The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, successor to 2017’s Breath of the Wild, is out soon. And while there’s a big fancy collector’s edition of the sequel available, which includes a book, Nintendo is this week taking the time to revisit the original, releasing for free a book called The Explorer’s Guide.
It used to be the whole point of the special Explorer’s Edition of the game, but with Breath of the Wild now six years old Nintendo figures we’ve all explored quite enough, thank you, and so instead of the book helping us find our way around a post-apocalyptic Hyrule for the first time, it can now help us remember the good times instead.
As Polygon report, Nintendo have released the book as a pdf on their company site, and you can read/download it here. It’s…OK? I mean it’s typical limited edition filler, in that it’s not useful enough to be a true guide, there’s not enough art for it to be an art book and it’s not specific enough to be the game’s manual.
It’s still a nice little thing to thumb through though, even after all these years, though weirdly not the whole book has been uploaded. For reasons known only to Nintendo, pages 73-84 are missing, an omission that’s not for plot reasons because there are spoiler warnings present on pages that did make the cut (If you’ve got this book at home from 2017 and can tell us what’s on the pages, that’d be great!).
If you want to check it out, note that most of the book is dedicated to explaining the broad concepts of Breath of the Wild’s open world design to newcomers, and so may not be the most interesting thing you’ll read today, but the intro section is still fun, if only because Nintendo had to try and wrangle the series’ convoluted timelines and history into a couple of concise pages!
When Overwatch 2 launched in October of last year, it was only natural that players stumbled into its new Push mode like ignorant babies in the dark. But y’all, we’ve had five months of pushing barricades across Toronto and Rome, and I need the rest of the Overwatch community to get off the goddamn robot when we’re winning and in overtime.
For the uninitiated or those who need a reminder of how the Push mode works in Overwatch 2, this is the Treadweather TS-1 Large Utility Robot [pic below], but his friends call him TS-1. Or, if you’re playing as a character less friendly to the series’ Omnic race, they probably just call him “the robot.” This fine gentleman is the centerpiece of the Push mode, as two competing teams escort him across a map as he pushes one of two barricades across it.
TS-1 moves in accordance with the players who are in his proximity, and if competing players are close to him and fighting, he’ll remain stationary and ask that players “resolve [their] issues” before he proceeds. The first to get their team’s barricade from the center of the map to the other end in front of the enemy team’s spawn wins. If time runs out, the team whose barricade is further into enemy territory is deemed the victor.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
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Like most Overwatch modes, it sounds pretty simple on paper. The nuance of the game is in the heroes players choose and how they interact with their teammates and counter their enemies. But Push isn’t quite like other modes, where you need to move the payload or control an objective point. Where TS-1 is on the map at any given moment can factor into your team’s strategy if you’re coordinated. For example, say your team is in the lead. TS-1 has pushed your barricade well into enemy territory, but your opponents gained the upper hand and won a team fight. They’ve got TS-1 closer to your spawn than their own, and if you win the next fight and regain control of the bot, you have a strategic advantage. The enemy team will have to get back to TS-1 to reengage and try to gain the lead.
So while it might seem the reasonable thing to do to guide TS-1 back to the other side of the map to start pushing your barricade again, if you’re already ahead and there’s not a ton of time left in the match, it can sometimes be better to hold your position and let the opposing team come to you.
Of course, this comes with risks. If you lose that battle, TS-1 is much closer to the enemy’s barricade. That’s why it’s important to coordinate with your team, have a unified plan, and make the judgment call depending on factors like ultimate charge, how many people in your team are alive versus in spawn, and whether or not you think the team is sitting on a few ultimates of their own. While pushing a payload is pretty straightforward, the decision between pushing and holding your position in Push is a situational game sense that you learn the more you play the mode. However, there is a universal instance where you need to leave TS-1 alone and let him stand in place: when you’re winning and the game goes into overtime.
Get off the Overwatch robot, Shinji
Just like any Overwatch 2 mode, a Push game doesn’t just end when the clock runs out, it ends when no one is contesting the objective. This means that as long as a member of both teams is next to TS-1, the match will continue into overtime. This underlying design is one of Overwatch’s greatest strengths because it means that a match is truly never over until it’s over, and there’s no reason to give up if there’s any chance you can contest an objective to the very last second. With an Escort or Control point map, this means it’s paramount to stay on an objective until the announcer declares a victor, or at least make sure your opponent can’t get near it. With Push, putting some distance between yourself and TS-1 has a strategic advantage in Overtime.
The trouble is, most randos I play with don’t get this and will escort the big robot right into enemy hands. In fairness to everyone involved, this is learned behavior from every other Overwatch mode. To win an Escort match, you have to be on the payload, and despite the setup having some notable differences, escorting a payload and escorting TS-1 are identical in terms of how you interact with them. But after five months of walking the robot into enemy lines when you would have won the match otherwise, when will we all learn to get off the bot?
If I’m playing with strangers I will spam the “Fall Back” voice command to no avail as my teammates guide TS-1 on a blissful stroll right into our opponent’s filthy clutches. Kotaku Senior Editor Alyssa Mercante described it as similar to “ yelling at your dog when they pick up something bad,” and I know you, like the dog, want to hold onto things that aren’t good for you and hide them under the couch. But I’m telling you to leave it, Overwatch community. Yes, we made jokes about staying on the payload for years, and now I’m asking you to get off the robot so this match can end and I can play any other mode.
This is Life By You, an “upcoming, moddable life-sim” being made by Paradox Tectonic:
Life by You – Announce Trailer
That’s a Sims competitor all right! While it might look initially like it’s cutting very close to Maxis’ cloth, Paradox say the big draw here is that Life By You is going hard on creation and customisation suites (harder than The Sims goes, anyway), letting players shape not just their appearance and homes, but their careers and conversations as well.
Open up a new world of creative possibilities in Life by You. Be in total control of the humans that you create, the towns that you build, the stories that you tell. And oh yes – mods! We know life is always better with a heavy sprinkle of your imagination, so we’re empowering you with a wide variety of Creator Tools so you can design your lives the way you see fit – or break the rules of life itself. Designed to be one of the most moddable and open life-simulation games, we look forward to the humans, stories, and creations that you’ll make with Life by You.
Life By You is for the PC only, and will be entering Early Access (on both Steam and the Epic Games Store) on September 12.
It was always a little weird that The Sims has remained unchallenged for so long, considering both its age and immense popularity, but then making these kinds of games is hard work! We’re finally getting some serious competition in the space now though, between this and the promising Paralives, so it’ll be interesting to see what effect all that has on The Sims 5…whenever it releases.
With Resident Evil 4’s remake due out this week, Capcom’s marketing for the title is swinging into high gear, and while that would not normally move any of my needles, this little anime they had made for the game is just too good.
Its full name is “Resident Evil 4 Anime PV Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater – ‘Leon and the Mysterious Village’ EP 1″, which isn’t the catchiest, but it at least gets the point across. It only runs for 56 seconds (and that’s including title screens), but it is 56 seconds of pure joy for anyone who has ever played this game across its 117 previous releases.
