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Road-Tripping Through a Post-Apocalyptic America in “The Last of Us”

By Inkoo Kang

Joel and Ellie hiding in an abandoned building

In the post-apocalyptic diseasescape of the new dramatic thriller “The Last of Us,” on HBO, survivors are offered the choice between a regimented existence in scattered quarantine zones under a repressive police state and near-certain death beyond their borders. Inside the government’s densely patrolled walls, it’s believed that only the nihilistic sort—slavers, marauders, terrorists—would risk infection by the creatures that wiped out civilization two decades ago: mutated parasitic fungi called cordyceps, which hijack their human hosts and turn them into zombies. The infected, who slowly hybridize with the parasites to become more impervious, may well be ineradicable as a species. When the mutation is first discovered, in Jakarta, a petrified mycologist advises, “Bomb this city and everyone in it.”

Cities were shelled in an effort to stamp out the cordyceps, and small towns were replaced by mass graves. A fascination with panicked brutality links “The Last of Us,” co-created by Craig Mazin, to his previous series, “ Chernobyl .” On the autumn night in 2003 that the cordyceps arrive in Austin, a construction worker named Joel (Pedro Pascal) attempts to flee in a truck with his teen-age daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), and his younger brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna). He denies help to a young family stranded on the side of a road and is soon repaid exponentially for his hard-heartedness when a soldier is instructed via walkie-talkie, with no explanation, to execute Sarah. In the present day, Joel, now a skilled smuggler, plans to break out of a Massachusetts quarantine zone with his partner, Tess (a soulful Anna Torv), and head to Wyoming in search of Tommy. The pair are reluctantly convinced by the new order’s resistance movement—whose leader Tess scornfully calls “the Che Guevara of Boston”—to transport a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsay), to a scientific base out West. Immune to the cordyceps, she may hold the key to a vaccine. (If such a breakthrough comes to pass, one can imagine a second season of the show that contends with the characters’ bafflement at the widespread mistrust of a lifesaving jab.)

Genre-savvy and satisfyingly tense, “The Last of Us” is adapted with affectionate but not deferential fidelity from the 2013 video game of the same name. Neil Druckmann, who wrote and co-directed the award-winning third-person shooter, created the TV series with Mazin. I have never played The Last of Us, and, for viewers justifiably leery of video-game adaptations, one of the highest compliments I can pay the show is that I wouldn’t have guessed that Joel and Ellie’s mordant, spiritedly macabre adventures first began in pixelated form. (Provocatively, a late sequence structured like a conventional shooter game makes us reconsider the morality of the gunman.) Audiences unfamiliar with the source material are more likely to be reminded of other popular series. “Game of Thrones” is an obvious influence, not just in the casting of the two leads, who played fan favorites on the medieval-fantasy juggernaut, but in its character-driven stakes and seductive evocations of brute force as a sometimes necessary evil. “ Station Eleven ,” the defiantly optimistic portrait of a Shakespearean theatre troupe wayfaring through a post-pandemic Midwest, is another precursor, in images if not in tone; the Ozymandian sights of nature’s reclamations in “The Last of Us”—ducks and frogs swimming blithely in a flooded hotel lobby, or a herd of roaming giraffes seemingly escaped from a zoo—conjure that same beauty of perseverance amid desolation.

Mazin and Druckmann eventually carve out their own niche between the relative sunniness of “Station Eleven” and the self-conscious grimness and shock-for-shock’s-sake violence of, say, “ The Walking Dead .” The show’s rough-hewn center is the surrogate father-daughter bond between Joel and Ellie, but the series works best as an anthropological travelogue of post-catastrophe subcultures, teasing out the disparate ways that survivors rebuild mini-societies and create new alignments of power.

Between the monomaniacal militias and the self-cannibalizing cults, a deserted preschool classroom, constructed underground, stands as a brightly muraled testament to the blind hope that many parents still nursed for their children, while a heavily guarded commune risks the messy ideals of equality and coöperation even in the face of existential peril. These long detours are often accompanied by rather moving vignettes centered on minor characters. An early highlight is Bill (Nick Offerman), a smugly paranoid, hyper-competent prepper who relishes the mostly unpestered solitude of near-extinction, until the arrival of a hungry trespasser (Murray Bartlett) forces him to grapple with the loneliness he’s tried to deny. Scott Shepherd is as terrifying as any of the spore-heads in his role as a soft-voiced pastor who preys on his followers’ need for solace and guidance. A peevish husband and wife in their silver years, isolated in a snowy hinterland, illustrate the inevitability that, in the end, nothing endures but cockroaches and bickering old couples.

The sole disappointment among these secondary figures is played by Melanie Lynskey, who turns in perhaps the first bad performance of her career as Kathleen, a rebel leader fixated on revenge. An underwritten character created for the series, Kathleen serves as a cautionary tale for Joel—grief transformed them both into stronger, sharper, and, in many ways, baser versions of themselves. With Ellie, Joel is offered a path toward redemption, as well as a chance to become more than the sum of his gruff heroics. He’s still the dutiful dad who sacrificed neighbors and strangers alike to protect his daughter. The series, like the game, asks when that patriarchal protectiveness—the subject not only of this story but of so many cinematic masculine fantasies—verges on something darker.

But “The Last of Us” does lightness just as well, and it is that willingness to embrace the full humanity of its characters, including their ardor for material comforts, that gives the series its earthy relatability, despite Joel’s laughable spryness as a fiftysomething roughneck and Ellie’s gothic childhood as an orphan in a post-apocalyptic military school. When Joel and Ellie pack provisions from a rare well-stocked home, she makes sure to prioritize toilet paper—a big improvement from the pages of old magazines. There’s a refreshing honesty to the show’s approach to menstrual needs, too, not least in the “Fuck yeah!” that Ellie exclaims, stumbling upon an ancient box of Tampax in an abandoned store. The show’s occasionally clunky dialogue hampers the formation of an organic through line for Joel and Ellie’s relationship, but the scenes of mutual teasing, or of Joel’s recollections of what the world was like before, feel as crucial as the ones in which they save each other’s life for the umpteenth time. Passing the shattered remains of a downed plane, Ellie marvels at the thought of human flight, an experience that Joel tells her felt far from miraculous. Later, seizing the opportunity to shape her ideas of the past, he reassures her about his own former line of work: “Everybody loved contractors.” Acting opposite an understated Pascal, the button-eyed Ramsay shines as the shrewd but sheltered Ellie, a snarky, friendless teen desperate to find a worthy target of her loving mockery.

The expansive imaginings of survivalist adaptations are matched by the production’s eerie visual allure, not least in the marine pulchritude of the cordyceps’ character design. Multicolored fungi bloom across the faces of the infected, leaving intact the mouths and teeth with which they attack, as they join a teeming, growing army that appears to know no natural death, and only lies dormant, waiting. For all the narrative’s graceful swerves and clever surprises, its greatest reveal may be that the characters find reasons to go on despite the immense evolutionary advantages of their predators and the realization of our most savage instincts. ♦

An earlier version of this article misattributed the description of a resistance leader as “the Che Guevara of Boston.”

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The Last of Us: Gender in a Post-Apocalyptic World

by Benedetta Fabris

April 4, 2023

House of Dragon , The White Lotus , and, now, The Last of Us… HBO is on a roll lately, churning out success after success. Based on the 2013 video game produced by Naughty Dog for Sony PlayStation, The Last of Us takes place during a zombie apocalypse. But it’s not really about the zombies—it’s about humanity. And though this is the premise of many apocalyptic narratives (think of The Walking Dead ), The Last of Us is one of the few instances when it turns out to be true.

Twenty years after a fungal infection has turned most of the population into zombies, Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler, is assigned a special task: transporting fourteen-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to the anti-government group Fireflies. Why? Ellie might be the key to developing a cure for the infection, as she appears to be immune to the Cordyceps fungus. As he reluctantly accompanies her on this journey, fighting off zombies (or “infected”, as they call them) and humans alike, Joel goes from viewing Ellie as mere cargo to caring for her as he did for the daughter he lost.

How does The Last of Us portray male and female gender roles?

Now, my feminist zillennal brain might be reading too much into it, but I find that the interesting question addressed by The Last of Us and other post-apocalyptic narratives is the following: if gender is a social construct (as argued not only by feminist theory but by the World Health Organization ) what happens when society as we know it collapses?

The short answer is things get a lot worse. Masculinity seems to thrive in a post-apocalyptic world that calls for violence, strength, and rationality–all values that are gendered as male, as opposed to nurturance, tenderness, and emotionality, which are signifiers of femininity. Joel embodies all the characteristics of the stereotypical male action hero: hardened by his tragic past, he is emotionally detached, brave, and physically strong. He keeps his word, and resorts to ruthless violence to survive and reach his goals. He takes on protecting Ellie to keep his promise to his friend and smuggling partner Tess (Anna Torv), but he stubbornly refuses to care for her and makes himself emotionally vulnerable.

As for the female characters, both Tess and Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), the leader of the Kansas City rebels, are strong and successful in a traditionally masculine way. The only way they can make it in the post-apocalyptic world of The Last of Us is by aligning their values and their behaviors with hegemonic masculinity—as expressions of femininity would make them weak. Yet, despite their efforts, both Tess and Kathleen are ultimately unsuccessful: they end up being brutally killed (and violated, in Tess’s case, through a “clicker kiss” ).

So, post-apocalyptic society sounds just like our society, on steroids. Our world, or today’s Western, privileged world, deems femininity as weak and inferior, while masculine qualities are not merely exalted, but necessary in order to survive. Even with zombies roaming the streets, the patriarchy still stands.

However, as the show progresses, we see Joel’s character undergo a transformation. As he bonds with Ellie, he displays compassion and empathy. He is given a second chance at being a father figure, and to tap into that tender, caring nature he had buried down deep after the death of his daughter. It is perhaps his weakness, but it is also what gives him purpose.

Frank and Bill's love story in The Last of Us defies expectations

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), who broke the internet with their sweet, heartbreaking love story. While in the game we only briefly meet Bill after Frank’s death and the nature of their relationship is only implied, the show dedicates a whole self-contained episode to the couple. Titled “Long Long Time”, fans and critics alike highly praised episode three, with Victoria Ritvo calling it “a masterpiece in its own right” .

When we first meet Bill, he’s a survivalist who waits for the military to evacuate his town before turning it into a self-sufficient fortress, surrounded by electric fences and booby traps. Like Joel, everything about him screams “macho action hero who needs no one”. Enter Frank, a passerby who falls into one of his traps. Bill reluctantly lets Frank into his home and into his heart and discovers that it’s possible to live, not merely survive, even when the world is crashing and burning. Together, they transform Bill’s solitary fortress into a safe haven, where they can cook, sing, paint, water plants, grow strawberries, love, and die on their own terms. "I'm old, I'm satisfied, and you were my purpose,” Bill tells Frank, revealing he’s not willing to go on living without him.

In a world where stereotypically masculine qualities seem necessary to survive, Bill and Frank shattered gender stereotypes and were the happiest of them all. And if that doesn’t say something about our own society…

Entertainment
HBO’s <i>The Last of Us</i> Adaptation Is Astonishingly Well Made—But Something’s Missing

HBO’s The Last of Us Adaptation Is Astonishingly Well Made—But Something’s Missing

I n a vignette that opens the second episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic epic The Last of Us , a professor of mycology is eating lunch in a Jakarta restaurant when two military types whisk her away mid-bite. Transported to a government lab, she inspects the corpse of a factory worker whose body is now host to a writhing, bloodthirsty fungus. When she learns that the source of the human bite that caused the dead woman’s infection remains unknown, the scientist starts to shake; the teacup in her hand rattles against its saucer. One officer begs her to help them make a medicine or a vaccine. But she knows that a cure would be impossible. Saving humanity, says the genteel academic, will require mass murder: “Bomb this city and everyone in it.”

