Playing through The Last of Us it’s hard not to jump from your chair whenever one of its many infected humans notice you, especially clickers. Known as the game’s merciless one-hit kill enemy, you quickly learn that making any hasty movements around them is a bad idea.
When asked why such powerful monster exists in TLOU, Naughty Dog’s Bruce Straley told Kotaku the following:
There were two things. We didn’t have an enemy like the clicker, and we had a push-off mechanic, where as you were wrestling with infected you could push them off. And by removing the mechanic and making the clicker one-hit, all of a sudden you had all this tension. And people were now using all the stealth mechanics that initially they were just not using.
For Naughty Dog the discovery of survival-horror was a challenging affair. For more than a decade it has specialized in charming action-adventure narratives. TLOU is a far cry from its library of previous works.
The balance of horror and survival in TLOU is quite the achievement. Clickers aren’t always an obstacle, but when they’re present it’s in the best interest of your virtual life to employ the best of your survival techniques. Without caution, even on the lower difficulties you’ll quickly find yourself loading the last checkpoint. This infusion of challenge reinforces the fact that you’re struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
