The End is Nigh: Left 4 Dead

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Left 4 Dead, and how fighting zombies was never supposed to be easy.

Left 4 Dead shows humanity reduced to a twitchy, gibbering mess. And that’s just the players.

The four-player co-operative zombie shooter comprises of five (initially four, but a fifth campaign - Crash Course - was added as DLC) self-contained campaigns, with each one functioning as a petite game in its own right. They’ve got definable beginning and end points, for one, with each campaign drenched in schlock B-Movie tropes and embellished as mini-movies by faux-poster loading screens and scrolling end credits after the exuberant finale sequence. It’s the finales which mark the ending of each campaign, and these moments are guaranteed to be exceedingly tense: the players must endure swarms of the undead for a few minutes before being able to escape the level and finish the campaign (hopefully) alive. It’s challenging by design, and Valve are certain to make sure death is always a possibility.

It’s also chilling because, by some miracle of design, it somehow feels like you only have one chance at your great escape. You can replay the campaign - it is only a game, after all - but this reality is frequently forgotten: you’ve come too far to die now, goddamnit. It successfully deceives you into believing you’re caught in some once-in-a-lifetime moment, partially by design - the game’s AI director, which changes enemy placements with each game, ensures that games are similar but never entirely alike - but also because the players which exist behind the recognisable faces of survivors Bill, Francis, Louis and Zoey will inevitably become so varied that each permutation will create a group of unique ability and attitude.

Generally I’d advocate playing with friends, but sometimes experiencing a finale is even better when you’re playing with strangers - it brings out the most negative qualities of the players, yourself included.

Take this recent example: I found myself frustrated after being on the receiving end of another player’s friendly fire one too many times, and further vexed when the same player refused to heal me a couple of chapters later after I had nobly used my medkit (you’re only allowed one at a time) on their ungrateful wounds. Our increasingly uneasy alliance was held up by a communal desire to survive, but the relationship was clearly teetering during the finale. As the getaway vehicle (in this instance an aeroplane) made itself available, a Smoker (a nasty special monster, complete with fifty-foot long tongue which can be fired at survivors) dragged him off into the zombie horde. There was probably enough time to save him and have us all escape together, but I didn’t even hesitate to run straight onto the plane - the other two players in the game didn’t seem to be too concerned, either. It could have just as easily been me dragged away to certain death, but it wasn’t. And that’s what made it so glorious.

This kind of ending can’t happen with a group of close friends, who tend to be determined to see each other’s continued survival. The incontestable brilliance of the game’s design, compounded in the extravagant finale sequences, is that there are too many enemies to make solo survival possible. But there is always a moment at the very end - at the precise moment the escape vehicle makes itself available - where the game descends into a complete free-for-all: an overwhelming zombie horde looms on the horizon, and all you need to do is forget about everybody else and run as fast as you can to safety.

Tension is further added to the finale sequences, and the game as a whole, by the game’s special infected monsters. The game cues their appearance with audio and visual signals, but their appearance causes panic during a campaign’s final throes because of their ability to shove and yank survivors away from their established formations. And maintaining formation is the key to success. To make matters worse, every finale demands the players fight two impossibly large, hulking behemoth Tank monsters, who can take out a player in a single enraged clobber, and as the game announces their arrival by playing their distinctive music it’s hard not to close your eyes for a second and hope you make your way out of the imminent encounter alive. Whenever the Tank fails to notice your presence in favour of one of your supposed colleagues, there is always a temptation to go and hide in a cupboard and leave it to everyone else to sort out.

That’s the emotional power of each and every one of Left 4 Dead’s finale sequences. No matter how many times you experience them, they always maintain their power to cause immense distress. And that guarantees consistently fantastic endings.