“Story of my life” indeed, my guy:
Resident Evil 4 Anime PV Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater – “Leon and the Mysterious Village” EP 1
If you were thinking that animation style looked familiar, that’s because—as the credits at the end state—the clip was made by storied Japanese studio Nippon Animation, who among many other things are known for their old show Masterpiece Theater (hence the name in this case) which would showcase short anime episodes every week that were adaptations of existing works.
While the remake isn’t out until March 24, reviews for the game went live last week, and for the 188th time people are finding that, yes, Resident Evil 4 is a good video game:
Out March 24 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, the Resident Evil 4 remake updates one of the best entries in Capcom’s long running survival horror series. Following in the footsteps of previous remakes for Resident Evil 2 and 3, the newest game still sees Special Agent Leon S. Kennedy sent to a Spanish village to rescue the President’s daughter from a weird cult. This time things are just much prettier, the controls and UI are more modern, and there’s some new content like additional side-quests.
A number of places like IGN have given the game perfect scores, and it currently sits at over 90 on Metacritic. At the same time, not everyone is under the remake’s spell. “Several smart changes; a few disappointing cuts,” tweetedEdge magazine’s deputy editor, Chris Schilling. “When it’s good it’s brilliant, but largely in the exact same ways as the original.”
Lance Reddick, the actor who’s been lending his voice to games ranging from the Horizon series to Quantum Break, passed away Friday. He was 60 years old. While he’s been in films and TV shows such as John Wick and The Wire, Destiny players know him best as the commander of The Last City, the Awoken Guardian Zavala. Now, folks who’ve heard the news of Reddick’s death are flocking to his in-game character to honor him as their forever commander in a wholesome display of gamer solidarity.
Zavala is a mainstay in the Destiny universe. One of the first characters you meet after waking up in the original game and blasting your way through an alien-infested planet, Zavala could be found in the Tower’s war room alongside Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey. A kind of stoic blank slate in the beginning, he would primarily sling a variety of Titan armor in silence. However, he’s been given a lot of emotional backstory in the years since, with the character evolving in significant ways—he’s more talkative when you see him in the Tower now, standing alone and looking out at the Traveler, pontificating on the state of the world and his role in it in Reddick’s dulcet tones.
In last year’s Witch Queen expansion, he grappled with his faith as cosmic forces challenged it, which gave Reddick even more room to flex into Zavala’s character and personality. Subsequent seasons revealed a familiar tragedy from his past that still haunted him. Infamous lines memed into oblivion like, “We’ve stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars,” also gave way to intimate personal tales of grief and struggle.
So, with the news that Reddick has suddenly passed away due to what police are saying is natural causes, many Guardians are now paying their respects to the beloved Titan Commander, heading to the Tower to pay tribute to him as best they can. Games journalist Saniya Ahmed shared a picture of gatherers at the Tower, writing that some players were giving each other emote hugs.
Kotaku senior editor Alyssa Mercante jumped into the game and confirmed there were folks gathered around Zavala. Several players deployed the Peaceful Rest emote, which surrounds them in neon-colored tower candles. Another held a shield and sword made of light. A few just sat.
Folks are heartbroken over this loss, including many Bungie employees, who shared their immediate reactions to the shocking news on Twitter. Artwork of Zavala has already been drawn up and sent out. Content creator Uhmaayyze shared an older image of Reddick holding a Destiny gun, beaming. Zavala quotes are circulating online, their meaning holding even more weight in light of this loss. Some players are even planning a “community-wide silent sit-down event” in front of Zavala to pay tribute to Reddick’s stellar performance, while others are trying to organize a shared color scheme to honor him. Reddick’s impact on the Destiny community cannot be understated, especially since the last tweet he liked was about the game.
It’s never a good feeling when a beloved figure passes, especially someone as influential and prolific as Lance Reddick. But thanks to the community’s adoration and his immortalization across mediums, Reddick will live on forever. So, eyes up, Guardians, Commander Zavala is forever watching over you.
The player known as Let Me Solo Her has become an icon in the Elden Ring community in the year since FromSoftware’s action RPG launched. It started when he used the game’s online co-op features to help a player fight Malenia, one of the game’s hardest boss battles, wearing nothing but some underwear and a pot on his head. Now, it looks like he’s attempting to play a version of Elden Ring where every enemy is replaced by Malenia, and he’s streaming it starting on, March 17, for your enjoyment.Players modding Elden Ring to replace enemies with Malenia isn’t necessarily new, as mods of that kind were circulating throughout 2022. However, given that Let Me Solo Her’s vendetta against Malenia is an Elden Ring legend, at this point, it’s just the natural next step in this saga. Will Bandai Namco send him more swords commemorating all these kills he’s racking up in nothing but some white underwear and a helmet?
Let me solo her
The stream is ongoing on Let Me Solo Her’s YouTube channel, and the mod already makes early segments of the game terrifying to watch. Where once low-level enemies wandered in the base game, Elden Ring is now entirely populated by one of the most powerful bosses in FromSoftware’s game, who just happens to be able to heal herself.
Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku
So far, he’s mostly running past Malenias that appear in the open world, and only has to face them head on when he reaches a boss fight. Hey, we’ve all done it. But that doesn’t stop each of them from making swings with their giant swords as he sprints past, and it’s easy to imagine a situation where many Malenia make it hard to simply flee. If you, like me, are too scared to take on this challenge yourself, sit back and watch Let Me Solo Her do it, instead. Personally, I’d rather try the mod that turns enemies into Pokémon. That seems less terrifying.
While seeing cool remixes of the original game is fun, most Elden Ring fans are looking for new content for the game, which Bandai Namco and FromSoftware finally announced back in February. Not much is known about the upcoming expansion, but fans are already speculating about what characters might be in it based on what little information and art we have at this point.
There was a lot of hype going into Lightfall, Destiny 2‘s big cyberpunk expansion. The reality has been much more muted, full of ups and downs, fun discoveries and tedious chores. Live-service games are unwieldy creatures to try and examine under a microscope, and Destiny remains one of the toughest of them all.
Free-to-play sandbox changes are launching alongside the paid campaign, and separate seasonal story missions will be dropping week to week as hotfixes continue rolling out. Below fellow Kotaku writer and Destiny 2 glutton Zack Zwiezen and I discuss the highs and lows of Lightfall’s initial kick-off.
Zack Zwiezen: Eyes up, Guardians. We will be talking about Destiny.
Ethan Gach: Okay, let’s start with the Lightfall campaign. What were your most and least favorite parts? The high point for me was obviously the opening cinematic that shows The Traveler confronting The Witness and everything going sideways. The low point was crawling through air ducts while Osiris barked at me to quit wasting time and become one with the green space magic (Strand).
Zack: My favorite part was also the opening bit and the ending. It felt like stuff was happening and actually seeing the Traveler do something was amazing. Finally, the orb is helping us. My least-favorite part was how much the rest of the main campaign feels like season three of Lost, just spinning its wheels until the big finale.
It’s ironic that Osiris is so angry about us wasting time when this whole campaign feels like a waste of time.
Ethan: I felt extremely torn throughout most of it between the gravity of the story Bungie is telling at this moment and the lightheartedness of the ‘80s tropes littered throughout the campaign.
