The last of us: escape the dark –

I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it was more than this. In many ways, the world of The Last of Us is amazing – well…. Not as a world you want to live in, but as a setting in a movie or in this case as a board game, it’s something that offers incredible storytelling and action-packed sequences. Here, unfortunately, I mostly hung around and felt like one of the zombies…. Because not much happens, and when it does, you get so extremely frustrated and pissed off by how slow things are and that you suddenly run out of ammo. But before we move on to the scathing criticism, I’ll give some praise and talk about some positive aspects of the board game, because it’s not completely terrible.

First is perhaps the best part of Escape the Dark. This is probably the best looking board game I’ve had the pleasure of getting my hands on so far. It’s all in black and white and the art style is dirty and gritty, but mostly incredibly beautiful. There is a real darkness here and that is fitting in this context when the game world is as hostile as it is. It also doesn’t hurt that the parts, from the little chips to the board itself, are made of really thick cardboard and the cards are also sturdy and well made. This is a real quality project and Themeborne Ltd. should be applauded for it.

I guess I was hoping for a more open-ended game. One that was closer to the TV series, where you had time to explore the world through stories, but it didn’t work out that way. If you’ve played Themeborne Ltd.’s other Escape the Dark games before, you’ll probably recognize many elements. They’ve designed a system here, one that I haven’t experienced before and now never want to explore further. But if you like the other Escape the Dark games, I think you’ll like this one more than I did.

Anyway – the game is about reaching the quarantine zone all the way to Jackson’s sanctuary, while making sure everyone in the group (Joel, Ellie, Tommy, Tess, Bill and Marlene) survives and thrives. Along the way you encounter everything from FEDRA agents, hunters and infected, and none of them are particularly pleasant. Using the game’s many dice, you must roll the right ones to win battles. Although it offers some strategy, it is essentially a game that depends on luck. Another example is when you are looting and you are about to turn over a card – you may be unlucky enough to trap your fingers instead of being lucky enough to obtain a flamethrower. So luck is something you need here and I don’t really think it works in this context. To me, The Last of Us is a world that requires careful planning and stealth, but The Last of Us: Escape the Dark is unfortunately not that kind of game.

You can also upgrade weapons and your equipment in general, but they offer such a marginal difference that there’s no need to waste time on them, because this is a slow game and the faster you can fight through it, the better you’ll feel afterwards. If you play five games, I don’t even want to think about how long it will take. You have to sit around and wait for a player to roll their many dice and make their moves, and it can take a long time – a very long time – before it’s your turn again. I recommend playing this alone or with up to three players. Then you can really participate and make decisions together, but to me that takes away some of the sense of seriousness. In any case, it’s important to make the right decisions – to stop and listen a bit or maybe sneak around instead of just jumping into situations, because if one of you dies, the game ends immediately.

It also offers very little variety. The locations you can visit are very limited and after playing it a few times, I at least feel like I’ve seen everything the game has to offer and don’t feel like playing another round. The characters are also almost identical and you might wonder if it wouldn’t have been reasonable if Joel could have taken a little more damage than, say, Ellie.

The fact that a relatively new game almost suffers from the lack of an expansion is a rather tragic but realistic picture of the board game world in general. Expansions are not something I like and this is one of the few cases where I think it is really necessary. Often you get the impression that developers withhold content to release it in expansion form, but here we have a game that has no planned expansions and actually feels flawed anyway.

Sometimes it really is a great game. In small moments I have fun and see what the intent was, but then I run into one of the many distractions and the house of cards collapses. I personally can’t give this a high rating, but I understand that others see it from a more positive perspective than I do, and it’s amazing that opinions always turn out to be varied. But The Last of Us: Escape the Dark is not for me. It’s too slow, too little content and variety, and also far too much depends on getting lucky with each roll of the dice. Games can absolutely rely on that and be good, but any sense of immersion and seriousness is lost when Joel (the character in the game, not me) dies because I flip a card with a trap on it instead of the bandage or medicine I was actually looking for.