It’s one of many chilling moments in a series, premiering Jan. 15, whose predominant moods are tense, mournful, and unnerving. And while almost all of the action in The Last of Us takes place halfway around the world from Indonesia, in the United States, the professor’s lethal prescription sets the tone for a story whose characters are constantly forced to choose between protecting themselves and their loved ones, and making existential sacrifices for the good of a plague-ravaged society. Based on the acclaimed video game franchise and created by the game’s mastermind, Neil Druckmann, and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin, the show is by turns gorgeous and harrowing, brutal and warm. From the performances to the storytelling to the aesthetic elements, it’s an exquisitely made adaptation. But it also asks viewers to absorb a whole lot of human misery without saying much that we haven’t already heard in similar shows.

The plot is a pastiche of familiar post-apocalyptic survival narratives, though not one that too closely resembles any particular predecessor. In the show’s alternate-reality 2003, climate change catalyzes a mutation in the terrifying Cordyceps fungus that allows it to take over the human body, essentially transforming its victims into deadly zombies. Within a week of its discovery in Indonesia, the brain-colonizing affliction spreads around the globe, causing chaos, violence, the collapse of society, and the demise of the vast majority of the human race. You know the drill: one minute the frequency of ambulance sirens is a cause for mild concern; the next, people are fighting mushroom monsters who used to be their next-door neighbors.

Although we meet one of two protagonists, a contractor and single father named Joel ( Pedro Pascal ), just before the plague decimates his home state of Texas, most of the show takes place two decades later. Joel has made his way to Boston, where he and his partner Tess (Anna Torv) work as smugglers—a dangerous job in a ruined, walled-off city controlled by a fascist government, FEDRA, that condemns even the pettiest of criminals to public execution. Apolitical survivors by nature, the couple is gearing up for a risky trek to Wyoming, in search of Joel’s idealistic brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), when they become entangled in the machinations of a righteous, militant rebel faction, the Fireflies. The group’s leader, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), cuts a deal with them to escort a young woman who could hold the key to humanity’s future.

Fourteen-year-old Ellie ( Game of Thrones breakout Bella Ramsey ) is a headstrong, independent orphan with a remarkable secret: she is, as far as anyone can tell, the only person who’s been bitten by a zombie without being infected. If she can make it to a laboratory out west, where Firefly scientists are conducting crucial research, she might be able to help develop the cure that seemed impossible 20 years earlier. But the journey won’t be easy; networks of corpse-powered fungi still lie in wait for fresh blood, and the humans who’ve lived through the past few decades are a pretty cutthroat bunch. Further complicating things is Ellie’s delicate relationship with Joel, who’s grown hardened and gruff since losing a daughter her age in 2003.

As they travel west together, following a trajectory that supposedly hews quite closely to that of the game, Druckmann and Mazin carve out space to tell the stories of the people our heroes encounter. There’s an idyllic gated commune and a Christian cult on the verge of starvation. The closer these digressions get to individual characters, the less generic they feel. In Kansas City, a grieving community leader ( Melanie Lynskey ) launches a scorched-earth quest to destroy a man (Lamar Johnson) who betrayed her in an effort to save his own leukemia-stricken kid brother (Keivonn Woodard). A bittersweet vignette that comprises most of the season’s best episode casts Nick Offerman as a misanthropic survivalist who builds a relatively luxurious fortress around himself and then accidentally booby-traps the perfect person (Murray Bartlett) to share it with him.

Smartly cast and evocatively written, these side stories effectively evoke an emotional response. (Criers, be warned.) Even the surrogate parent-child bond that inevitably develops between Joel and Ellie transcends cliché thanks to the performances. Liberated from his Mandalorian mask, Pascal tempers Joel’s stoicism with glimpses of tenderness; you can see his protective-dad muscle memory kicking in despite his insistence that he sees Ellie as mere cargo. Alternately plucky, goofy, heartbreakingly naive and, necessarily, mature beyond her years, Ramsey’s sensitive portrayal of her orphaned character might be the show’s greatest asset.

Equally impressive is the visual world Druckmann and Mazin import from the game. Created in consultation with concept artists at the Last of Us ’ developer, Naughty Dog—and financed with a massive budget that reportedly topped $100 million for the eight-episode debut season—the series’ backdrops vary widely but share a distinctive patina of post-apocalyptic decay. Each infected body has its own freakish, human-mushroom hybrid features, and the patterns that the fungus makes as it creeps across walls and floors and furniture are at once beguiling and nauseating. Now that so much of what we see on the big and small screens has a vaguely unreal aspect imparted by the overuse of computerized effects, it’s a particular pleasure to see a video-game adaptation that’s genuinely cinematic, immersing us in the majesty of snow-covered mountains at one moment and the grimy details of an abandoned shopping mall the next.

The Last of Us is so skillfully, meticulously, and lovingly constructed—to call it TV’s best video-game adaptation would be to damn it with faint praise—that it was tempting to ignore the question that nagged at me throughout each episode: What’s the point? It’s not that the characters’ motivations are muddled, or that the central dilemma of self vs. society isn’t explored in enough depth. But that moral conflict, which resonated with so many fans of the game, isn’t exactly novel in this medium. There have been so many post-apocalyptic dramas in recent years: The Walking Dead franchise, Sweet Tooth , The Rain , Snowpiercer , The 100 , Y: The Last Man . Just about all of them touch on similar themes. The very best examples, like HBO’s own The Leftovers and HBO Max’s Station Eleven , don’t just ask whether the ends of one person’s survival justify the means; they conjure unique visions of spirituality, art, and love influenced by the ordeal of living through the end of the world. Each can be wrenching at times, but both leave viewers with profound ideas about what it means to be a person in precarious times.

I don’t know that The Last of Us has comparable insight to offer. Having never played the game, I can only imagine that the meaning-shaped hole in its otherwise robust story is something players fill with their own simulated but still, in a sense, firsthand experiences of embodying Joel and Ellie. A game that interrogates your ethics is a game that teaches you about yourself. In the form of beautifully rendered, often devastating TV, the effect is less illuminating and more masochistic. What’s the point of putting yourself through so much vicarious suffering, at a time when everyday life offers plenty of the real thing, if you’re not going to come out the other side any wiser?

Correction, Jan. 11

The original version of this story misstated the relationship between characters played by Lamar Johnson and Keivonn Woodard. Woodard plays Johnson’s younger brother, not his son.

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What Makes the Prologue from ‘The Last of Us’ So Effective

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores the terrifying prologue HBO’s The Last of Us.

I don’t know if y’all have heard, but this The Last of Us show is getting some prrrrretty good reviews . So much for that whole “ live-action video game adaptation curse ,” huh?

Like Naughty Dog’s 2013 video game of the same name, the TV show follows Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they make their way through the United States, now an overgrown wasteland in the wake of a fungal infection that has turned much of humanity into violent husks of their former selves, piloted by fungal hosts.

One of the aspects of the HBO show that folks have latched onto is its grim cold open. Rather than launching us into the tragic 2003 outbreak, which is seared into the minds of fans of the game, the show takes us back to a talk show in the 1960s. There, a panel of scientists responds to the possibility of a viral pandemic. One of their number (John Hannah) clarifies that his real fear is the possibility of a fungal pandemic that wouldn’t just lay out humanity but alter what it means to be human.

For a closer look at what makes the cold open in The Last of Us so good, sneak a peek at the video essay below.

Watch “THE LAST OF US: The Scariest Scene Isn’t The One You Think”

Who made this?

This video essay on why the scariest scene in HBO’s “The Last of Us” is by Adam Tinius , who runs the YouTube channel Entertain the Elk . They are based in Pasadena, California. You can follow them on YouTube here . And you can follow them on Twitter here .

The Last of Us: Power of Narrative Through Exploration

Categories: Sony Video Games

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Published: Aug 4, 2023

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Introduction, narrative in the last of us, key mechanics in the last of us, works cited.

Naughty Dog. The Last of Us. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013.

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All Tech Considered

Reading the game, reading the game: the last of us.

Jason Sheehan

The Last of Us is as much about the bonds between Joel and his surrogate daughter Ellie as it is about their post-fungal-apocalypse world. Sony/Naughty Dog hide caption

The Last of Us is as much about the bonds between Joel and his surrogate daughter Ellie as it is about their post-fungal-apocalypse world.

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game , in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.

I played the game through the first time in something like a perfect state of awe and terror. Enraptured is, I think, the word that best describes it. Carried away completely into this ruined, beautiful world and the story of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Normally such a completionist — so obsessed with exploring every hide and hollow in these imaginary worlds I throw myself into — in this instance I simply rolled with the narrative. Ran when running was proper. Slogged through dark and rain and snow and sunshine. Stood my bloody ground when left with no other options.

Joel came to love Ellie, his surrogate daughter, and Ellie came to love Joel, the only father she'd ever known. And I (a father, with a daughter roughly Ellie's age, with Ellie's four-letter vocabulary and Ellie's strange, discordant humor) loved Ellie, too. So when I reached the endgame and was presented with a terrible choice (no spoilers ... yet), I drew my guns and slaughtered my way to the end credits, alight with fury and sure knowledge that I'd made the only choice I could.

Second run: The beats are all the same, the story a known thing. Joel and Ellie fight zombies and soldiers and bandits and madmen. They lose friends and see sunrises and, this time, I play with an awful wisdom. Cassandra's curse. I know how this story ends and I have made up my mind that, this time, I will make the other choice. The right one (morally, mathematically, humanistically), and so I walk with ghosts the whole way, right up to the end, and then ...

And then I make the exact same choice again. I can't make the other. It hurts too much. Because that is how good the storytelling is in The Last Of Us. It makes you care so deeply for a smart-ass bunch of pixels in the shape of a teenage girl that you will damn the whole world twice just for her.

(OK, so now we're gonna get spoilery. Fair warning.)

Reading The Game: No Man's Sky

The Last Of Us is a zombie story. It is incredibly derivative, borrows liberally from a hundred different books and movies, is structurally simplistic, trope-heavy, melodramatic, viscerally violent, and despite all this (or, arguably, because of all this) tells one of the most moving, affecting and satisfying stories you'll find anywhere. At its heart, it is the story of Joel — a broken and hard-hearted thief and smuggler living 20 years deep into a zombie apocalypse. He and his partner, Tess, are forced into a job that requires them to smuggle a young girl out of the Boston quarantine zone and deliver her to an army of revolutionaries because, of course, this girl is The One — the only person ever to be immune to the spore/virus that turns infected people into gross, murderous mushroom zombies. That young girl is Ellie. And, unsurprisingly, the job does not exactly go as planned.

If this all sounds familiar, that's fine because it is familiar. The story -story is a stock frame — tested and dependable. It is a road trip story in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is, or Mad Max: Fury Road . Go from point A to point B, survive the journey, get there whole. And there's nothing at all wrong with a simple narrative architecture when it is being used to support complex character arcs, as it is here. The Last Of Us is a simple road trip story underneath, existing in service to the complex and rich redemption story on top.

All the stakes and ruination are laid out in the first 10 minutes, in a prologue so powerful that it'll break your heart even if you don't have one. Joel loses his daughter on the night the world ends, his little girl dying in his arms, under the gun of a panicked soldier trying to hold back the infected. When Ellie floats into his life two decades later, the jaded gamer in you says, Oh, so here's where he learns to love again. ... And you're right.

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Exploring the 'universe' in a video game.

But then you watch it happen — in tiny moments like when Ellie, blowing off caution, walks a rickety plank between two buildings and Joel glances briefly down at the watch he wears, a gift from his daughter that he's been wearing for 20 years — and you participate in it happening (protecting her, defending her, eventually becoming her for an extended chunk of the game in a brilliant bit of perspective switching), and it all just clicks. This is a love story — one of the best parent-and-child narratives ever told.

Which is when that ending comes and you are presented with the ultimate parental nightmare scenario: Will you sacrifice the life of your child to save the world? Not a stranger, a friend or even a spouse, but your own daughter (which is what Ellie is now — Joel's daughter, blood or no). Because in Ellie lives the cure to the mushroom zombie plague. But in order to create it, she has to die.

I started a third playthrough before writing this piece. I am walking slow, taking my time, listening to Ellie read from her joke book, watching her swarmed by fireflies on the outskirts of Boston and admiring the natural beauty and deep environmental storytelling of the game. Nature has reclaimed most of this abandoned world, giving us an unusual apocalypse run riot with wildflowers. And while I have not made it to the end yet, I know it's coming. I know the choice I'm going to have to make.