Neomuna feels like a cross between a Saturday morning cartoon and an afternoon at a futuristic space mall. The training montage with Strand was cute but also felt like a complete waste of time. Nimbus has grown on me over time, but I think they suffer from being the loan representative of an entire new civilization.
Zack: I kept wondering, as I played through the campaign, what the point of this expansion was. And the weird mix, as you mention, of ‘80s tropes and serious storytelling, didn’t help. With Witch Queen, I really liked how the narrative developed the idea that the Light isn’t some inherently good thing. That it can instead be used by anyone and how that really shook up Zavala and others. This time around the Strand was just a fun Darkness power we got via a Rocky-like montage, beat Calus (again) and I was left going “Okay…cool?”
I really enjoy exploring Neomuna and Nimbus has also grown on me. And I do like how the post-campaign quests seem to be expanding more on the lore of the planet and its people. But compared to last year and Witch Queen, I mostly felt disappointed by Lightfall.
Even the Vanguard have no idea what the hell is going on.Image: Bungie
Ethan: Yes, Witch Queen felt like a very tightly calibrated story with a beginning, middle, and end that built out the lore and stakes of the larger story while still focusing mostly on expanding on Savathûn’s backstory and motivations. No characters really provided that in Lightfall.
The end-game quests are much stronger than many of the campaign missions, I think, and probably would have provided a nice middle point to help the expansion breathe a bit more. I think backloading finally getting Strand, learning about Neomuna’s history, and also what Rohan was up to prior to our arrival, only served to make the campaign feel even more rushed and underexplained.
Zack: Yup. And I’ll also admit now that I still don’t fully understand why The Witness couldn’t just pop down to Neomuna and get his fancy Veil thing and do what he needed to do. And I also found it weird that Bungie—which is usually good about seeding stuff long before it becomes a big part of the story—just invented this whole Veil thing outta nowhere.
It just added to the feeling that this was rushed or not planned out as well as past expansions and seasons. Ethan, where did The Witness go? And will we find out before the next expansion via the upcoming seasons?
Ethan: I’m sure there will be hints of it throughout the upcoming seasons. But as tends to be the case with the expansion/season divide, my guess is the plot won’t move forward until The Final Shape. Which is fine, honestly. I get why some people felt like Lightfall needed to deliver more than a couple cutscenes, but I would have been completely satisfied if it felt like Neomuna had been properly fleshed out and had more tension.
I do think it’s been much more successful as a patrol space and launching pad for new exotic missions, however. What have you been thinking of the post-game and the broader content changes and additions in Lightfall?
Terminal Overload is a great public activity, if you can find enough players to help out. Image: Bungie
Zack: I like the quality-of-life stuff! The loadout manager is cool and actually works. The way red frame weapons work now, where you just get the plan right away, is nice. But it’s not all great. I hate the new guardian rank system. And the commendation stuff, which could have been cool, just sucks.
Commendations seem so generic and everyone is giving them out all the time, regardless of how I played, and it all feels pointless at the moment.
Ethan: Yea it feels very caught between wanting to incentivize good behavior and also not lead to negativity. Also since matchmaking is reserved for the easiest activities, I’m also rarely ever paying attention to who I’m playing with.
By the end of a Defiant Battleground or Nightfall I rarely remember who was the person that went out of their way to revive me or kept us from wiping. I do see who is the best dressed, and yet there’s no style commendation. It also feels moot when you can assign one to both people, and a chore considering the number of button presses. How do you feel about the overhauled mods?
Zack: All of the mod changes are solid and much needed, I feel. The mod manager helps a lot too. I really like how much easier it is to play how I want without having to worry about costs or energy types as much. I also like that the artifact mods are now active perks. Overall I now enjoy messing with mods and my build more than before. And I was someone who barely cared about that stuff before because it was such a chore.
Ethan: It definitely feels like the builds have less personality around them. Warmind mods had a very specific flavor, and I miss elemental wells a ton. Overall I think the changes are good to great on average, though I think the way mod benefits are communicated is still a little obtuse, especially for newcomers.
It’s clearly part of the design philosophy at Bungie to slap “+10% kinetic damage” on something, which I admire, but the current system requires learning a lot of keywords to break down what are, at the end of the day, numerical trade-offs. Speaking of which, man it’s rough out there for legendary primaries.
Calus is the Sol System’s favorite lush, but his character arc is more than played out. Image: Bungie
Zack: I’m still mostly using stuff from the last two seasons, which is often a bad sign. I’ve not liked most of the new Neomuna-themed legendary weapons. Which feels like a change from past seasons, where I would often end up swapping out most of my stuff for the new toys and having a good time!
Ethan: The Neomuna weapons haven’t been super exciting, and it’s a pain that the Terminal Overload ones aren’t craftable. I’d almost rather have it be reversed, with Nimbus’ engram weapons being RNG rolls only, since Terminal Overload is a much more targeted farm.
If the Queensguard weapons didn’t also roll out alongside it, I think there would be a lot more talk of Lightfall lacking loot on par with some of the criticisms of Beyond Light, though the exotics are head and shoulders above other expansions (with the exception of Witch Queen’s Osteo Striga, which remains undefeated).
One complaint I have is that I’m over 30 hours into the new content and still don’t have a new crafted weapon yet, with the exception of the Vexcalibur exotic. As with Strand, the campaign would have been a great time to level one of the new guns up and grow attached to it. Now, I almost don’t care anymore. Crafting in general, while less painful, still feels under-developed. It was the key feature of last year’s expansion, and it feels like a footnote now.
Zack: *Looks off into the distance, dreaming of Osteo Striga. What a gun…*
But yeah without the Queensguard weapons I’d be pretty damn bummed about the loot this time around. And about crafted weapons, I too lack any still. And I often forget about the whole system now that I just hit a button to get the plans. It really feels like a misfire, and keeping it around in this current half-baked form feels bad. Rip it out and just let us have generic plans that can be used to craft stuff, or something.
I do think it’s maybe telling that we’ve talked so much about the new expansion and neither of us seems excited about Strand. I don’t hate Strand or anything like that. I enjoy using it. But it’s not as exciting to me as the other subclasses after the big 3.0 overhauls.
New Exotics are the highlight of Lightfall. Image: Bungie
Ethan: It’s definitely very powerful, and I like that it can be utilized very effectively in both offensive and defensive ways, sometimes even in the same build. The grappling hook, like every moment-to-moment action in Destiny 2, feels great. Sorry though, not trading away my grenade for it. I mostly find myself using it now when I want to speed through lower-level grinds. I also don’t find it quite as visually and auditorily satisfying as Stasis, which, as evidenced by the stellar Verglas Curve exotic bow, remains so satisfying every time. But the damage output on Strand is wild. Players bemoaned the boring-sounding Titan Strand subclass, but I think it turned out to be the most fun version of it.
Zack: Oh the grappling hook feels soooooo good. But yeah, giving up a grenade for it and the long cooldown compared to the campaign makes it far less enticing to use regularly.
I think your comment about it not being as visually or auditorily satisfying is accurate and it leads me to the other problem with it: It just doesn’t seem as unique. The other subclasses being mostly elemental worked well to make them stand out. Strand is the first new subclass that seems less obvious to explain to someone. It’s like green space strings…I guess?
