Its much-better standalone, The Lost Legacy, tried to open things up (literally) at least. Uncharted 4, for all its improvements in action, told a lackluster story amidst its wider-than-usual spaces. By the current console generation, this general formula has gotten tired. The AI could also be distractingly dumb sometimes, like Ellie standing in clear view of an enemy while Joel was carefully hidden behind waist-high cover, an element endemic to the seminal cover shooter series, Gears of War.
The Last of Us, at least, played with the interactivity of its environments slightly more than Uncharted's-you could open drawers, for instance, and find nothing inside.
It was when a lot of games were the opposite of immersive sims, featuring heavily detailed, mostly narrow environments, but with little in the way of interaction.
It's also something of a hallway game, a phrase that was cast at the likes of Final Fantasy 13 during the PS3 generation. It's a brief roadblock that serves no purpose. In one circumstance, Joel and his brother Tommy go looking for Ellie, who ran away with a horse, and are forced into an out of nowhere encounter mid-gallop. Combat encounters are sometimes arbitrarily thrown in, and feel like they never needed to be there in the first place. The combat and stealth is clumsy sometimes by tension-building design, mostly in just being seven years old at this point. Nonetheless, The Last of Us, despite looking solid on PS4, very much feels like a PS3 game. Where every action-adventure in the PS3 era started chasing Grand Theft Auto's open-worlds, Naughty Dog saw another route. It can be called cinematic, sure, but Uncharted was built on the strengths of being interactive. Uncharted isn't a fun game to watch-it's a fun game to play, plainly, whether we're scaling giant ancient architecture, shooting the shit with Sully, or running away from one of its many impressive setpieces.
What made the Uncharted series resonate wasn't that it was like an Indiana Jones movie, but rather that it put us into one.
The Uncharted series was praised for its cinematic angle-a comparison that I've always seen as quite empty, both in its positive and negative capacity. Nathan Drake, and Uncharted in turn, were born. It introduced guns, driving, and more to the series, which was once just a 3D platformer with a lot of attitude its grander hub world the closest thing it had to an "open-world." On PS3, Naughty Dog ditched cute characters for a realistic art style, but it retained its sense of humor. Jak 2 borrowed ideas from the then-newly popular Grand Theft Auto games from Rockstar. Naughty Dog's segue from platformer to action-adventure started way back on PS2, with the open-world 180 of Jak 2. But the PS3 action-adventure didn't die with the PS4. It is both the pinnacle of the PS3 action-adventure that Naughty Dog helped to pioneer, and a relic. "Because it better captures the desperation of survivin'." Baby's first real criticism.) Playing it again in 2020 was a particularly interesting trip back, because while its story remains just as impactful, it's everything else about it that's aged unkindly. ("It's only really good on harder difficulties," was a common refrain from me. It fueled some of my earliest "critical" discussions surrounding games. My appreciation for The Last of Us stems from the sort of books and movies I loved when I was in college. Once on Normal difficulty, later on the more tense Survivor.
It was, I believe, my fourth time through my last save file on PS4 was apparently from 2014-itself a strange time capsule, just one year shy to my first internship in the games journalism business. In preparation for The Last of Us Part 2, I recently wrapped up a replay of The Last of Us and its DLC Left Behind.