And I know exactly what I'm going to do.

Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

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The Last of Us: Every Major Difference Between the Game and the Show

The first season of HBO's The Last of Us largely stayed true to the game, but a few significant differences threw fans for a loop.

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This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us HBO show and The Last of Us Part 1 game.

The Last of Us first season is finally over. While many predicted that the show had the potential to be the finest live-action adaptation of a video game ever, it really was remarkable to see all the ways the show successfully adapted the game’s legendary story . Of course, as with all adaptations, there are some major differences between the HBO series and its source material.

While you’ll find a list of those differences below, keep in mind that we’re emphasizing the word “major.” That means this article doesn’t reference things like different camera shots, different actors, or even slightly different dialog sequences. Instead, we’ve primarily focused on changes that either impacted The Last of Us ‘ overall narrative (or specific character arcs) in significant ways or notably altered a memorable event from the game. If you spot any significant changes you think we missed, though, let us know about them in the comments.

The Last of Us Episode 1: “When You’re Lost in the Darkness” Differences

The talk show opening.

The very first scene in HBO’s The Last of Us is unique to the TV series.

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Whereas the game’s opening takes us back to the early days of the Cordyceps infection (more on that in a bit), the show goes even further back in time than that. It opens with a snippet from a fictional 1968 TV program in which a host discusses global apocalyptic scenarios with two researchers (always a pleasant bit of programming). During that panel, one of the researchers suggests that the greatest threat to humanity is actually a fungal infection accelerated by global warming (though those words aren’t used). As you probably know, that suggestion turned out to be tragically prophetic.

The showrunners have previously stated that they felt this intro helped set the stage by informing viewers that the people in this show were aware of that threat on a least some level before it actually happened. The team said they were originally going to utilize a David Attenborough-style opening, but felt that the roundtable format was a bit sleeker and more entertaining. As we’ll soon see, this was just one of the many ways the show added new material to the game in the name of worldbuilding.

The Timeline Changes

As we’ve previously discussed, The Last of Us ’ pilot episode quickly establishes that the show follows a slightly different timeline from the games. Whereas the game opened in 2013 before jumping to the apocalyptic future of 2033, the show opens in 2003 before eventually jumping to 2023. The timeline changes ultimately don’t have a major impact on the rest of the series (aside from some additional 2003-specific references), though the 2023 timeline does hammer home the idea that we’re looking at an alternate timeline rather than a vision of 2033 that could yet come to pass.

We See a Lot More of Sarah

While The Last of Us HBO series does a remarkable job of recreating the game’s incredible introduction sequence, the HBO version of that incredible opening features significantly more scenes with Sarah. The show allows us to spend much more time with Sarah and witness a pretty typical day in her life (albeit during some quickly escalating circumstances), which arguably makes her eventual fate hit that much harder.

Tess and Joel’s Relationship Is Much More Obvious

This is a slightly smaller change, but it’s worth noting that the show implies that there is more of a romantic (or at least sexual) relationship between Tess and Joel than the game did. Most notably, we clearly see Tess crawling into bed with Joel and embracing him. While you could argue that the game also leaves you with the impression that Tess and Joel are more than just friends or partners in crime, the show emphasizes that Joel is still looking for someone to love at the end of the world despite his hardened exterior.

How the Cordyceps Infection Spreads

This is another one of those changes that run throughout the series, but The Last of Us ’ pilot episode quickly establishes (in various ways) that the Corydycpes infection in the show generally spreads via direct contact with the infected rather than through the spores that were such a major threat in the game. The showrunners discussed their reasons for that change before the series’ pilot even aired, and the decision to make the actual act of infection a little more “personal” would pop up in various ways throughout the show (some of which we’ll discuss in a bit).

Tommy Is Missing

Strangely, The Last of Us show reveals that Joel had lost contact with Tommy quite some time ago (despite the two speaking regularly before that), whereas the game suggests that the two simply don’t talk that much anymore. It’s not entirely clear why the show implies that Tommy may be “missing,” though we some minor ramifications of that alternation in future episodes.

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The Last of Us Episode 2: “Infected” Differences

The scientist opening.

Much like the pilot, The Last of Us ’ second episode opens with a show-specific sequence that takes us back in time. This time, though, we go to the earliest days of the Cordyceps infection and follow a scientist in Jakarta who learns of the nature of the outbreak and reveals that there is little else that can be done at this point outside of bombing the city.

This new sequence accomplishes two key things. First off, it furthers the show’s message that the outbreak was a global crisis whereas the game focused more on the U.S. (though a global outbreak was certainly implied in the games). Second, it suggests that Jakarta was the apparent starting point of the infection whereas the games were always a little more ambiguous regarding the exact origins of the outbreak. In general, this is one of the many ways that the show directly reveals things that the game only hinted at or simply never said.

Ellie’s Bite

In The Last of Us game, Joel and Tess are convinced that Ellie is immune after they see her breathe in deadly Cordyceps spores and remain miraculously uninfected. Since the show doesn’t utilize those spores, we instead see Ellie get bit yet again, which eventually helps convince Joel and Tess that she’s the real deal. It’s a logistical change that gets us to relatively the same place via a slightly different route.

Tess’ Death

In The Last of Us game, Tess is killed by FEDRA soldiers that have been pursuing the trio since they left the quarantine zone. In the show, Tess is killed by a horde of infected (though she manages to take quite a few infected out with her before dying).

As we’ve previously discussed , this change can likely be attributed to a few things. First off, the showrunners felt that it just didn’t make sense for FEDRA soldiers to pursue Joel, Tess, and Ellie so far into Boston. As we’ll discuss later, it’s also possible that the showrunners also wanted to portray FEDRA as a slightly more morally ambiguous organization rather than de facto bad guys.

This change also allows Tess to go out in a blaze of glory rather than simply die in a gunfight against seemingly impossible odds. More importantly, having Tess be killed by the infected rather than FEDRA allowed this episode to establish another important change to the functionality and social structure of the infected.

The Cordyceps’ Kiss/Connections

Early into The Last of Us ’ second episode, we watch as Joel, Tess, and Ellie observe a massive horde of infected from a seemingly safe distance. It’s here that we learn that these larger populations of infected are essentially connected via a fungal network that allows them to detect humans from across great distances and communicate with each other. The implication is that the infected have a strange kind of “society” that allows them to work together more effectively than the survivors often do.

Another lore change to the infected’s functionality occurs during Tess’ aforementioned death scene. Right before she blows up most of the pursuing infected horde, a lone infected host corners Tess and essentially tries to “kiss” her with tendrils in order to infect her. That kiss is yet another example of the show altering the portrayal of the infection process to make it more horrifyingly intimate.

The Last of Us Episode 3: “Long, Long Time” Differences

The source of the infection.

Early into The Last of Us ’ third episode, we see Joel and Ellie walking along the countryside and observing some remnants of the world that was. Ellie asks Joel how all of this happened, and Joel theorizes that the infection may have spread globally via contaminated food products (specifically, bread and flour-based products).

Joel admits that nobody alive probably knows exactly what happened, though his theory seemingly confirms an early fan theory about the show. After all, in The Last of Us ’ pilot episode, we see Sarah and Joel avoid eating a suspicious number of bread products on the day the infection spread. To be fair, fans of the game had also previously theorized that the infection’s spread was likely related to food.

Mortal Kombat

As Joel and Ellie are heading toward Bill and Frank’s house, they stop off to explore an abandoned gas station. The gas station secretly harbors a cache of supplies that Joel had previously hidden away, but the real prize in Ellie’s mind is a broken Mortal Kombat 2 arcade cabinet. In the game, that isn’t a Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet but rather a cabinet for a fictional fighting game called The Turning .

It’s a minor change all things considered, though the show would eventually revisit Mortal Kombat in ways that make that game’s first post-apocalyptic appearance feel slightly more significant than it did in that moment.

Pretty Much the Entire Frank and Bill Story

While many viewers (ourselves included) have already discussed the many ways that the Bill and Frank storyline in episode three diverges from the game, it really is worth noting that this episode represents the biggest departure from The Last of Us game by some distance.

Simply put, Bill is not only dead by the time Joel and Ellie find him in The Last of Us show (which is a major change in and of itself) but the majority of this episode is devoted to showcasing the relationship between Bill and Frank. Perhaps some of those events could have happened in the game, though we certainly don’t get to see them in the game and Bill and Frank have already split by the time we encounter Bill in the game.

While this almost entirely original episode is arguably the show’s finest accomplishment (though not everyone feels that way), it may eventually become a harbinger for things to come. Now that we’ve recently learned The Last of Us ’ second season will make some major changes to The Last of Us Part 2 , it seems reasonable to expect more episodes like this one moving forward.

The Last of Us Episode 4: “Please Hold to My Hand” Differences

Kansas city in place of pittsburgh.

In The Last of Us game, Joel and Ellie head to Pittsburgh after leaving Bill’s compound. In the show, they instead head to Kansas City. While that change in location doesn’t have a major impact on what happens next (at least not on its own), it’s worth noting that Kansas City is not seen or referenced in the games at all. This is yet another one of those ways that the show emphasizes how far the infection has spread and how much of a world exists beyond what we see in the games.

The Last of Us ’ fourth episode introduces us to Kathleen: the leader of the Kansas City resistance who has more than a few grudges to settle. As you may know, Kathleen doesn’t exist in The Last of Us games. She is instead a kind of amalgamation of different characters and concepts from those games who helps give Joel and Ellie’s human adversaries more of a face and purpose than they previously had at this point in the adventure.

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So, in the interest of keeping things as tidy as possible, any scene with Kathleen is obviously a change from the games. As we’ll soon see, Kathleen’s presence and narrative also create a ripple effect that changes a lot of little things that follow in increasingly significant ways.

Ellie’s Kill

In The Last of Us game, Ellie kills a raider who is attacking Joel. This is the first time we see Ellie kill anyone. In the show, Ellie does stab a raider that is attacking Joel, though Joel ends up killing the wounded raider himself. That change also gives us more time to sit with the pleas and screams of the wounded raider who now seems much more human than he did moments ago.

It’s not entirely clear why this change was made. Perhaps the showrunners didn’t want Ellie outright killing someone so early on, or maybe they just felt this was a good time to showcase Joel’s more ruthless side. In any case, it’s a brief but notable departure from the source material.

The Pit of Infected

Though arguably the smallest change on this list, there is a fascinating scene in this episode that sees Kathleen and her right-hand man Perry overlook what is essentially a pit of infected creatures that seems to be boiling slowly to the surface. This scene doesn’t exist in the game, though its presence here both keeps the infected in the conversation and contributes to the idea that the infected are actually growing more hostile rather than simply rotting away underground.

Henry and Sam’s Intro

In The Last of Us game, Joel and Ellie just kind of run into Henry and Sam while wandering through Pittsburgh. In the show, Henry and Sam sneak up on Joel and Ellie while they’re sleeping. Along with giving Henry and Sam a little more agency , this change also allows this episode to end on an effective cliffhanger.

The Last of Us Episode 5: “Endure and Survive” Differences

Sam is deaf.

Simply put, Sam is deaf in The Last of Us show but seemingly has no hearing problems in The Last of Us game. While Keivonn Woodard (the actor who plays Sam in the show) is also deaf, it’s not clear if this change was made due to casting or if it was another way that the show tries to give Henry and Sam more of a story of their own (which we see play out in several early scenes not present in the game).

No Infected In the Tunnels

In The Last of Us game, Joel, Henry, Sam, and Ellie’s journey through the Pittsburgh underworld is interrupted by a steady stream of infected who block their progress. In the show, the group doesn’t encounter any infected in the tunnels. Henry actually makes it a point to mention that he believes the tunnels are mostly clear of infected (minus some possible stragglers).

It’s another small change that has more of an impact when you weigh it against the previous implication that Kansas City is practically bursting at the seams with infected (as well as what happens next).

Henry Was a FEDRA Informant

In the games, Henry and Sam are just two people trying to survive in the city. In the show, though, we learn that Henry was actually a FEDRA informant whose information led to the death of Kathleen’s brother (and many unfortunate events that followed). Aside from the fact that there is no Kathleen in the game (which also means that Kathleen’s brother doesn’t exist), the biggest reason for this change seems to be the many ways the show tries to highlight the many moral ambiguities and complicated choices people in this world must often face.