Are you excited about the rest of the year? Or has Lightfall dampened your Destiny 2 excitement for 2023? I’ll admit that I came into this new expansion and year very excited and pumped after Witch Queen and the last two seasons. And this has definitely made me a bit less excited for the rest of the year.
Neomuna is full of beauty that never gets its due. Image: Bungie
Ethan: I was extremely burnt out after last fall, and didn’t play a ton of last season. So far, I’ve actually been playing more of Lightfall than Witch Queen, which I loved it, but which I ended up dropping off pretty hard. We haven’t mentioned the Root of Nightmares raid yet, but I think while not as spectacle-driven as some past ones, it will get a lot more play because of how much shorter and more straightforward it is to grind. That’s especially surprising considering how the more general ramp-up in difficulty this season has completely turned me off of doing Lost Sectors and Nightfalls, which just feel like more trouble than they’re worth right now.
Zack: Yeah it’s interesting to see the raid be so much simpler than past raids. I wonder if Bungie wants more people playing raids or is just trying to shake things up and not always do some complicated beast for each new raid. Yet, meanwhile, other parts of the game are harder than ever. I imagine Bungie has data to back up these choices, but then again, as I write this, I see the hotfix patch notes for the game mention increasing rewards on solo Lost Sector runs. So maybe this is more evidence that this expansion and update didn’t get as much time in the oven as it needed
Ethan: As we look forward to the rest of the year—and to be clear, a Destiny expansion really is a year-long $100 commitment at this point (both for Bungie and the player)—there are definitely some things coming that I wish could have arrived alongside Lightfall. An in-game looking-for-group tool is one of the big ones, but the biggest of all is an end to the Power grind. It’s tedious. It gates content. And it’s just not fun.
RPG leveling has always been an uncomfortable fit for Destiny, which is a shooter at heart and fundamentally about chasing guns. Without skill trees or stats to pour points into, there’s really no reason, besides padding. to have to hit an arbitrary number before being able to participate in new content. It’s always been a fundamental tension in Destiny, but I don’t think any of the solutions have ever fixed it. And on a more optimistic note, I’m more confident than ever that the fundamentals of the game are strong enough to survive without it.
Pick an Engram, any Engram.Image: Bungie
Zack: More so than ever, this expansion and season I feel the Power grind and I’m excited to hear Bungie isn’t going to raise it again next season. It feels like the beginning of fully removing it completely. The game can live on without it.
Reading back through this chat, I worry I sound super down on Destiny 2. But I’m still ready for the rest of the year and I’m excited to play more. I think, for me, this expansion just reminded me of how damn good Witch Queen was. It was always going to be hard to compete with that.
Ethan:Lightfall is definitely a slow burn. I can’t recommend it to people who aren’t already invested in the game in some way, unlike The Witch Queen,which was arguably the best shooter campaign of 2022.
But I think, or at least I’m hopeful, that it will bear more fruit over the long run. Season of Defiance is already off to a really strong start compared to other expansion-adjacent seasons, quality of life is improving, a lot of the currencies and grinding is getting streamlined, and there’s room to tie up a lot of interesting loose ends before The Final Shape.
Zack: Agreed. The future is still bright for Destiny 2. We just have to get there.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is next week, and while that’s normally a time for developers from around the world to meet up, the developers of Rust were also planning on using the event to catch up with fans. That now won’t be happening.
As PC Gamerreport, the original plans were for a meeting—at a “coffee shop in San Francisco”—to be “a chance for conference attendees and fans to meet the Rust team, share their portfolios, and ‘talk shop’”.
It has been now been cancelled after the developers received “threats to kill”, with the team posting a statement to Twitter that reads:
This is not a statement we’re happy to announce.
Due to an IRL threat we must take seriously, we’re going to have to cancel the GDC meetup in San Fran next week. 😢
Fans are instead encouraged to “reach out via email!” instead. “It’s important to remember the developers are indeed humans”, they add in a follow-up Tweet, saying “When threats arise we make their safety #1.”
“The overwhelming majority of fans are respectful and supportive,” Rust producer Alistair McFarlane told PC Gamer, adding “there is always going to be a small subset of individuals who engage in threatening and abusive behaviour.”
It’s important to note that this meetup wasn’t a part of the official Game Developers Conference schedule of events, and so had nothing to do with the organisers of GDC. This was something the Rust team were organising outside of that, just to take advantage of the fact that the team and fans were going to be in the same space for a few days.
The cancellation also only affects this one meetup; developers Facepunch will still be attending the Game Developers Conference itself, which runs from March 20-24.
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.
Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.
To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.
The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show
Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.
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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.
The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.
What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?
Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.
Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.
The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.
After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.
What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?
Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.
HBO Max
Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.
Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.
For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.
Image: Naughty Dog
The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part IIfocuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.
In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.
Dead Island 2, the open-world zombie RPG that passed through so many hands someone done forgot it in the development oven for over a decade, is finally coming out on April 21. This is a week earlier than originally anticipated, which we love to see. What’s funny, though, is that developer Dambuster Studios is out here saying the game’s development hell gave the studio “quite a lot of goodwill in the end.”
In case you forgot, Dead Island 2 was announced at E3 2014, with work reportedly starting sometime in 2012. Dying Light studio Techland was originally set to spearhead the project, but pivoted to Dying Light 2 instead. This led publisher Deep Silver to shop around for a developer to helm Dead Island 2 until Spec Ops: The Line creators Yager Development stepped up to the plate. Yager toiled away on Dead Island 2 for a few years, with the game making a couple appearances at conventions after being announced in 2014. Unfortunately, Yager didn’t stick. Deep Silver dropped the studio in July 2015, leaving Dead Island 2 lifeless until Hood: Outlaws & Legends studio Sumo Digital took over development in March 2016. Again, like Yager, Sumo didn’t stay long. Deep Silver shifted development hands one more time, this time putting the game in the lap of Homefront: The Revolution creator Dambuster Studios. If you lost track, this means Dead Island 2 has been worked on by at least four different studios throughout its over a decade of development.
Now, Dambuster Studios is asserting a VGC interview that after all this reshuffling and restarting, Dead Island 2‘s development hell actually wasn’t all that bad.
“It definitely concerned us at the start,” technical director Dan Evans-Lawes said. “I remember when we took the project on, I was thinking ‘Is this a poisoned chalice,’ you know what I mean? I think, though, that once we announced the game, people were interested because they knew it had been in ‘development hell’ for however long, and I think people were expecting it to be terrible, and so we were pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t. And I kind of feel like it’s actually given us quite a lot of goodwill in the end. But that’s obviously reliant on people liking the game. But as long as they do, which I think they will, then I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all.”
Dead Island 2 was a total restart for Dambuster
With going through so many hands, you’d be correct to assume that Dead Island 2 was restarted once Dambuster Studios got a hold of it. It was, though not everything was scrapped. Some stuff, such as the Los Angeles location, stayed intact. Most of everything else, however, was rebuilt from the ground up.
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“It was basically a complete restart,” Evans-Lawes said. “Obviously there were some things that had been communicated out already, the [Los Angeles] setting and things like that, and when we looked at it the setting was something that we definitely did want to keep. We felt that it as an opportunity to have a really crazy, diverse cast of characters, and also it’s a very iconic location, so obviously we wanted to keep that. Other than that, it was totally from scratch.”
