It's a good movie, but not a great game (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 01:17 (3129 days ago) @ cheapLEY

It's decent, but nowhere near as effective as actually playing the game. I was never a fan of the Uncharted series, but I think ND tapped into something special with the way they told story through gameplay in TLoU. The cutscenes are really just the tip of the iceberg. There is something about being those characters and being responsible for each other that gets lost when you just watch everything. I think it is the player's active participation in the story that allows it to connect with so many people the way it does. So in this specific example, I'd say TLoU is what it is specifically because it is a game. A movie version could be great too, but it would be a very different animal.

Oh, I absolutely agree that TLoU works the way it does because it's a game. I previously stated it would be better as a movie, but I've come around to thinking the opposite. It COULD work as a movie, sure, but, as you said, it'd have to be different. Actually BEING those characters makes it work in a pretty powerful way.

I'm not sure that I would call it "fun" to play, though. That is definitely a game that I played to advance the story, and not because the moment to moment gameplay was fun.

I'm totally with you on that last part... at least I was the first couple times I played the game. I found the shooting mechanics to be sloppy and uninteresting, and really detracted from the overall gameplay experience.

Then I played it on the max difficulty setting. Holy crap, what a game changer!

On the toughest setting, TLoU's mediocre shooting mechanics get thrown out the window; you never have enough ammo to shoot anything, so you quickly learn to find other ways to deal with every encounter. The game suddenly reveals itself to be a masterfully well designed stealth game. Supplies are so scarce that it forces you to make meaningful, stressful decisions about how to use what you have. "I can make a shiv or a health pack, but not both" - that kind of thing. It plays in to the dramatic tension of the story, because it puts the player more firmly into a state of stress and fear. Not what I'd call "fun", but it makes the gameplay far more meaningful than it was before.

I feel TLoU is one of those games that had to water itself down in the hopes of wider appeal. Relatively few players are interested in a slow-paced, highly punishing stealth game. But I feel that is what TLoU really is at its core.