The Bloater

Again, pretty much any scene with Kathleen in it is obviously at least slightly different in the show vs. the games, but one of the more interesting changes related to Kathleen occurs when the Kansas City hunters and our group of protagonists face off against a rapidly swarming horde of infected. The horde is seemingly led by a giant infected creature affectionately known as a “Bloater.”

We actually see a Bloater during the Bill section of the game, but he was moved to this portion of the adventure as a way for the team to show that the infected can grow larger and more dangerous over time.

Ellie’s Blood

In one of the most heartbreaking moments in The Last of Us show, Ellie learns that Sam is infected and tries to cure him by rubbing her blood into his wound. The “cure” obviously doesn’t take, which eventually forces Henry to shoot Sam before taking his own life.

While Sam does get infected in the game and is eventually killed by Henry, the scene of Ellie trying to rescue Sam with her blood is a devastating new addition that cleverly showcases that a real cure will be much more complicated than that (if it’s possible to manufacture at all).

The Last of Us Episode 6: “Kin” Differences

The opening scene of this episode represents yet another opening sequence not found in the game.

In that sequence, Joel and Ellie confront an older couple living out in the middle of nowhere whose day-to-day lives were seemingly not greatly impacted by the end of the world. After some persuading, the couple then send Joel and Ellie in the right direction before warning them of a mysterious danger just across the river.

Along with expanding the world of the games just a bit more, this scene plays into Joel’s paranoia that Tommy is not well. That paranoia is not entirely unique to the game, though it’s obviously more pronounced due to some of the changes mentioned above.

Tommy and Maria’s Baby

In both the game and show, Joel discovers that Tommy is actually living a pretty good life for himself in Jackson. He even has a wife named Maria. In the show, though, we learn that Tommy and Maria are expecting a baby. Among other things, that expected child adds weight to Joel’s eventual decision to ask Tommy to risk his life to help Ellie. It also highlights the many ways Joel is slightly pained by Tommy’s ability to make a new life for himself.

Joel’s Panic Attacks

One of The Last of U s show’s most memed moments actually wasn’t in the games. Yes, the games show that Joel is struggling with the decisions he must make in Jackson, but we don’t see him start to have full-on panic attacks as he does in the show. Again, these panic attacks just make Joel’s vulnerabilities and doubts a little more obvious.

Joel’s Breakdown When Talking to Tommy

The scene in the show where Joel asks Tommy to escort Ellie the rest of the way also happens in the game, but the conversation between the brothers plays out slightly differently in the show. For instance, Joel is much more open with Tommy in the show regarding both his fears that he can’t get this job done and the ways he now sees Ellie as so much more than just a package that needs to be delivered. Again, the game heavily implies that Joel has these same concerns but Joel doesn’t outright state his concerns in that game at that moment in the same way he does in the show.

Ellie Stays in Jackson

In The Last of Us game and show, Ellie overhears Joel’s conversation with Tommy. In the game, though, Ellie runs away when she learns that Joel intends to hand her off to Tommy. That leads to Joel finding and confronting Ellie. In the show, though, Ellie just heads back to her room and waits for Tommy to pick her up. Along with showcasing Ellie’s increasingly hardened soul, this change allows the show to move at a slightly brisker pace by skipping the sequence where Joel has to look for Ellie and gets into some trouble along the way.

Joel’s Wound

In both the game and show, Joel is wounded while trying to escape the Eastern Colorado campus. In the show, though, Joel is wounded by a raider. In the game, Joel falls onto a metal rod and must fend off several raiders while his wound worsens. It’s likely the showrunners just wanted to simplify this sequence for runtime purposes. It also would have been hard to recreate the full impact of the in-game version of events given that viewers obviously can’t participate in that shootout the same way they can in the game.

The Last of Us Episode 7: “Left Behind” Differences

There is no mall.

After Joel is wounded, Ellie tries to find the basic supplies needed to keep him alive. In the show, she finds a needle and thread in an abandoned house. In the game, though (or at least the Left Behind DLC), Ellie looks for supplies in a nearby mall filled with raiders she must fend off. The sight of that mall triggers the flashback sequence that follows.

Again, this change was likely made for logistical reasons. Simply put, it’s easier to shoot in a house than it is to find yet another mall set (and film yet another action sequence). It’s also worth noting that Ellie’s flashback in the show is partially triggered by Joel telling her to leave him and go off on her own. The scene where Joel asks Ellie to leave him to die was also not in the game.

Fast Times at FEDRA High

While this episode largely focuses on Ellie’s pre-Joel adventures, the show expands on that portion of her life more than the original Left Behind DLC did. Specifically, it includes a few scenes of Ellie’s time at a FEDRA academy that weren’t included in the games. Those scenes show Ellie being reprimanded for attacking another student while also being reminded that she has the potential to be a leader in FEDRA.

While The Last of Us game does include that sequence where Riley confronts Ellie in their dorm room, the rest of Ellie’s time at the FEDRA academy is unique to the series. It’s an interesting addition to the show that once again portrays FEDRA as more of a morally ambiguous collection of humans than the often slightly more evil organization they often were in the games.

Playing Mortal Kombat 2

As previously mentioned, most of the references to the fictional fighting game The Turning in The Last of Us game were replaced with references to the very real fighting arcade fighting game Mortal Kombat 2 in The Last of Us show. So, when Riley and Ellie play Mortal Kombat 2 during the arcade sequence in that episode, they’re actually playing The Turning in The Last of Us game. However, that’s not the biggest change the show made to this memorable scene.

See, in the game, Riley and Ellie aren’t able to actually play the arcade machine. Instead, Riley asks Ellie to close her eyes and pretend to play the game while she describes it. In the show, they simply power up the arcade machine and finally enjoy a few rounds of Mortal Kombat . Why the change? The official answer to that question is unclear, though the whole idea of Ellie pretending to play the game probably wouldn’t have translated quite as well to the series. Generally speaking, the entire mall sequence in the show is also more colorful and “alive” than it was in the game, and this change feeds into that part of the fantasy.

Riley’s Firefly Station

In The Last of Us show, we learn that Riley has actually been stationed at the mall by the Fireflies. In the game, Riley simply chooses to take Ellie to the mall to celebrate their last night together. It’s not clear why this relatively minor alteration was made, though it likely has something to do with the scene where Ellie and Riley argue about the Firefly’s intentions and their plans for Riley. Learning that Riley has been building bombs in this mall was just a perfect catalyst for that discussion.

A Single Infected Corners Riley and Ellie

In The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC, Riley and Ellie have to fend off (and mostly run away from) a horde of infected. In the show, they are instead confronted by a lone infected host. While both scenarios end the same way (Riley and Ellie are “infected” and choose to spend their remaining hours together), the choice to focus on one infected rather than a horde almost certainly made this scene cheaper and easier to film. It also hammers home just how dangerous a single infected host can be.

The Last of Us Episode 8: “When We Are In Need” Differences

Hunting rabbits.

In a memorable sequence from The Last of Us game, we watch as a cute snow bunny hops around an idyllic winter woodland area. The bunny is then swiftly killed by an arrow that we soon learned was fired by Ellie. In the show, Ellie does see a bunny but isn’t able to kill it in time. It’s likely that the showrunners were just following a variation of the “don’t kill the dog” rule, but I haven’t heard the official word regarding this change.

David, The Religious Cult Leader

While David is a big part of The Last of Us game, we still end up seeing a lot more of him in the show than we ever did in the game. The show features numerous sequences of David interacting with his followers and roaming the town that were not in the game. That’s likely because the show is occasionally able to focus on characters that aren’t Joel and Ellie whereas the game kind of had to stick with that pair for gameplay and presentation purposes. Actually, the showrunners have stated that they originally thought about giving David an even bigger role in the show via flashbacks.

Those sequences aside, David is also presented as more of a religious cult leader in the show than he was in the game. Interestingly enough, some unused audio files from The Last of Us game also portrayed David as more of a religious figure than he was shown to be in the final campaign. It’s likely that the showrunners just wanted to revisit that concept.

David and Ellie Don’t Bond Over Their Fight Against the Infected

In The Last of Us game, Ellie and David must fight off a pack of infected. Their battle against the infected allows them to bond a bit before Ellie learns of David’s true nature. In the show, we just see Ellie and David bond during a campfire discussion where David’s dangerous charisma does most of the relationship building.

This seems to be another one of those instances where the infected were cut from the show for both logistical reasons and so the showrunners could focus a little more on the human characters and their interactions.

Joel Pulls Ellie Away From Her Attack on David

In both the show and the game, Ellie kills David in a pretty violent fashion. In the game, though, Joel pulls Ellie off David while she’s still attacking him. In the show, Ellie finishes the job, walks out of the burning building, and runs into Joel.

This is another one of those changes that get us to roughly the same place in notably different ways. You could argue that Joel pulling Ellie off of David better emphasizes the idea that Joel is still making these futile attempts to shield Ellie from the violence of the world, though the show’s version of this sequence does a nice job of establishing that Ellie’s independence (especially when it comes to violence). This change also likely sprung from the decision to not show Ellie straight-up kill that raider in the fourth episode.

The Last of Us Episode 9: “Look For the Light” Differences

Ellie’s birth.

This episode features yet another elaborate opening flashback that showcases events not actually seen in the game. This time, we watch as Ellie’s mom (Anna) escapes a pursuing pack of infected and gives birth to Ellie in a remote cabin. Unfortunately, Anna was bitten during the attack. She knows she will become infected.

We soon learn that Anna has actually been sharing that cabin with Marlene and the Fireflies. Anna asks Marlene to kill her when she becomes infected, and Marlene reluctantly honors her request. She would have presumably killed the baby as well if she needed to do so, but we know that there was no need. Ellie presumably acquired her immunity to the infection as a result of her mother becoming infected during the birthing process.

This is a fascinating addition to the lore of the games. Neil Druckmann says that he really wanted to feature the Anna character in the games but just never found the chance to do so before the show. While he mostly wanted to highlight the relationship between Marlene and Anna. This sequence seemingly reveals why Ellie is immune in the first place (a pretty major piece of lore that was never explicitly laid out in the game). It’s another major example of the show outright telling us something the show either implied or simply never directly addressed.

Joel’s Attempted Suicide

While heading towards the Firefly lab, Joel finally tells Ellie the story of the scar on his head. It turns out that Joel tried to kill himself sometime after Sarah’s death. The attempt obviously failed, but this moment allows Joel to share his philosophy that time can heal most wounds.

While that conversation doesn’t really happen in the game, the idea of Joel trying to kill himself isn’t entirely new. In the game, Ellie finds the skeleton of a person that presumably committed suicide. Ellie says something about that person taking the easy way out to Joel, and Joel mentions that suicide is never easy. His delivery implies personal familiarity with suicide attempts.

Sarah’s Picture

In The Last of Us game, Maria gives Ellie a picture of Sarah that Joel had previously refused to take. Later on, Ellie gives the picture back to Joel. The implication is that Joel can finally start to accept the past and put it behind him as needed. Strangely, Ellie never receives that picture from Maria in the game so she obviously doesn’t give it to Joel here.

Once Again, No Infected

On their way to the Firefly labs in The Last of Us game, Joel and Ellie have to fight off one more pack of infected. In the show, there are no infected in that part of the story. It’s another one of those instances of the show skipping a confrontation with the infected. Along with the usual logistical reasons, it seems likely that the infected were cut from this part of the story in the show simply because the writers didn’t need an additional action sequence for gameplay purposes and could instead focus on Joel and Ellie’s interactions.

Matthew Byrd | @SilverTuna014

Matthew Byrd is Games Editor at Den of Geek and an entertainment enthusiast living in Brooklyn. When he's not exploring the culture of video games, he's…

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The rest of us: revenge, prestige, and putting The Last of Us: Part II in its place

If we properly situate The Last of Us: Part II in the broader medium of videogames, and not just the subfield of Triple-A action videogames, both its accomplishments and failings are better tempered and it is easier to evaluate it for what it actually is.

This essay includes extensive spoilers for The Last of Us: Part II .