In a way, Dead Island 2 could be considered a normally developed game under typical circumstances. I mean, Dambuster Studios apparently started working on the game in August 2019, not long before the global pandemic impacted development on a plethora of games. Despite the challenges that come with development, especially under the effects of a widespread health crisis, Dead Island 2, under Dambuster Studios, has only been in the oven for almost four years. That’s not a bad timeline. It’s just wild for Dambuster Studios to insinuate that development hell has, in a roundabout sort of way, helped them. You know, if the game ends up being any good.
Nine years ago, Super Mario 64player toyuru2 wall-jumped his way up the slide in Cool, Cool Mountain, sending the plumber into the void–but not before grabbing a 1-up mushroom. At the time, it was a feat, as nobody had ever gotten the mushroom. But then, a new challenge emerged: was it possible to grab the mushroom without dying at all? Now, years later, a speedrunner has answered that question through the use of special tools.
First released back in 1996 on the Nintendo 64, Super Mario 64 is one of the most famous video games ever released. It was Mario’s big leap into 3D and helped create the blueprint for what a 3D platformer would be. Like any other game, it features a number of oddities, like items and enemies that exist outside the bounds of where the player can go. These seemingly “impossible” items became a fixation for the community, like this one coin that took 18 years for anyone to collect.
27 years later, players are still speedrunning the game, creating mods for it, porting it to the PC, and trying for those hidden coins and other secrets in this beloved 3D platformer. In this case, the impossible item clips out of the tunnel before players can normally reach it, though as you can see in this video, it actually spawns in the tunnel at first. Technically, unlike other “impossible” items, this 1-up has been grabbed before–what’s different now is that it’s been grabbed by someone without dying. And all they had to do was just jump between two walls for over an hour.
PaLiX’s tool-assisted method has Mario immediately leap out of the level and fall to the finish line below. Then they jump between two walls for an hour and a half. Slowly Mario climbs up the wall and eventually reaches a point where he seems to lock up. Then, using an exploit involving how the game calculates where Mario is in relation to the floor, PaLiX is able to break free and butt stomp onto the 1-Up.
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Even though this video does involve some emulation tools that help perfectly pull off the tricky moves and jumps, it’s still interesting to see a player grab this power-up without kicking the bucket. Will it be possible for someone to one day actually pull off this trick on an N64 or other platform without tools? Maybe. People continue to do wild shit in this game. For years, the hardest glitch in Super Mario 64 speedrunning was considered impossible to do by a human without the use of tools, until of course someone did exactly that. So at this point, I’d say anything is possible.
Like most people who require water to live, you probably like H20 a normal amount—but you definitely don’t like water as much as this famous Nintendo fan. They’re so well-known and beloved that they’ve even been featured in the official plumber website for the Super Mario Bros. movie.
Super Mario Bros. Plumbing is a website for a fake plumbing service where Mario and Luigi come to unclog your pipes. Not like that, you pervert. Anyway, the website is an elaborate movie marketing campaign that even features a real live van tour. If you look down at the carousel section of the website, you’ll see a review by someone named Pipe_Dreamz. “Amazing looking water courtesy of the brothers,” it says.
For the non-chronically online, Pipe_Dreamz is likely a reference to a Miiverse user named MARIO WiiU. They spent at least a couple of years commenting on the graphical quality of video game water on Nintendo’s official forums. Their bio describes them as “a hardcore Nintendo fan” who has been playing the publisher’s games since 1985. Despite being a Nintendo gamer since the Nintendo Entertainment System, they felt that the Wii U is “an amazing system.” You do you, buddy.
Since Miiverse was discontinued in November 2017, a new account claiming to be MARIO WiiU has appeared on Twitter. However, there isn’t a viable method to confirm that they’re the same person (A conundrum that they’ve addressed publicly). I have my doubts. The original water commentator had posts that were unrelated to water, and the new account only contains tweets about water. So the account is likely run by a fan of the water liker.
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This isn’t the first time that Nintendo of America recognized video game water’s biggest fan. Three years ago, the publisher tweeted “Nice water” alongside a clip of Paper Mario: The Origami King.
The Miiverse may be gone, but the spirit of MARIO WiiU lives on.
Today Capcom streamed a new “Capcom Spotlight” event on Twitch and YouTube. While the cat was already out of the bag on its biggest news—a Resident Evil 4 demo, out today—there was plenty more to see, too.
If you’d like to watch it yourself, you can find the stream archived here. That said, here’s everything we saw in today’s Capcom Spotlight stream.
Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection
Capcom
Capcom kicked off by showing off Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection again, which includes all 10 mainline entries in the Game Boy Advance’s fun strategy-tinged, chip-collecting RPG series. Director Masakazu Eguchi, presenting himself in the guise of “Mr. Famous,” explained the new Buster “MAX” mode and how the collection will include digital versions of the 499 previously physical “Patch” cards that interact with the later games in the series. The online play sounds robust, too.
This Legacy Collection, split into two volumes, is hitting Switch, PS4, and Windows on April 14.
Street Fighter 6
Capcom
Street Fighter 6 made its customary appearance and revealed its fourth and final in-match commentator, Japanese actress Hikaru Takahashi. With her addition we now have two Japanese and two English announcers. (We also saw muscled helmet enthusiast Marisa beating the crap out of my main grappler, Zangief. She seems cool.) Street Fighter 6 is due June 2.
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Capcom Town and Capcom ID
Capcom
Apparently Capcom is working on a “digital theme park,” called Capcom Town. Let’s let the video explain. It also announced a new “Capcom ID,” a login that will be required for online play in some future games. Hooray.
Exoprimal
Capcom
The team-based dino-battling online shooter Exoprimal appeared again, this time showing more story scenes. Looks cool. Despite apparently not being a live-service game, the game seems riddled with optional extras, including a season pass, pre-order bonuses, copious character costumes, weapon skins, etc. It’ll be interesting to see if the fatigue for this sort of cruft we’ve just seen with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will surface here too.
Anyway, it’s coming to all the major platforms but Switch on July 14, and will be on Xbox Game Pass day one. A two-day open beta test will start on March 17.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Capcom
We got another peek at the HD remaster of the Nintendo DS cult hit Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I’m sure fans will dig all the little bonuses it’s getting, and it’s coming June 30 for Switch, PC, Xbox One, and Windows.
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak
Capcom
Monster Hunter Rise’s Sunbreak expansion has a release date: April 28, 2023. Love that iconic theme music. Capcom will also be holding another digital event in April to talk about the next major update, ver. 1.5.
Resident Evil: Death Island (CG movie)
Capcom
Finally, Resident Evil time. A brief glimpse of the upcoming CG film Resident Evil: Death Island looked suitably creepy; it turns out I don’t care for undead swimming crawly things. Not ashamed to say it. Hopefully I’ll be prepared come its summer release. Jill’s in it too, by the way.
Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo
Capcom
Ah, the main event. The big news? Resident Evil 4’s demo is out today. Unlike many modern game demos, the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo will not be time- or launch-limited, so you can go nuts in that iconic starting village scene as much as you like. The demo’s out on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Steam.
