The Last of Us

Daaaamn, Naughty Dog... You're rull good at making games. "Last of Us" puts story first and accompanies it with great gameplay, excellent sound design, and it's a very pretty game for a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like the "Uncharted" series, which Naughty Dog also makes, this game has excellent characters, writing, and voice acting. You become immediately invested in these characters and their plight.

In Last of Us, the world has basically gone to shit. Most of the population has fallen victim to infection. And those victims are creepy as fuck. They come in three flavors: Runners, Clickers, and Bloaters. Runners are the newly infected. They're quick, scream like banshee's, and if you call attention to yourself, you're likely going to get 5 of them in your face. Clickers are...well, horrible. They've been infected for a while, and as a result, they've got these crazy growths that cover up their eyes. So, good news, they can't see you, but bad news, they can hear you, and they make this awful clicking/gurgling noise to echolocate your sneaky self. It's kind of terrifying to hear a bunch of Clickers in a dark room. Fabulous sound design...I give this game so much credit for this. Stressed. Me. Out.

The third member of this creepy family are Bloaters. Giant motherfuckers...fat ass infected that huck spore bombs at you and will rip the top of your head from your jaw if they get a hold of you. It's quite unsettling.

The manner at which you deal with these baddies can be via beating the hell out of them with crowbars and such, shooting em in the face with shotguns and such, or stealth killing them via choke out or a shiv to the neck. Melee doesn't work so good against Clickers, and nothing but fire works all that well against a Bloater, so they all require different tactics, and their concentration in one area becomes a major factor with how you deal with them. Alerting any of them to your presence is generally ill advised, as they'll call all their buddies to have a go at you. So..sometimes guns are kind of a bad idea. You don't want to go wasting your ammo if you don't have to either.

Resource management is very important in this game, with ammo and with the crafting system. You can craft med kits, shivs, molotov cocktails, nail bombs, and smoke bombs to give you an added edge. You make these items by finding their components throughout the environment, and boy...do they come in handy. Molotov cocktails are my jam.

In addition to infected, you're also going to have to deal with regular folks trying to murder you too because people can be dicks. The game is very good about balancing the encounters and changing up the scenarios so you're not just constantly hiding and wetting your pants trying to evade infected. There's sneaky combat sections, there's running and gunning, there's puzzle sections, there's perfectly safe areas that you'll probably sneak around in the entire time all stressed out because paranoia, and cutscenes interspersed with some damn fine voice acting and animation. These feel like real characters going through real shit. I'm not going to go into the plot at all because spoilers, but this game will probably make you have some feels.

But the feels are worth it. Go pick it up. You will like.