The Last of Us: Part II (hereinafter TLOU2) is the much-anticipated direct sequel to Naughty Dog’s 2013 post-apocalypse zombie shooter The Last of Us . Upon its release last month, it provoked two drastically different critical responses. The first was overwhelming and effusive praise for the game’s advanced visuals, nuanced and believable characters, and grim and complex story about the fallacy of revenge. The second was frustration and ambivalence at what seemed to be an overly self-important and insincere shooter pretending to be much bolder and deeper than it actually was.

The first of these positions is best exemplified by a much-derided tweet from Jeff Cannata stating that ‘in a medium where everything is John Wick , The Last of Us Part 2 is Schindler’s List .’ The second by Maddy Myers’ considered review for Polygon , where she calls TLOU2 ‘the latest game that exists at the cross section of shaky moral ideas and an incredibly high level of craft.’

TLOU2 is, at once, a remarkably impressive blockbuster videogame that develops characters and places both visually and emotionally to an extent rarely seen in videogames, and also yet another videogame where you satisfyingly shoot a bunch of people and zombies in the head while being told that, gee, this violence thing is pretty bad huh? Both extreme positions are understandable and defensible, but I also find them both insufficient to really situate and understand what TLOU2 achieves, what it doesn’t achieve, what it shouldn’t have to achieve, and what other videogames beyond the blockbuster niche of videogame production we call ‘triple-a’ have already achieved years ago.

Development studio Naughty Dog hold something of a jaded messianic position in videogame discourses. Every time they release a new Uncharted or Last of Us game, we end up in this same discursive stalemate where their games are, at once, bravely pushing the medium forward with their sheer level of craft, and also seemingly holding it back with how they anchor that craft in musty old conventions of running, jumping and shooting your way down a series of corridors.

It’s a cliché to praise a videogame for being ‘cinematic’, but there is truly something filmic about Naughty Dog’s work. Every single moment in these games is carefully authored to occur a certain way before the player presses a button. The story cannot be budged one way or another by the player’s ‘choices’. Characters have a level of nuance to their acting that no other videogame compares to. Moments of tense playable action and chill conversations are interweaved seamlessly with non-interactive cutscenes. In The Last of Us and its sequel in particular, direct cuts between scenes and shots where most games would use a slow fade-in/fade-out (typically to hide necessary load times) are used to great effect to add a transmedial filmic veneer. This in turn helps to consecrate Naughty Dog games in the self-conscious critical discourse of videogames as ‘real art’ because they now look more like a pop cultural medium whose artistic value is better understood (the movie) – despite these games effectively just being videogame re-imaginings of Indiana Jones and The Walking Dead .

But more than these design and aesthetic decisions, it is the positioning of the player that gives Naughty Dog games their filmic feel, and that also leaves many players frustrated and feeling constrained. The typical convention in videogame design is that the playable character or ‘avatar’ is a vehicle for the player to drive, a virtual limb extending the player’s agency into the virtual world. Playable characters in Uncharted and, more so, The Last of Us , are not this. They are already fully-formed before the player occupies them with their own histories, identities, ambitions, decisions. In Naughty Dog games, the player is not the character so much as the actor who is performing the character: you have been handed a script and told what to do, and all that is left to do is get on the set and do it with your own particular flair.

This redefined player-character contract liberates Naughty Dog’s storytellers. No longer do they have to worry about what the player would do or might do – the agency question that so often defangs otherwise effective videogame storytelling- Instead, they can confidently determine what will happen and why , leaving the player no choice but to opt in to that.

Unsurprisingly, it’s this rigidity that frustrates some players, as they find themselves thrust into positions where the characters make choices other than the ones they would have made. It’s here, in the relationship between player and character, that Uncharted and The Last of Us are both so affective for some and so frustrating for others.

TLOU2 pushes apart the conceptual distance between player and character much further than any previous Naughty Dog game.

The player jumps between three different characters throughout the game: Joel and Ellie, and newcomer Abby. At the end of the second playable sequence as Abby, when the player is still unaware of her motives or background, Abby violently murders Joel. It’s a shocking and confronting scene – in part, because the player is so familiar with and has been Joel for most of the previous game; and in part because you, the player, were responsible for directing Abby towards this goal without knowing what you were leading her towards. It feels like a betrayal, an abuse of the player’s trust. But its effect is to make sure the player knows, right from the start, that this isn’t their story. It’s the characters’ story. You’re just along for the ride. Here, you’re not even a single actor anymore but more akin to a cameraperson, observing this story unfold from its numerous perspectives with no say over where it is going to go.

TLOU2 is about revenge and how violence begets violence. It’s not the most original or revolutionary theme, but it’s delivered powerfully and effectively by, somehow, making every single character on each side of the conflict relatable and sympathetic. No one is entirely evil, and no one is entirely good. Every act of revenge throughout the game is entirely justified, and yet only ever makes things worse.

After Abby and her friends murder Joel, Ellie, her partner Dina, her friend Jesse, and Joel’s brother Tommy head to the zombie-infested ruins of Seattle to murder Abby and her friends. Ellie calls it justice, but we know from the start that it’s really just revenge. After a number of increasingly violent and grim scenes that sees the-player-as-Ellie kill off Abby’s friends one by one without successfully finding Abby – culminating in Ellie murdering Abby’s pregnant friend Mel – Ellie and her colleagues finally call off the search only to be confronted by Abby herself, who points a gun at Ellie’s head after killing Jesse.

At this cliffhanger, time rewinds and we are back ‘in control of’ Abby (or perhaps controlled by Abby) shortly after her team returned to Seattle after killing Joel. We hang out and chat with and learn all about the friends and colleagues that we have already seen Ellie murder. We learn that Abby didn’t simply kill Joel for his decision in the previous game to choose Ellie’s life over a vaccine for the zombie fungal virus, but because in the process of that choice Joel killed Abby’s dad, the doctor tasked with killing Ellie on the operating table to produce said vaccine.

At this point, the stories of Ellie and Abby become paralleled and intertwined. Abby treks across the country with her friends to hunt down and murder Joel because he killed her father; Ellie treks across the country with her friends to hunt down and murder Abby because she killed her father-figure. Ellie’s two main friends are her pregnant lover Dina and Dina’s ex, Jesse; Abby’s two main friends are her ex-lover Owen and Owen’s pregnant partner, Mel. Perhaps TLOU2 ’s greatest achievement is that it successfully gives the player the time and the opportunity to get to know the stories and motivations of these two main protagonists, as well as each of the friends who end up as collateral in their joint destruction. By the time Abby’s extensive sequence converges with Ellie’s timeline, there is absolutely no possibility of an outcome that the player will consider ‘good’ between these diametrically opposed women.

The game culminates in two dramatic, brutal, and exhausting melees between Ellie and Abby. In the first, you play as Abby. In the second, as Ellie. Each fight is difficult to play, as you bash the square button to attempt to kill another character you have spent so much time with.

This long, twenty-five-hour, multisided slog between two women’s search for revenge in which they each lose everything and gain absolutely nothing is grim and exhausting, but it is also profoundly affecting in its well-trodden themes because, by the end, we know these characters and we really can’t say one is any more or less justified in their actions than the other.

Numerous critiques have dismissed TLOU2 as yet another game where the player is forced to do bad things and then told to feel bad. This misses the point and misunderstands the player-character contract that Naughty Dog is asking you to sign up to, and which is it uses so effectively to make us care for all these characters. The player is simply along for the ride in this story of characters making bad, understandable decisions, and then living with the consequences.

However, this ‘both sides are as bad as each other’ dynamic also weakens TLOU2 on another level.

The personal revenge stories of Ellie and Abby are wrapped in a broader struggle between two groups of survivors, the Washington Liberation Front (WLF) and the Seraphites. This struggle is a deliberate and explicit analogy of the Palestine/Israel conflict, with the WLF standing in for Israeli state and the Seraphites standing in for the displaced Palestinians. Throughout the game we see WLF members complain about Seraphite kids breaking truces by throwing rocks at armed guards and ‘death cult’ Seraphites making things worse by not ‘staying on their island.’

The Palestine/Israel conflict is perhaps an obvious backdrop for a story about cycles of violence – albeit one few commercial videogames would dare go near – but a poorly-chosen one when the game’s position is that ‘both sides are equally bad’. In the personal struggle of Ellie and Abby, this centrist position works effectively; in the structural story of WLF and the Seraphites, it is hugely problematic and, as Emanuel Maiberg notes, ‘perpetuates the very cycles of violence [ TLOU2 ] is supposedly so troubled by. ’ When Naughty Dog involve us in the struggles of Ellie and Abby, they are all too happy to tell us the stakes and the history that led both sides to this crossroad. When Naughty Dog involves us in the struggles of WLF and Seraphites, however, they refuse to articulate a clear political stance or engage with power and history, an all-too-common position in the Triple-A industry.

What of other aspects of representation and their politics? TLOU2 has a far more gender diverse cast than is typical for blockbuster action videogames. The main character is a white lesbian, her lover is a bisexual Jewish woman, and her friend is an Asian American man. Abby is muscular in a way that only men are typically allowed to be in videogames, and her group of friends are as racially and gender diverse as Ellie’s (and includes a pregnant woman who isn’t treated as being disabled by her pregnancy). Enemies, too, an important site of representation rarely discussed in videogame diversity discourse, includee women as often as men. Most remarkable, perhaps, is the presence of a transgender character whose gender identity is not only explicit but a central plot point. The game’s numerous queer characters are not killed off as is the typical trope, and form instead, no doubt deliberately, the majority of the few characters to actually survive Ellie’s and Abby’s destructive spiral (though, as Cameron Kunzelman observes , the game’s black characters are not so lucky).

Simply hiring ? more ? women ? guards ? doesn’t automatically make TLOU2 a politically ‘good’ game, however. Maddy Myers rightful notes that

Naughty Dog makes its queer woman protagonist act just as violent and self-involved as the legions of grizzled straight-white-dude video game protagonists who have preceded her. There’s something that feels off about that straightforward swap here; it’s a missed opportunity to explore how the rage of a marginalized character might take on a different form, and what that form may look and sound like.

The structure of the game is still very much one of conservative and masculinist hacker/gamer values, regardless of the diversity of its cast.

In praising the game’s gender diversity, a number of critics have made mention of TLOU2 being the ‘first’ game to present women, queer relationships, or transgender characters in a complex way. These are dangerous and self-defeating proclamations that are only accurate if you ignore all the videogames that women, queer folk, and transgender folk have been making about their own experiences for decades beyond the borders of the blockbuster triple-a industry in games such as Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia and Queers in Love at the End of the World , Turnfollow’s Wide Ocean Big Jacket, Fullbright’s Gone Home, Porpentine’s CYBERQUEEN, Merrit K’s Lim, Sundae Moth’s Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, and Natalie Lawhead’s EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK , to name a few.

That said, it’s equally important not to dismiss or obscure the many female, queer, and transgender developers working within the massive blockbuster studios who have long been agitating for change and representation in these most visible and widely played videogames. Just last week, news broke of Ubisoft executives – now plagued with sexual harassment allegations – rejecting a development team’s decision to cast a woman as the sole lead character in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey . I have heard numerous similar stories anecdotally and off the record of Triple-A projects at which a marginalised developer pushed hard for more diverse characters only to be rebuffed by management and harassed by colleagues.

TLOU2 ’s inclusion of a more diverse cast is not groundbreaking for the medium of videogames, even if it is boundary-pushing for the specific subset of videogames where you run around and shoot people in the head. But the game’s more diverse cast is absolutely the result of long and ongoing struggles of usually invisible marginalised minorities working within the Triple-A studio system, and their victory here should be applauded.

I want to return to that tweet highlighted earlier in this essay that stated that in a medium of John Wicks, TLOU2 is Schindler’s List . It is of course easy to tease this exaggerated and overly self-important statement (never mind the offensiveness of comparing a game where you shoot zombies to the grim realities of the Holocaust), but it also stands in as an explicit example of an undercurrent of TLOU2 ’s praise: that this prestigious game where you shoot a bunch of zombies and people in the head marks the time when games become consecrated as art thanks to the empathetic and diverse characters, strong themes and serious storytelling.