So, my take? Nothing mind-blowing, but a pleasant showing for sure. I’m looking forward to some of these, though none on the level of Dragon’s Dogma 2. What did you think?
I wasn’t sure if we’d ever see the day, but after years of waiting, the top hits from the Game Boy Advance are steadily trickling onto the Nintendo Switch. Metroid Fusion joins the Switch Online Expansion Pack library next Wednesday, perfectly timed for everyone who just beat Metroid Prime Remastered and is still itching to shoot through some creepy underground test facilities.
Metroid Fusion sees bounty hunter Samus Aran charged with investigating an explosion in the Biologic Space Laboratories station on a dark and stormy planet, only this time she’s infected by the X Parasite and rocking a new teal suit to compensate. Oh, and she’s being hunted, Terminator style, by a relentless clone of herself, called the SA-X. On the upside, she can absorb additional parasites to restore health, ammunition, and gain new abilities. The 2002 GBA release is one of the most linear in the series, but what it lacks in open-ended exploration it more than makes up for with cool boss encounters, good storytelling, and an incredibly eerie vibe.
Prior to 2023, Nintendo had made trying to revisit Metroid’s past a huge pain in the ass. If you didn’t have a Wii U or the ambassador’s program on the 3DS, there was no way to access Metroid Fusion. This was particularly frustrating since 2021’s Metroid Dread is a direct sequel. In the span of just a couple weeks, however, Nintendo has finally brought both Fusion and another classic, Metroid Prime, to the Switch. It now contains:
Metroid
Metroid II: Return of Samus
Super Metroid
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Prime
Metroid Dread
Not too shabby, especially considering that the GBA’s Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the first game, and Metroid Prime 2 and 3 also now appear destined to eventually get added. The only Metroid Switch owners aren’t likely to get their hands on any time soon is Metroid: Samus Returns, the 2017 3DS remake of II. In fact, most 3DS games seem unlikely to ever make the jump to a modern platform. Is there a Metroid I’m forgetting? Nope, can’t think of any others.
I only have one gripe: I wish the Switch Online games could also be purchased separately like in the old days of the Virtual Console. While Sony has been slow to add PlayStation 1 classics to PS Plus, the ones that have arrived are also sold separately, letting you hone in on the exact ones you want and not rely on an indefinite paid subscription for access. Maybe Switch (or the Switch 2) will get there one day. Baby steps I guess. For now, inject the Parasite X directly into my eyeballs like it’s 2002 all over again.
Go look through your Steam Library, flick across the spines of your PlayStation collection or gaze up at the shelf with all your Xbox games on it and tally for yourself: how many games are there set in the world you live in?
I’m not talking about Call of Duty, which puts dates and names on contemporary places but could be set anywhere. I’m not talking about a racing or sports game, which intricately model exactly one aspect of the entire human experience, at the expense of infinitely countless others.
I’m talking about a video game that lets you do a lot of the stuff you already do, or at least can do, on a daily basis. After you’re done adding those games up, you probably won’t find many. You might not find any at all.
Let me explain where I’m going with this. I was playing Yakuza Kiwami 2 the other day, part of a long-running series that is believed to be inherently Japanese, when I realised one of the things that resonated most with me wasn’t very Japanese at all.
Yakuza is inherently urban. Most of your time spent interacting with a Yakuza game isn’t spent smashing bikes into a man’s face, it’s spent approximating the same stuff anyone who lives and/or works in a modern urban environment does every day. You’re just…walking around. Popping into a convenience store to buy a drink. Trying out the new fast food place on the corner (every new Yakuza game, set 1-2 years after the last, always has a new place to try). Catching a cab because it’s raining and you can’t be bothered walking four blocks. Running into people you know on the street (or not running into them, see previous cab comment).
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These are global, human experiences because they’re built around one of the few things billions of people around the world have in common: consumer capitalism. Yakuza is set in Japan but the bulk of its action—ritual and ancient combat on the grounds of a hallowed clan headquarters aside, maybe—could be taking place anywhere and it would be much the same game. Anywhere people live, eat and shop within close proximity, from Manila to Melbourne, Brussels to Bangkok would work just as well.
A big part of Yakuza’s appeal is the intimacy of its place, the availability of so much stuff in such a relatively small area, the way you start to recognise certain buildings, know your way around back alleys. The fact almost everywhere you visit is a store—a bar, a takeout, a restaurant, a clothing retailer—is, on the one hand, kinda depressing! That so much of our love for Kamurocho is built on commerce, and that I dismissed other genres above for only doing one thing when Yakuza is, when you strip it down to the studs, spending most of its time also doing just one thing (buying stuff).
On the other hand that’s a gross simplification, because it’s not our fault the world is like this, we’re just living in it. And buying a refreshing soda from a vending machine, going to the arcade, buying a new bandana or sitting down to enjoy a nice meal might all be “commerce” in the broadest sense of the world, but they’re also very different types of nice things, satisfying very different needs and urges.
Importantly, what sets these Yakuza activities apart from other “real world” games like Madden or Gran Turismo or Life is Strange is that fact that they’re everyday things. We do them, all the time, just like the guy on screen. Which sounds boring as hell, but is in fact I think one of the biggest reasons people love Yakuza, and its main playable characters, so damn much.
Kazuma Kiryu is an exceptional man, of course, who can hurl signs into crowds of armed men, leap over barricades like Superman and even cheat death. But he’s also the most relatable protagonist in video games, because when he’s not doing that stuff we’re in control of him as he sits down to slurp a bowl of ramen, buy a packet of smokes or get weirdly frustrated at a UFO catcher machine.
I do that! We do that! And having the player control Kiryu’s most mundane activities—playing out in a world that’s a recreation of our own, not a fantasy or alternate timeline or fictional take—is the best, because they’re doing a wonderful job of fleshing the character out. Making him fallible, human, a guy who has to kill time and run errands and eat normal food, just like us.
This revelation got me thinking about two things. Firstly, about how if you could move the Yakuza formula to another city, I’d love to see a London edition/take, complete with Greggs, pints, nice suits and the city’s iconic cabs. The characters and cutscenes would write themselves:
Yes, I know this is set a very long time ago, I just really like this scene and think it’s basically a Tom Hardy-driven Yakuza cutscene
Secondly, it was weird that I was having to fantasise about a different game doing this, since almost no other video game series is letting us do everyday things in a digital version of our own world. There are open world games (Yakuza is definitely not an open world game) with some stores and pastimes, sure, but they’re not as integral to the experience, or as densely-packed. They’re also often caricatures of cities (see: GTA V), with little resemblance to Yakuza’s faithful recreations of a modern urban environments, down to the magazine racks on convenience store shelves. And games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley may encourage players to engage in the mundane, but they’re set in idyllic locations, and digging up turnips is not something people living in modern cities are doing every day.
Persona, maybe? Though it provides the illusion of freedom and choice, in reality its hamstrung by a limited set of locations and a strict schedule it keeps the player on. So no. Sleeping Dogs? It has some denser areas, designed to be played as a pedestrian, but still nothing on the scale of Yakuza’s daily distractions. The Sims? It’s either the best or worst example possible, and would need a whole other article to unpack, so in the interests of keeping this brief I’m going to say “no” here as well (though I will entertain arguments to the counter!)
