinite, struggled - aiming high with strong moral overtones but falling short of delivering a real message.

If I’ve been scrimping and saving since Hackett Out launched, 2013 was the year where I went broke. Steam sales, Humble Bundles and PlayStation Plus have provided me with the majority of my gaming time this year. 

I’ll always put aside a few pennies for new games though and so my playlist included a few triple-A games. I’m listing here each and every game that I put any real time into in 2013. But first, the five that, for me, felt like they best delivered on the intentions of their developers.

5. DMC Devil May Cry
DmC: Devil May Cry does its best to put you off. It’s bawdy and misogynistic on first impressions. For the first two hours gameplay is cut-through with too many tool-tips and interjections. It’s hard to believe that this is the developer behind 2010’s Enslaved. But stick with it. This is a character-action game and a surprisingly deep combat system reveals itself with time. DmC does a better job than most in encouraging experimentation and weapon-switching. It also provides environmental navigation that make use of the tools in your arsenal.

4. Metal Gear Rising. Revengence
Having two character action games on a list of only five titles is not what I would have expected  at the start of the year. But this is a genre where mechanics are king. When done right there’s a purity to the experience that’s unrivalled. Rising doesn’t quite live up to the quality bar set by Platinum Games with their 2010 title Bayonetta, but this game has an interesting twist with a real focus on defence - every incoming attack needs to be physically batted away with a well timed parry. Also all of the ridiculousness you would expect from a Metal Gear is here, and then some.

3. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
It’s difficult for a game to convey emotion - to capture moments of warmth, of love, of sadness. Some manage it but it’s especially difficult, for any medium, to convey the real depth of grief and loss. Brothers left me a wreck - dragging up feelings I’d forgotten I could have. And it did it by subverting expectations, by telling its story through gameplay but by telling a story other than the one it sets out from the start.

2. Gone Home
Personal stories have a place in video games. Games can be interesting without being mechanically complex or overtly fun. Gone Home single-handedly proved that games can be ‘important’, that they can tell human stories. The tale it tells has been told a thousand times - but it’s told confidently and with care here in a new medium. Gone Home immerses the player in a world that they can relate to - it tells a story about real people with grounded lives and relatable desires. And it’s a joy to experience.

1. The Last of Us
The Last of Us recovers from a difficult couple of hours towards the start, to tell one of gaming’s great stories. It’s the attention to detail in every aspect of its design, from the environmental storytelling of its buildings, to the emotion in the eyes of its characters, to the way protagonists Joel and Ellie animate as they move past each other when crouched and hiding. A great cast, excellent pacing once the game opens up and a solution to the age-old disconnect between player action and story delivered with confidence and style. My game of the year.

The Playlist - 2013
The Room (iOS)
Metal Gear Solid Revengence (PS3) review
Bioshock Infinite (PS3) comment
Ku (iOS)
Republica Times (PC)
Fez (PC)
Papers Please (PC)
Gunpoint (PC)
Hundreds (iOS)
Ridiculous Fishing (iOS)
Super Stickman Golf 2 (Android)
Knights of the Old Republic (iOS)
Catherine (PS3)
A Ride into the Mountains (Android) 
The Walking Dead (PC)
Thomas Was Alone (PS3)
The Last of Us (PS3) comment
Plants vs Zombies 2 (iOS)
X-COM Enemy Unknown (PS3)
Spelltower (Android)
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Wii) 
Dark Souls (PS3) 
Gone Home (PC) comment
Brothers (PC)
DMC (PS3) 

Read this: Edge on the representation of women in The Last of Us

Ellie, Marlene and Tess with protagonist Joel.

The Last Us is a game about the downfall of civil society in the wake of a serious natural disaster. Developer Naughty Dog has crafted both gameplay and a story that can carry the weight of the setting.

At its core, the story is about one man dealing with his past, but its strength lies in his interactions with the characters he meets along the way. There is a subtlety and a level of detail to these interactions that sets The Last of Us apart.

Naughty Dog's previous games, the Uncharted series, were praised for their representation of strong female characters. Uncharted 2 is in many ways the pinnacle of what I want from videogames. An article I wrote about that game was featured on edge-online.com. However, Uncharted had it's problems, most notably the huge body count and the overly sexualised nature of characters such as Chloe.

Writing on edge-online.com, Jason Killingsworth highlights how the developers have moved beyond that, presenting a cast of strong women who aren't defined by their sexuality. It also presents perhaps the only gay character in videogames who's primary defining characteristic isn't his being gay.

"It’s depressing that mainstream games have such an atrocious record with portrayals of women that simply writing your game’s female characters in a humane fashion warrants congratulatory slaps on the back. This ought to be standard practice. But with the inertia pushing so forcefully in the wrong direction, it’s worth taking a moment to examine and appreciate the ways in which The Last Of Us rattles the cage of the game industry’s institutional sexism and moves things forward."

Read the full article here.

The game is developed by Naughty Dog and was released for Playstation 3 in June 2013. Jason Killingsworth (@jasonkill) is features editor for Edge magazine.