The thing is, videogames are not a medium of John Wicks and never have been. (As an aside, to say a videogame foundationally about the consequences of seeking revenge as not being a John Wick is deeply ironic). Such a claim can only be made if one draws a very deliberate and arbitrary border around which videogames get to count as ‘real games’. For a range of historic and cultural reasons beyond the scope of this essay, Triple-A blockbusters have long been able to position themselves as the only authentic works in the videogame form – everything else is just casual games or amateur games that can safely be ignored. For this reason, something is often considered not to have happened in the videogame medium until a Triple-A videogame does it, despite the fact that it has already probably been done somewhere else by someone with a far smaller budget a long time ago.

When we talk about Triple-A videogames, we are effectively talking about ‘Hollywood action movies’: a particular subset of a broader medium that has a high budget, offers massive amounts of spectacle, and, sure, can tell challenging stories and explore deep themes but doesn’t necessarily have to in order to be successful. More likely, it is going to play things pretty safe to ensure it makes a return on the investment required for said spectacle and budget. For decades now, the situation in much of popular videogame critical discourse is the equivalent of if critical film discourse insisted that Hollywood action movies were the only films in existence.

The ‘endless cycle of violence’ theme that TLOU2 explores so powerfully at the personal level but fails to explore meaningfully at the structural or historic level was already well achieved by Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th in 2003. Themes of new relationships, growing up, and parenting were much more powerfully explored in Turnfollow’s Wide Ocean Big Jacket earlier this year. Themes of queerness and gender have been deeply explored in countless games such as those already listed above – many of which were released back when Triple-A still couldn’t be convinced to include a white straight woman as a playable character. Everything that TLOU2 does narratively or thematically has already been done elsewhere, years ago, by a team with far less resources in a game that more likely takes twenty-five minutes, not twenty-five hours, to play from start to end.

But does this lack of originality or a pioneering element really matter? The critics who find TLOU2 overly self-important and even vapid certainly seem to think so. I find myself more forgiving and ultimately more impressed by TLOU2 as a work, I think, because I do personally think of these sorts of Triple-A blockbusters as simply the ‘Hollywood action films’ of videogames. When I go to the cinema to watch an action blockbuster, I want competent but not necessarily groundbreaking storytelling at the service of more affective registers such as spectacle, exhilaration, emotion, bedazzlement, fear. I’m not necessarily there to be challenges intellectually. Triple-A videogames fill a similar space. The one thing they do that all the smaller, more thematically developed videogames can’t do is offer what I’ve previously called a spectacle of labour : that amazing demonstration of craft that only comes with a vast amount of resources (and, often but not inevitably, the exploitation of workers ). Again, in this they are similar to the blockbuster action films of Marvel or Lucasfilm.

This isn’t to say Triple-A videogames shouldn’t be critiqued for perpetuating old-fashioned or conservative ideas, or that critics and players shouldn’t demand they be better. Rather, that we shouldn’t necessarily expect them to be better. That instead of waiting for Triple-A to accurately tell a transgender character’s story, we could seek out the games transgender developers have already made to tell their stories. If we properly situate TLOU2 in the broader medium of videogames, and not just the subfield of Triple-A action blockbuster videogames, both its accomplishments and failings are better tempered and it is easier to evaluate it for what it actually is.

TLOU2 is a profoundly affecting and accomplished Triple-A action game that uses well-trodden tropes and themes to present an endless, exhausting spiral of revenge between two characters. Its grandest accomplishment is using an unconventional dynamic between player and character(s) to make every act of revenge equal part justified, understandable, horrific, and absolutely the wrong thing to do. It does what Triple-A videogames do best, using tried-and-tested conventions to great effect and affect. For the most part, aside from its centrist and ahistorical stance on Palestine and an ill-considered and unnecessary final act, it avoids doing what Triple-A does worst: it is not, despite what many critiques have said, a game where the player is forced to do bad things and then told they should feel bad for doing them; it is a game where the characters do bad things and then have to deal with the consequences, and the player comes along for the ride.

Pierre Bourdieu once wrote that those creators that hold the dominant position within a cultural field do so by working to ensure their cultural field is popularly imagined as only their own work. TLOU2 is spectacular, devastating, beautifully crafted and a huge accomplishment. But perhaps a game primarily about shooting zombies and humans in the head is not actually the daring and pioneering next step for the entire medium of videogames that those journalists and marketers and developers with the most invested in the Triple-A industry’s dominance of the field would have us think it is.

Brendan Keogh

Brendan Keogh is a senior lecturer in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames and co-author of The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software .

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland ’s work in general, please subscribe or donate .

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This is an excellently written piece on what TLOU2 is. All without being condescending to those who dislike it! I have a great many friends whom have stated that they don’t understand why I enjoyed the game so much and called me pretentious for saying that it’s a work of art. I may have to share this to them and maybe they will come away with a different point of view.

I’m commenting because this anomaly of the internet makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. But the context of the original Jeff Cannata tweet is that was his attempt at illustrating how the game is not supposed to be fun. He was saying that other games, like John Wick, are trying to be entertaining. Where TLOU2 is not trying to be fun. And his touchstone for that is Schindler’s List, which I think is probably No.1 on the Family Feud survey when you ask people to name a movie that isn’t supposed to be fun (with the possible exception of Passion of the Christ in the U.S.). It had nothing to do with the content of the stories, and I think you’ll see that if you go back and look at the thread.

I get that the internet gets to decide its own reality. It’s happened to me. But I still don’t think we have to give in to that tendency.

Of course, I don’t think this invalidates your take.

Really nice article, Brendan. Much to think about!

No matter what last of us part 2 is still one the greatest game I ever play

No offense, but Naughty Dog failed at making a proper sequel to a game I absolutely loved as one of my favorite games of all time. The original was about the lengths people will go to survive and care for one another, even complete strangers, in a world gone to shit. Anyone who thinks TLOU part 2 is a good game is not a real fan and probably never played the first game. And anyone who decides their game isn’t going to be “fun” hasn’t made a game… you’ve made a brick. If I wanted to play with a brick, I would go the local hardware store and buy one, and STILL probably get more entertainment out of it! Disappointing…

Daedrium: Real fan eh?

I loved part 1. Prior to the new game coming out it was my favourite game. It isn’t any more as part 2 improves on the first game in almost every way. It was brilliantly written, acted, directed, shot etcetera.

It made me hate Abby, then love her, then be happy that I don’t have to kill either main character.

I thought it was a brilliantly crafted and well-executed game that was fun to play.

If you don’t think bricks can be fun, it’s you that never played The Last of Us.

Something that bothers me is that no one is picking up on how this games examines the failure of people to reconcile or even sympathize with one another. It’s no coincidence that this is reflects current cultural turmoil in America (and much of the world to be fair). In TLOU 2, even close friends fail to–as Jesse says–“get over themselves”.

I’m sorry, but TLOU2 isn’t a work of art outside of visuals. The story is just hot garbage stuffed inside a nice box to look at. Why did we love Joel so much in the original? Because we agreed with the choices he made. We connected with him. We bonded with him. And we waited 7 long years to see how that story continued, only to have our hearts (and our expectations from advertising) ripped away from us in Act I of the game.

This was the fatal flaw for many fans. You killed a character we invested a whole game and seven years of waiting in, Abby could have been the daughter of Jesus and Michelle Obama and it still would not have been enough to redeem her. We didn’t care. We didn’t want to invest in a story about her, we knew it. We went through that story in the last game, and we’d make the decision to waste her father again to save Ellie.

Instead, we are forced to slog(great word choice, btw) through a backstory we don’t care about, characters we want to see meet their end, and an ongoing war that has nothing to do with our concern of Ellie’s mission just on the driving factor of hope that we get some satisfying resolution of Abby getting what she has coming to her. Only, we don’t. We got literally nothing. No resolution, no sense of avenging Joel, not even a sense of accomplishment we did anything. Just…an ending. If you want to call it that.

It’s the only game that as soon as I finished it, I broke the disc. One, because the game was so terrible that I knew I would never pick it up and play it again. Two, I was not about to put it back on a GameStop shelf for it to give someone else the same awful experience I had.

And notice, not one critique of why I hated this game had anything to do with the sexual identity of the characters. Why? Because I don’t care. None of that matters on why this game was awful. We knew in the first game Ellie was finding herself as a lesbian, so anyone who let that part of the game be what ruined their experience have no one to blame but themselves. It’s not like this was something new to the series.

In the end, let’s call this game what it was. It was eye candy with little to no expansion at all of the old gameplay mechanics, a weak and absolute disastrous story to tell, and no replay-ability factor.

I completely agree with you. Well said!

I hear you but this is nothing but your opinion pal

I’ll respectfully disagree with you on a couple of points, fist that it’s really just you along for the ride. If naughty dog made the parts of both games where you basically can just sit for eternity because the game is waiting for you to put in the 1 button press 5hat makes you take the action they want. And instead just make that into a fmv part of the game. Then yes, your along for the ride. But by making you press that button, they are forcing you to take action, to make a choice, continue or walk away from the game forever. If they force a choice it should have game changing consequences. Not simply, do you play it yourself, or watch it on YouTube to see the rest. It isn’t a choice, it’s forced consent. No means no man.

And 2nd, I never felt any connection to Abby after I had to play her, if anything her story felt forced. We are expected to believe that the #1 scar killer suddenly turned softy just because 2 who were on the run from the rest happened to save her life. The reality would have been much closer to, she lets them go this time. The play time as Ellie firmly established that the elf were very bad people, the torture cells in the base, the kill on sight anyone orders, all of the notes left by people who they killed. Everything established them as a group of murderers. Even if you did end up with 2 of them later regretting how they killed Joel. The rest were not good people. Ellie’s fall was believable and felt. Abby was just a thug.

Now had her story been 1/3 in the past with her dad, so a bond is formed for the player and a reason we can sympathize with were not established, then, her dad was murdered. And the next 1/3 was her seeking revenge, and both of these came before you ever played as the original characters, without you knowing who killed her father, or even mentioning Joel or Ellie. Then a big shock, the final flashback to Joel killing her dad, a nightmare the character has been living with all the play time since his death. And she then kills Joel, and boom your now playing Ellie and her story is unchanged, only the part where you play Joel is gone. Ellie’s game is now played, and the game continues as it is from that point, only the entire Abby story is cut to 1/3, cause all of the pre hunt for Joel parts are now back when she would have been hunting him. Before you played as Ellie.

That, would have been a great game, and you would have definitely cared about Abby. As it is, Abby is a throw away character.

Great and honest review. Thank you.

Great and honest review. Thank you. Keep up with the good work. Sergio

This game was a waste of time. Just so meh in every way. Boring linear story and world. Samey scavenging gameplay. SHITHOUSE story. Glad I just borrowed it and didn’t pay for it.

Thank god that Ghost of Tsushima has redeemed my faith in video game developers. Thanks to “The Last of Us Part II,” I’ve been feeling probably the most disappointed I’ve ever been in my 30+ years of gaming. Not at all due to a character I loved dying, but in the total bullshit story which was nothing short of hypocrisy.

Dear Naughtydog, stop forcing your fucking your moral agendas in games (not at all about sexuality, because we need more representation in the industry.) Or at the very least, make your moral values consistent throughout the story. That aside, the gaming industry has grown too comfortable with animal violence that is FORCED UPON the player to commit. It was absolutely repulsive to see how you tried to use a subconscious trick to make the player dislike Ellie for killing Alice the dog, meanwhile playing fetch with her as Abby. You have 100% lost me on all of your future projects, because I realize that one man with hypocritical ideals will be forced upon me as the player in the year 2020. See what Ghost of Tsushima did with their story and giving the player choices? Take notes.

This was a really great take, and I appreciate it! I read the WLF/Seraphite conflict as a more general commentary on the nature of sectarian war. Obviously the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one expression of this, but I didn’t read the game as directly, particularly commenting on it. In some ways, I think I gave the game an out for being so centrist regarding the conflict as a result of that; feeling like they were making the larger point on the futility of war (and that was all) let me be ok with the fact that they don’t pick a side. Having said that, I also found the Seraphites pretty awful, when encountered by Ellie, Abby, and especially Lev, but they were definitely who I was rooting for in the conflict with the WLF. That probably has to do with my own way of seeing things more than an inexorable conclusion the game was trying to bring me to, though, so it’s probably still accurate to say they didn’t pick a side.