I guess all I want to say here is that video games don’t always have to be about escapism. Or at least don’t always have to be about escapism. Sometimes the most boring, everyday actions can be the most meaningful in a game, because if you want us to truly relate to a playable character, one of the best ways to do that isn’t to pull off some superhuman shit every five minutes, but to just…let us take them out for a nice little snack and a walk down the street.
The term “Soulslike” generates a specific kind of game in the mind. It conjures something that’s hard as hell, with fearsome bosses to beat, intricate levels to explore, tight combat to experience, and a world rife with enough lore to fill several tomes. You may call games in the genre alluring, unforgettable, and sometimes super cheap, but if there’s one word you likely wouldn’t use to describe Soulslikes, it’s “approachable.” Until now. Team Ninja’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is a terrific game, one that excels in so many of the ways we’ve come to expect from great Soulslikes. It has brutal, pulse-pounding combat, a haunting world, and some memorable bosses. And the fact that it manages to deliver on all of this without compromise, while also being the most accessible Soulslike to date, is nothing short of a marvel. In other words, next to Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty might be my fave Soulslike.
Wo Long is the latest Soulslike from action game aficionados Team Ninja, whose previous efforts in the genre comprise the Nioh franchise. Set in 184 AD during the Later Han Dynasty, the game tasks you with stamping out the Yellow Turban Rebellion, a peasant revolt that sought to disrupt ancient China. However, weaved into this mythically fictionalized retelling of the historical events of the Three Kingdoms period is an even greater threat than the poor, emboldened to rise up by some bad dude. Nah, it’s a mystical drug called Elixir that’s corrupting the lands, poisoning the people, and raising the dead.
This is what you, a nameless militia soldier you customize through Wo Long’s impressively robust character creator, are actually fighting against: Not just the brainwashed poor, but also the grotesquely transformed, as the power-hungry jerks who take Elixir either die and come back as zombies or have their bodies forever changed with new limbs and animalistic features. In narrative and environmental terms, Wo Long is a lot like Nioh 2, but in ancient China with a dash of Bloodborne horror, and that’s dope.
In Team Ninja’s Nioh 2 follow-up, a captivating, dying world
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Fengxi Boss Battle
It’s telling that development producer Masaki Yamagiwa cited Bloodborne as “a new form of motivation” that inspired Wo Long, because the world is lathered in similar Lovecraftian imagery. It takes its time in reaching the depths of depravity, however, with the game steadily building on the horror as the story’s stakes ramp up. You start at the tail end of a fiery onslaught on the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the environment a desecrated mess of ransacked homes and burnt trees. After battling a few Yellow Turban lackeys here and a possessed rendition of Tony the Tiger there, you’ll encounter the first of many two-stage bosses, Zhang Liang, who ingests an Elixir ball and grows a snake-like arm covered in blood-filled crystals. It’s a haunting, 1v1 battle on a moonlit, flower-covered field as Liang swings his now-deformed left arm in the hopes of crushing you to death so that darkness reigns. Things only get grosser as you slash your way through each distinctly detailed locale.
This isn’t an open-world game, though. There isn’t as much freedom here as in something like Elden Ring. Instead, Wo Long’s level structure is more reminiscent of Team Ninja’s Nioh 2 and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. As the narrative unfolds, you’re taken (via lore-filled loading screen) to the subsequent location. Sometimes this is the lavish Mt. Tianzhushan, with its vibrant pink-colored leaves, lush bushes, and glistening waterways. Other times, it’s the devastated Guandu, crumbling to pieces as veins protrude from the array of suspended buildings. All the while you’re set on a fairly linear path, with a few available shortcuts to make backtracking less frustrating: ladders to reach an upper level, a bundle of wood that acts as a stepping stone, and so on. In its world design, Wo Long is focused and intimate, hooking you in with little details like rotting produce in abandoned villages and decaying bodies pierced on the battlefield, visual elements that breathe life into an otherwise desperate, dying world.
There’s an oddly captivating quality to that desperation, one that helps drive home the game’s broad view of humanity: We are power hungry. If it serves us, we will do what is necessary to get power. Wo Long explores that and the sacrifices people will make to achieve power in an on-the-nose but nonetheless enthralling way. Through Elixir, the drug that essentially unlocks the host’s unstoppable inner demon in exchange for their life, an ultimate big-bad can pull the strings while everyone lusts after the thing he’s in full control of. There’s political intrigue as warlords like Cao Cao and Sun Jian debate the best strategy to put an end to the war, while Elixir stealths its way through the ranks because of fools too weak-willed to maintain vigilance in the face of power. There’s even romance and heartbreak, as characters profress their unyielding love for each other just before taking their last breath in the icy ground. It’s dire, but it speaks to just how destructive power is when chased by the corrupt.
Wo Long is the most accessible Soulslike I’ve played
Probably can’t even feel it, hyped up on all that Elixir.Image: Team Ninja
I’ve made the comparison that Wo Long is Nioh 2 but in ancient China a few times in my impressions of the game, but now having played through the whole thing, it feels even more applicable. If you’re at all familiar with the Nioh series, Wo Long will feel like coming home. That’s not to say that all the same pictures are hung in the same spaces or that all the same furniture is placed in the same rooms. There are some notable differences that set these two Team Ninja games apart, particularly when it comes to combat and difficulty. Wo Long is significantly faster in its animations, meaning the pace of engagements is much quicker here than what you see in the Nioh games.
This might make for a more challenging experience, but because Wo Long demands and rewards aggression, the increase in speed is a boon for anyone who wants to treat these games as a sort of hack-and-slash adventure. By relentlessly attacking an enemy, you raise your spirit gauge while diminishing your opponent’s. Think of this dual-colored bar at the bottom of the health gauge as being similar to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s posture meter. Completely drain an enemy’s spirit and you’ll open them up for a devastating fatal strike which, in most cases, kills in one hit and, in all instances, lowers their morale ranking.
This morale ranking system is a vital component—the backbone if you will—of Wo Long’s understanding of difficulty within the Soulslike genre. When you play these masocore-like games, you’re sometimes relegated to farming for experience points to increase your level high enough to deal with whatever foe that’s putting you in a quick grave. You could switch up your build. Maybe try out a new armor or weapon. But the only way to really grow stronger in most Soulslikes is to accrue enough XP to buff yourself. That’s all true in Wo Long, too. However, exploring ancient China and raising battle flags, this game’s version of Dark Souls’ bonfires, is another way to become more powerful because planting flags increases your morale.
Similar to God of War’s power level system, upping your morale ranking in Wo Long increases your damage resistance. So, if you encounter an enemy with a morale rank that’s higher than yours, you can bet your ass is in for a beating. But if you pull up on a sucker with a lower morale rank than yours, well, it’s likely curtains of them. And it’s not just battle flags that affect your morale, as raising the smaller marking flags dotted across the map establishes the floor (the invisible fortitude rank) that your ceiling (the morale rank) can never drop below. In this way, scouring the map is not only encouraged as a means to find new goons to fight and loot to collect. It’s almost required to make it through the game. It’s through this morale ranking system that Wo Long’s accessibility begins to shine.
