The Last Man to Play 'The Last of Us'

[Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us: Part I]

I did not like The Last of Us when I first gave it a shot. I missed the initial wave of fandom when Sony first released the game back in 2013 for the PlayStation 3. The game was the newest release from Naughty Dog, the studio behind the Uncharted series, which I had found somewhat underwhelming (games that had enjoyable storytelling, but bland gameplay that largely consisted of moving between ledges, shooting behind chest-high walls, and quick time events1). To see that they were moving into horror, which already isn't my go-to genre, especially for video games where I’m a big old scaredy cat, didn’t really spur my interest.

However, I finally decided to give it a chance last year by playing the remastered PlayStation 4 version. I clocked out pretty early. The post-apocalyptic setting was a bummer, and even though I was playing the game on “normal” difficulty, I kept getting killed by zombies that are highly sensitive to sound. I’m already a little dubious on stealth gameplay2, so I figured that maybe this just wasn’t for me.

But late this year, the folks behind the game made a persuasive one-two punch. The first was that Naughty Dog had remade the game from the ground up for the PlayStation 5, my shiny new console that I’m enjoying immensely. The second is that there’s an HBO series on the way, and since I was interested in the show, I figured I should probably give the game a shot, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a shiny new version of the game. I am a sucker.

What Is The Last of Us?

The Last of Us is a third-person action adventure game. You play Joel (voiced by Troy Baker), a grizzled smuggler living in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland that was overrun by zombies twenty years ago. You lost your teenage daughter Sarah in the early days of the pandemic (you see this happen in the prologue and it’s pretty harrowing), and now your only priority is survival. Your new mission is protecting Ellie (Ashley Johnson), a 14-year-old girl who may hold the key to a vaccine against infection. Over the course of the story, you must get Ellie from Boston into the hands of the resistance fighters who can potentially make a cure.

Whenever I describe the game, I’m reminded of Kumail Nanjiani describing the experience of playing the similarly downbeat Heavy Rain:

(“Sixty dollars I pay!” is a common refrain in the Goldberg household when either I or my wife—and lets be real; it’s mostly me—decides to spend money on a piece of entertainment that doesn’t sound particularly entertaining)

But I decided to give it another go. I got the PlayStation 5 version so it looked as fancy as possible. I set the difficulty to the easiest mode so I could enjoy it mainly for the story that everyone raved about, and then I started again. And I liked it! I liked this stone-cold bummer of a game!

Beauty in the Decay

The Last of Us is grim. The prologue where a soldier shoots you and your daughter, and then you flash forward twenty years into a fascist hellscape overrun with zombies is not a place you want to be. But that being said, there are all kinds of stories where I wouldn’t personally want to go there, but I find the narrative compelling. What’s more, the narrative isn’t simply trying to atone for the loss of Sarah by protecting Ellie. Instead, the game asks difficult questions about the nature of living vs. surviving.

Naughty Dog created an unforviging landscape. If the zombies don’t get you, then humans will. In a world where resources are scarce (something that factors into the gameplay since you can’t simply shoot your way through every scenario; stealth matters because it saves bullets), people get desperate, and civilization falls away. You have to be a killer because if you’re not, someone will kill you. Naughty Dog keeps you barely on the side of the angels by having you protect Ellie, but even at one point Joel acknowledges that in the past twenty years, he’s been on both side of an ambush. To call Joel a “hero” would be a stretch, and the game knows this as it comes to its conclusion.

(There are major spoilers ahead, so if I’ve piqued your interest in the game, stop reading and give it a go)

At the climax of the game, Joel gets Ellie to the resistance only to learn that the only way to possibly extract the vaccine from her infection is to kill her. The whole narrative of The Last of Us has been a love story; not a romantic one, but a familial one between a surrogate father and daughter. These are two people who have lost people they’ve loved and learned to love each other, and now Joel is faced with a disturbing proposition: there’s a chance to save the world, but it will mean killing the person he loves the most.

Joel doesn’t really dwell on it. He rescues Ellie from the hospital and kills anyone who gets in his way, including the leader of the resistance. Since Ellie had been unconscious for this whole thing due to the anesthesia, she has no idea that getting the vaccine from her would have meant her death; furthermore, her survivor’s guilt probably would have pushed her to giving her life for even the chance of a cure. But Joel can’t let her go, and so he lies to her and says that the resistance had encountered other people like her and failed to find a cure, so they had given up. When pressed by Ellie about this, Joel commits to the lie.

This is where the brutal honesty of The Last of Us sets itself apart from other post-apocalyptic narratives. It’s not simply the bleak view that humanity regresses to a primal, brutal nature when civilization is stripped away. It’s that even in the best of times, we can’t perceive the totality of humanity. The way we process humanity is in those closest to us. We can understand there’s a whole world of people out there in the abstract, but we don’t perceive that logically. It may be logical that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but the bonds of our humanity don’t work that way.

The whole game is geared towards the idea of surviving vs. living, and those two concepts become intertwined at the end as Joel realizes that he couldn’t keep living if he lost Ellie. The last of his humanity would be stripped away, and he would be no better than the zombies or scavengers. The game is about how the last shreds of humanity matter a great deal when there’s not much humanity left in the world.