Having said that, I definitely agree that the centrist take regarding Ellie and Abby was compelling in a way that it wasn’t with regards to the WLF and the Seraphites, and when I start my second play through I’ll be thinking about that. Thanks again!

I agree with your take. I think it’s simplistic to interpret the WLF/Seraphite conflict as direct representation of and commentary on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Even if it was, I thought it was clear that the WLF had crossed a line when they attacked the Seraphite home island. Their attack was a massacre and a living nightmare, the culmination of all the game’s themes about the failure to seek reconciliation and make peace, the futility of revenge, the ways we dehumanise each other (see Lev’s insistence that Abby refer to him as a Seraphite, not a Scar), and the innocence and life lost through such brutality.

Thank you for this wonderful analysis! I would be very curious to hear more regarding the author’s assertion that the final act is “ill-considered and unnecessary.” Critical opinion on the third act seems split as to whether it cements Ellie’s motivations and follows her trauma to its psychological conclusion or confuses the narrative.

Thanks Trish! Mostly I just found the inclusion of some simplistically evil slavers really disappointing after the game had worked so hard to make both sides in the Seattle conflict so complex and well-rounded and contradictory. It was the only time in the game I did feel like I was just killing random baddies.

I also liked where it could have finished, post-Seattle, with Abby being the one who chose to stop the cycle and Ellie, having failed to do so, having to live her PTSD trauma.

That said, I did like how the final confrontation between Ellie and Abby’s in the boats did finally make Ellie’s story symmetrical to Abby’s, in that now each had chosen to walk away. But mostly it just seemed cruel to continue to punish Abby after she had broken out of the revenge cycle back in the theatre in Seattle.

Ultimately, I don’t think the final act added anything to the themes or story of the game that hadn’t already been achieved prior to it.

James* sorry

I CALL OUT ALL OF THE HATERS OF THIS GAME…. IF ABBY WOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST LAST IF US THEN U WOULD BE ON HER SIDE .BUT BECAUSE WE HAD TO USE JOEL N ELLIE THATS WHY U ARE MORE APT TO BE ON THEIR SIDES… IF U WERE ABBY U WOULD WANT REVENGE AS WELL. YEAH JOEL SAVED ELLIE. BUT THAT WAS NOT HIS CHOICE NOR ABBY’S DAD. IT WAS ELLIE.. SO STOP HATING ON THIS 2ND GAME IT WAS EXTREMELY BRILLIANT BRUTAL AND I’M TEAM ABBY ALL DAY!!! GET A LIFE PEOPLE. ITS ENTERTAINMENT THAT’S ALL..ART IRRITATING LIFE!!!.THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WOULD REALLY BEHAVE IF THIS CORONAVIRUS OR SOME NEW DISEASE TAKES OVER…THEN U SEE!! HUMANS ARE NO BETTER THAN THE MONSTERS THEY FIGHT…

This game had a lot of great ideas executed poorly. The gameplay and the level design was fantastic, but the story felt miserable to play through. Even my friends who liked the story, felt tired of playing it.

In TLOU you had time to connect with the characters Joel and Ellie met. They felt unique and interesting. In TLOU2 most of them felt exchangeable and faceless, which is why you didn’t care for them when they were killed.

The story narrative felt “preachy.” When the theme of the story drives the narrative this often happens. “Revenge is bad” and “you’ll lose everything” was rubbed in our faces all game long. Lev’s story being centered around him being trans was also the same way. Even Abby who was trying to be supportive was scalded by Lev for calling them Scars and how that was offensive… You know the murderous death cult.

Whether that was the intent or not isn’t the point. Making it feel like that was a failure of good story telling.

I know most have said this, but flipping the story structure would’ve done a lot to fix the game. They should’ve marketed it as a new game with a new character and then reveled what Abby did half way through the game. Hiding Ellie as a playable character. That would’ve been more risky and creative than what they did.

This is my opinion, you don’t have to agree with me.

Great essay. I agree completely.

I think the people who are so angry with Abby about Joel are mentally and emotionally stuck in the same one dimensional space that Ellie and Abby were stuck. It’s ironic and also a credit to the game that the hate is so meta.

I think this is broadly a good review, and I think you’re right that its take on Israel/Palestine or other sectarian and imperialist struggles is a bit liberal.

However I think you’re wrong in identifying the Seraphites as the Palestinians. All 3 sides in the story (Ellie + Jackson/WLF/Seraphites) clearly and no doubt deliberately have elements of all sectarian sides present in them. For instance, the WLF fought a mini civil war against the state to gain dominance in Seattle. If that’s like anything, it’s more like Hamas. The seraphites are probably also inspired by the Orthodox Jewish community in Israel, especially in their strict dress code in relation to hair. And the Jackson community could very easily be taken to be Israel, and their socialistic economy smacks of the Kibbutz.

I am sure the point of the game is not really to push a liberal agenda on Israel Palestine and say that both sides are equally wrong, but to tell a more personal tale about how individuals get caught up in blind hatred whenever sectarian violence takes place, no matter which side is more to blame

Nah the Seraphites are very straightforwardly the Palestinians in the analogy the game puts forward.

To be frank, the game did something that would have only worked if it started with the first game. The main issue, and why I find it hard to understand how anyone connected with Abby and the Wolves, is that we had an entire game to bond and learn things about Ellie. That creates a rift in players wanting to understand and care about Abby or any other individual who assisted in Joel’s death.

NaughtyDog tried something but instead of teaching a lesson to their audience, it’s left us with regrets and honestly a bit of hatred towards this game. I personally can’t even fathom a second playthrough because one time was enough for me. And that’s saying a lot considering I played TLOU Part 1 several times.

What a refreshing, reasonable take.

I feel like the only person who felt that the game did take a clear stance on the WLF and Seraphite conflict. Yes, they were caught in a ‘both sides’ cycle of violent UNTIL the WLF’s culminating attack on the Seraphite’s home island. This event was horrifying and I thought the game intentionally portrayed it that way. The WLF were shown as willing to murder children and burn down an entire society rather than seek a peace truce. There was nothing centrist about that.

well for all the “talk” this game was supposed to entertain, thats it, and I found that it didnt do that for various reasons I am not gonna go into. I paid good money to be entertained and was disapponited by what was offered.

The Problem with Abby

Heroes and Other Murderers First let me state clearly that the gameplay of TLOU2 was stupendous, a tour de force. But the story itself was awful. This was Druckman and Gross’ attempt to paint a morally gray LGBTQ themed world akin the Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto. The anti-heroes of those games were bad men, who all got the endings that they deserved no matter how much we loved them. Arthur Morgan’s death on the top of the mountain watching one final sunrise as he gasped for his last breath restful in the knowledge that for once in his life, he had done the right thing, was one of the best demises an antihero could ever hope to achieve. Yet was Joel Miller worthy of death because he saved a little girl from a fanatical paramilitary group seeking to murder a child? In comparison many of our heroes in fiction are guilty of murder. For instance, Captains Picard and Kirk are perhaps guilty of the deaths of hundreds of Klingons and Romulans. I am sure there are hundreds of people seeking revenge in the name of a fallen loved one. But as a fan of those men, do I want to pay $20 to go down to the local cinema and watch the vengeful daughter of a Romulan or Klingon beat my favorite Captain to death? And then force me to watch the rest of the movie from that murderer’s point of view? Yes, it worked for Thanos, but I know Thanos, I grew up with Thanos, Abby is no Thanos. How can we paint Joel as a villain worthy of death when he sacrificed his wellbeing to save Ellie? How to we honor that sacrifice by giving him such an ignoble death? Worse yet was Ellie’s treatment of Joel in this sequel. Please remember Joel chose to live the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. Was it even fair for Ellie to shun Joel when she learned the truth? “Thank you for saving me life on from a group of maniacs that were attempting to murder me to make an uncertain vaccine. Now I hate you forever? You stole the meaning from my life when you saved my life?” I call Millennial New Age bullshit in this story mechanic. The subversion of expectations for shock value alone. What type of gratitude is that? Let me tell you, surly teenager that I was, I would love anyone forever that gunned down a horde of soldiers to save my life. The Bad Man’s Daughter A Nazi by any other name is still a Nazi. I am sure Nazi’s, Klansmen, and Colombian drugs lords have a side to their story also. But should I be forced, to understand their point of view? Should gamers be forced to play as the murderer of a beloved and iconic video game character? In my point of view that answer is no. If Neil Druckman and Hailey Gross’ true intentions where to garner my sympathy for Abby and her friends, they failed miserably to move me.

See, to me, the game was like the movie Logan- an amazing work and beautifully done, but absolutely brutal on the emotions, and not something I’d want to experience again any time soon.

I believe The Last of Us 2 us beyond it’s time because it tells you both sides of each story. You get to play the good guys and the bad guys. While I agree, they do a very good job at justifying Abby’s actions and making us understand her motive for killing one of our favorite video games characters ever, she still did just that so a lot of people don’t like her but then you see how she helps out some Seraphites and shows that she too cares about others and really gives the villain a very human element which I believe was beautiful storytelling. That being said, anyone who thinks The Last of Us 2 is garbage and saying anyone who played it probably never beat the first one is just very closed minded in my opinion. Yes you can believe what you want but I’ve beaten The Last of Us Part 1 at least 27 times and can honestly saying it was my favorite game for 7 years as no other game could compare to the emotion it took from me until The Last of Us 2 came out. Nobody outlashed about the soldier killing Sarah in the first act we all just mourned her death with Joel but I think Joel’s death was the only emotional connection we could habe gotten out of that game because we already saw their story and it was just as much if not more mournful than Sarah’s death in the first game. We wouldn’t even have this game if Abby didn’t seek revenge and kill Joel is something Naughty Dog is trying to say. I love how the second game one upped the first one in every aspect including better close quarters combat, better weaponry and even a diverse cast that most popular games are still rejecting. Throughout this entire game all I wanted to do was help Ellie get revenge and murder Abby, but when it came down to that moment I was worried about what would happen to Lev and found myself relieved that Abby wasn’t killed because Lev was always going to continue that cycle of violence Joel started when he killed Abby’s father. Which means a story about violence becoming more violence finally broke that cycle because Ellie decided that a brutal fight was enough revenge and realizing that Abby’s death wasn’t going to bring Joel back from the dead. Hence the flashbacks during the drowning scene and her mourning Joel once again as Abby and Lev leave her alone as they depart in their boat. I just don’t think people are ready to accept the reality aspect in games like we have in the real world which, in fact, is all actions have consequences whether they are good or bad. Just like people weren’t ready to accept the PSP as the groundbreaking console it always was, nobody wants to accept The Last of Us 2 as the next step for storytelling in gaming. Tell both sides of the story so we know everything that really happened. If we didn’t have to play as Abby, then we would have never known why she brutally murdered Joel which was entirely justified because I would want revenge of someone killed my father too. It’s about putting yourself in both of their shoes and understanding why each character did what she did. I’ve waited seven long years for this game and even if I’m the only one who thinks this, it lived up to every bit of hype that it has built up to.

To the author — I thought this was a really, really fantastic look at the game. Extremely good textual reading (including the para below, but not limited to it) and an even better situation of this game within wider currents.

“This long, twenty-five-hour, multisided slog between two women’s search for revenge in which they each lose everything and gain absolutely nothing is grim and exhausting, but it is also profoundly affecting in its well-trodden themes because, by the end, we know these characters and we really can’t say one is any more or less justified in their actions than the other.”

Yes, yes, and yes. And, FWIW — while this is the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster — we can read blockbusters just as well as we can read indie games. They’re all ours. You’ve demonstrated that in your thoughtful look.

I wrote a textual analysis of the game that you might find interesting — similar points about what the key choices are — though obviously impoverished by a comparative lack of understanding of these comparative texts.

https://accidentaljellyfish.wordpress.com/2020/06/27/anyone-can-play-guitar/

Anyways — fantastic work. Thank you for paying attention to what games do, and not just what they look like.

thank you so much, i very much enjoyed this review. could you explain in more detail how the Seraphites were analogies for Palestinian people? i agree w u but would like to buff my knowledge a bit more re: this portion of the game.