The morale ranking system makes up just one prong of Wo Long’s approach to accessibility. The other comes in the form of reinforcements, which you can call upon at the various battle flags you’ve planted. This is a blessing because so often, Soulslikes are largely these individual affairs with obtuse multiplayer offerings. There’s multiplayer here, too, but in an expansion to Nioh 2‘s benevolent grave summoning mechanic, Wo Long lets you call up an NPC homie whenever you want, so long as you have the required tiger seal item to do so. (The consumable is pretty easy to come by, found on dead enemies and in random chests around the maps.)
You could always use a partner or two on the battlefield
Here’s A Soulslike That Anyone Could Play, Probably
Through summoning, you can fight alongside a plethora of historical figures, such as general Sun Ce and warlord Liu Bei, while tackling the game’s many difficult and unpredictable enemies. The best part, though, is you don’t always have to summon; Wo Long will, more often than not, start you with an ally already in tow as part of the game’s mesmerizing narrative. So, you’ll roll up to, say, Guigugou Valley in Ji Province, ready to battle with warrior brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei at your side. You can heal your reinforcements when they go down in combat and they never leave your company unless you decide to whisk them away with a different consumable item. Team Ninja understands that Soulslikes are, at times, far too punishing for the laygamer, and this inspiring reinforcement mechanic seeks to remedy that difficulty.
It’s these two elements, the morale ranking system and the summoning of reinforcements, that make Wo Long the most accessible Soulslike I’ve played in…maybe ever. Sure, there are no real accessibility options for adjusting things like damage taken and enemy visibility. Features like those seen in The Last of Us Part I and Rachel & Clank: Rift Apart would go a long way to opening up the genre to an even wider audience. However, just by implementing some design choices that both encourage exploration and galvanize the idea of seeking help, Wo Long makes it evident that developers can create their punishing games without wholly gatekeeping the experience. Hell, when I was getting bodied throughout my time with Wo Long, I just summoned a comrade or two and all of a sudden, I felt empowered to take ancient China head-on. If this is the power of friendship, then Soulslikes need way more of it.
Don’t get it twisted, this is still a very hard Soulslike
Now this is an asshole.Image: Team Ninja
With all of that said, Wo Long is still a hard-ass Soulslike. There are a plethora of grunts that have no problem showing you the casket to rest your head in, and they’ll do it with the quickness if you’re not careful. On top of difficult jerks, the world itself is out to get you as you can take massive damage after a fall and can be reduced to a single health point when taking an unfortunate dip in the water. But nowhere is the challenge more pronounced than in the intimidating boss encounters, fights with screen-filling demons like a malformed, tentacled cow or terrifying soldiers such as helmsman Lu Bu.
It’s these moments that feel like familiar territory for Soulslike players, those who associate grueling difficulty with the genre. And they are very challenging skirmishes that demand attention, skill, and patience, lest you get clapped in one hit. But again, thanks to the morale ranking system and summoning reinforcements, these engagements aren’t as insurmountable as they may first appear. The enemy might be obsessed with power, but strong friendships can’t be easily broken. That’s the penultimate lesson I took away from Wo Long.
That’s what I hope developers in the genre and players of these games take away, as well. Sometimes, you need help to take down an army, especially one with demons and evildoers high on performance-enhancing drugs. Doing it yourself is possible, as shown in something like Bloodborne. But as 1986’s The Legend of Zelda put it, “It’s dangerous to go alone.” So, why not take some reinforcements with you? You’ll be grateful you did.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) have today filed charges against publisher Activision—a company with a long track record of alleged union-busting—claiming the publisher violated several workplace laws in relation to the firing of two QA testers.
“Two QA testers expressed their outrage using strong language. In response, management set up disciplinary meetings where both workers were fired.”
The CWA argue that “the use of outbursts and strong language in the context of concerted activity by employees was protected by the National Labor Relations Board” until as recently as 2020, before the Trump administration “systematically rolled back workers’ rights, including modifying the standard for determining whether employees have been lawfully disciplined or discharged after making offensive statements, which ultimately limits free speech rights for employees.”
Activision disagrees. “We don’t allow employees to use profane or abusive language against each other,” a spokesperson for the company, Joseph Christinat, told Kotaku. “We’re disappointed the CWA advocates this type of behavior.”
The charges have been filed against Activision CEO Bobby Kotick directly, and allege that the firings—which took place on February 17—were made “in response to [the employee’s] engagement in protected, concerted and union activity”. The CWA also allege that Activision “improperly denied a request to have a coworker witness the disciplinary meeting which preceded the termination of [their] employment”.
“For far too long, Activision has gotten away with treating its employees, especially QA testers, like disposable work horses. Firing two employees for joining with their co-workers to express concern around hasty return to office policies is retaliation, point blank,” CWA Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens says. “When faced with unfair treatment by unscrupulous employers like Activision, workers should have the right to express themselves.”
Update 3/1/2023 9:08 a.m. ET: Added comment from Activision.
Milan Fashion Week has just wrapped up, and while this is not normally the kind of thing we would be covering on this, a website about anime, reality television and comic books, 2023’s show featured a surprise inclusion: Blizzard’s Diablo series.
Danish label Han Kjøbenhavn had a whole damn line inspired by (and officially licensed by) Diablo, with founder Jannik Wikkelsø Davidsen—who tells NME he played the game “back in the day”—showing off three separate outfits, two of which you can see in this post.
For those about to say in a comic-book-guy voice “nyyahhhh these don’t look like Diablo characters”, or “I will not be wearing these to my local GameStop, thank you”, please know that this is Milan Fashion Week. This is runway shit. This is designers going wild, art in motion, stuff designed for you to look at and feel something, not wonder when you’ll be able to order it on Amazon or get it with the collector’s edition of a game.
Watch the show, play the game If you’re intrigued by the new show starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, consider picking up the source. The 2013 survival horror game recently got a full-on remake for the PS5 with The Last of Us Part 1 and now it’s coming to PC as well. You can pre-order the Steam version of the game for 10% off from most Green Man Gaming which is set to release on March 28.
“For me, darkness is beauty. How do you balance those two things? That generates an [entirely] new feeling”, Davidsen told NME. “What we’re creating has a lot of volume and language in the garments we’re working with, so in that sense I’m trying to mirror the journey within Diablo as well as my own journey.”
In terms of things you can wear, Davidsen says Han Kjøbenhavn—who sell a ton of everyday gear like sweaters and tshirts, albeit at premium fashion label prices—will be releasing “something which is more everyday wearable” in the near future.
The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.
Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.
A tale of two malls
First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.
G/O Media may get a commission
Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.
This hopeless situation
In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.
He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.
She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.
Screenshot: HBO
(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)
Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.
Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.
Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II
Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.
Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspacestarring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.
We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.
Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.
What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?
After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”
In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.
After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.
Screenshot: HBO
When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.
Take on me
The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.
As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.
Just like heaven
Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.
But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”
Screenshot: HBO
Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.
Pictures of you
Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.
As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning
The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.
This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.
In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.
Screenshot: HBO
Kiss me, kill me
Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.
In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)
In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.
Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.
Love and truth in the Halloween shop
She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)
Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.
Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”
Screenshot: HBO
Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.
For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.
I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.
They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.
“I’m not letting you go”
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Screenshot: HBO
Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.