Can we just stop, please. “This is actually about Israel and Palestine.” How? “The protagonist is a lesbian! Way to represent the community!”

You know who was a good lead character? Alex in “True Colors”-not because she’s bi, Chinese and female, because she’s Alex. An individual who makes friends, chooses her actions and faces the consequences of same.

Or how about Samus: a woman who, no matter how often she’s knocked down, always gets back up. A person of character, not a stereotypical “strong woman”.

I dread to think what Anne McCaffrey would say if her characters were (mis)represented in today’s media.

The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation

Hbo turned the story into unmissable television. so why does it feel like something’s missing.

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In the third episode of HBO’s The Last of Us , a pair of postapocalyptic travelers search through an abandoned gas station ten miles outside Boston. “No way!” exclaims Ellie ( Bella Ramsey ), the savvy teenage girl whom gruff smuggler Joel ( Pedro Pascal ) is tasked with transporting across the country. Most of the population has been infected by a parasitic fungus that transforms its victims into killing machines. But in this brief moment of repose, Ellie spots a relic of a more civilized era. “I had a friend who knew everything about this game,” she tells Joel breathlessly, mashing the buttons of a busted arcade unit for Midway Games’ 1993 fighting game Mortal Kombat II. “There’s this one character named Mileena who takes off her mask and she has monster teeth and then she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones!”

It’s a slyly self-referential moment for The Last of Us, which co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have lovingly adapted from developer Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed 2013 video game . In the game, Joel is a hard-bitten survivor whose daughter was shot on Outbreak Day; Ellie’s mysterious immunity to the fungus may hold the key to a vaccine. As they make their way west, through bombed-out city blocks and overgrown interstates, past echolocating zombies and desperate human beings like themselves, they begin to regard each other as father and daughter. Widely considered a masterpiece of the video-game form, The Last of Us boasted a story whose strong characters and disturbing moral conflicts had all the makings of a buzzy television drama — so much so that The New Yorker asked in its preview of the series, “ Can a Video Game Be Prestige TV? ”

The answer is obviously yes. Before it premiered in January, critics had already crowned The Last of Us the best video-game adaptation ever made. In itself, this was no great honor: Outside a few fine kids’ movies, competition for the title has been limited to dreck like Resident Evil , Tomb Raider , or the limp Halo series on Paramount+ . Attempts to imitate gameplay directly have yielded almost universally ridiculous results (the nauseating first-person-shooter sequence from Doom lurches to mind). But, really, video-game adaptations have sucked for the same reason many movies suck: low budgets, terrible scripts, and an often comical misunderstanding of their own material. The solitary exception to this rule, until now, was 2021’s Werewolves Within , an amiable horror comedy that, tellingly, bears even less resemblance to the virtual party game on which it is based than 1985’s Clue bears to the board game Clue .

The Last of Us ’s showrunners have wisely exchanged action sequences for extended character beats, and thanks to the chemistry between Pascal and Ramsey, the series remains grounded in the deepening relationship between Joel and Ellie. Asked ad nauseam about the curse of the video-game adaptation, Mazin took to replying he had “cheated” by picking the best story the medium had to offer. What he probably meant was he had chosen a title whose actual gameplay, a fine but standard mix of third-person stealth and combat, mostly acted as a system of gates between one narrative sequence and the next. In this sense, HBO’s The Last of Us represents a superb realization of a modest goal: to adapt the narrative of a video game without attempting to adapt the game itself.

It’s worth remembering that this is standard operating procedure for prestige television, which regularly makes a point to bestow literary qualities — realism, lyricism, characterization — onto middling works of genre fiction. (An obvious example is Big Little Lies , elevated from beach read to serious drama by its naturalist approach and moody shots of the ocean . ) That this formula should have finally been applied to a video game, and a good one, is a matter less of artistic innovation than of budget. “One of the highest compliments I can pay the show is that I wouldn’t have guessed that Joel and Ellie’s mordant, spiritedly macabre adventures first began in pixelated form,” negged Inkoo Kang in The New Yorker . But the question was never whether The Last of Us would make for compelling television, since anyone who had played it could tell you it basically already was that. The real question, buried in the praise, was why a story with such cinematic ambitions had bothered being a video game to begin with.

To answer it, one would first need to know what a video game is. Despite enjoying a higher level of prestige than ever in their relatively brief history, video games are still reviewed largely for their recreational value — that is to say, as toys. But the chief obstacle to serious criticism is not that we fail to recognize video games can be art, which is usually just a desperate shorthand for “capable of evoking a strong response.” It’s that we presume to know what kind of art they would be. The first is merely a lack of attention; the second is a genuine error of judgment.

Look no further than the broad caricature of video games as “interactive,” a quality that supposedly distinguishes them from more “passive” media like television or the novel. Regarding a long, claustrophobic shot from inside a moving car as Joel flees the zombie outbreak with his daughter, Sarah ( Nico Parker ), one otherwise admiring critic reproached The Last of Us for aping the interactive format of a game, noting it was “hard to resist the feeling that you should have a controller in your hand to choose which way they should turn next.” Yet in the nearly identical sequence from the game’s prologue, the player is responsible not for the car but just for the in-world virtual camera, which they may swivel uselessly from Sarah’s terrified face to the dark road ahead to a neighbor’s house burning in the distance. Indeed, the feeling of helplessness is the whole point.

The mistake here, common enough even among those literate in video games, is the breezy conflation of interactivity with control, as if the simple fact of player choice were any surer guarantee of efficacy than the existence of choice in real life. It’s true you can’t alter the content of a television show just by watching it, but too great an emphasis on this will obscure the fact that the same is true of many video games. The Last of Us has sometimes been called an “interactive movie” by fans and detractors alike — a faintly damning term that implies, ironically, a dearth of consequential interaction between players and the game. And it’s true: As a game about difficult moral choices, it gives the player none. There are no plot decisions, no dialogue options; there is no open world. The weight of choice is felt instead during the mundane task of inventory management, where every bullet and clean rag is precious. Meanwhile, Joel is Joel, violent and gentle, and players cannot overrule his decisions short of turning off the game and going outside to play.

To an extent, The Last of Us was an outlier by design, one that left a choice-shaped hole in player experience that reflected Joel’s uncompromising commitment to protecting Ellie. Yet even in the most liberal of narrative video games, the majority of choices available to players are either cosmetic or mechanical. The classic example is a suit of armor that increases the computing number associated with one’s defense while also lending a desirable visual panache. These things matter deeply to how a game plays: Gamers were so appalled by the clothing system of Cyberpunk 2077, in which combat bonuses could be reaped only by rocking truly hideous pieces of streetwear, that developer CD Projekt RED later added an option for players to stick with one acceptable outfit without falling behind in their armor class. But none of this had any effect on the game’s narrative, which despite its many branching plotlines, romance options, and endings was still just one story that could be told only a finite number of ways. There is a big difference, in other words, between mere customization and true narrative control — if such a thing even exists.

A video game, then, is emphatically not a story you get to change; in its most elemental form, it is not a story at all. The highly visual aspect of video games can mask the fact that, as computer programs, they are naturally far more abstract than film or television. In Left Behind , a short companion to The Last of Us released in 2014, Ellie’s best friend Riley takes her to a deserted mall in Boston, where she shows Ellie an arcade cabinet for a Mortal Kombat –style fighting game. The unit is long dead, but at her friend’s insistence, Ellie closes her eyes and slams the buttons while Riley describes a round of gleefully gory combat. It’s an ingenious comment on the nature of video games: The narration is all but divorced from the gameplay, a mini-game in which the player may press their own buttons in order to help Ellie’s imaginary avatar “defeat” her equally imaginary opponent. But the actual game takes place only inside Ellie’s mind, her delighted face illuminated by the static glow of the defunct machine.

The lesson here is that, even in longform-narrative video games like The Last of Us, no predetermined relation exists between gameplay, as a real-time system of potential inputs and outputs, and traditional film elements like character, narration, or image. In theory, if one happened to strike the right buttons at the right time, one could play through a video game in its entirety without a single thought to what was transpiring onscreen, like a monkey typing out Shakespeare. The long-standing appeal of Mortal Kombat II, for instance, was that it really could be played by blindly mashing the buttons, with the game smoothly converting even the most anarchic style of play into a potentially deadly flurry of punches and kicks.

This doesn’t mean video games shouldn’t tell stories, a pseudo-formalist position occasionally staked out by sour game-studies types, any more than cinema should limit its focus to the passage of light through a lens. The resistance of gameplay to being narrativized, and of stories to being gamified — what game bloggers sometimes call “ludonarrative dissonance” — can never be eliminated, only managed; the first question for any narrative video game is therefore how it plans to forge this formal contradiction into a compelling aesthetic experience. In fact, many of the most interesting video games tend to amplify ludo-narrative dissonance, allowing form to poke stylishly through the envelope of narrative content. Valve’s puzzle-platformer Portal famously ends by revealing the protagonist is trapped in a gamelike research facility run by a homicidal computer whose sardonic directions the player must disobey to escape. Here was a darkly comic acknowledgment that a life wholly composed of jumping, shooting, and pushing boxes around — the life of many video-game characters — would in the real world be nothing short of torture.

To return to our initial question, then: It’s true that The Last of Us often resembles a game that doesn’t want to be one. But this tension, which the television adaptation is at pains to relieve, is precisely what made the original game such a compelling study in powerlessness. Its protagonist, after all, also doesn’t want to be one. In early cutscenes, Joel is vehemently opposed to becoming Ellie’s keeper, his fatherly grief masked as stony pragmatism; when gameplay resumes, players may feel they are pushing Joel forward against his will, overriding his reluctance with their own desire to progress in the game. Even as Joel softens to his precocious young charge, The Last of Us gives players meager few opportunities to make their Joel stronger or faster: a slight increase in his health bar, perhaps, or a new gun whose bullets are rarer than usual. Instead, the same ludic architecture that at first makes players to do things Joel doesn’t want to do — linear level design, few upgrades, scarce resources — slowly comes to reflect Joel’s terrifyingly limited ability to protect Ellie.

What The Last of Us does let you do, as often as you would like, is die. In itself, this is unremarkable. The need for a death mechanic is almost as old as video games themselves. “ Finish him ,” a voice booms in the HBO series as Riley (Storm Reid), playing as the bone-barfing Mileena, bests Ellie in a fully functional game of Mortal Kombat II. “Do not finish me!” Ellie yells, but soon the girls are slotting in more quarters, bribing death with pocket change. The arcade industry’s pay-to-stay-alive system, which in its golden age brought in as much as $8 billion a year in quarters alone, faded with the rise of home consoles, where player death usually just meant respawning at the last checkpoint. Today, many video-game protagonists are zombies after a fashion, their bodies hijacked by an alien intelligence with crude control over their motor systems and an unlimited ability to resurrect. The studio behind last year’s role-playing game Elden Ring has built its entire punishing aesthetic around death, giving players a single nerve-racking chance to return to the site of their demise to collect lost experience points. Recent games like Hades or Deathloop have integrated this concept on a narrative level, not only providing canonical explanations for why exactly the player keeps coming back to life but also using this de facto immortality as an opportunity for character development. (“I guess you want to die again?” purrs your ex-girlfriend in Hades after murdering you for the eighth or ninth time.)

What distinguishes The Last of Us is the way the player character dies. In the series, Pascal’s soulful Joel is keenly aware of his own mortality — his bad knees, his hearing loss. But in the video game, Joel actually does die over and over. Each time, the game snatches back control of the camera, forcing players to watch as he is shot, stabbed, burned alive, beaten with a lead pipe; as shrieking zombies gouge out his eyes, snap his jaw apart, rip glistening red sinew from his neck. These cutscenes, animated with a gruesome realism far more disturbing than the blood-and-guts approach typical to the genre, often have the quality of jump scares, pouncing just as the player thinks they’re safe. As in most games, Joel’s deaths are shunted off into a noncanonical universe; the player retakes control of Joel at the latest checkpoint, and he has no memory of his latest fatality. But the player does, and this visceral sense of Joel’s death — something that, speaking strictly from the narrative point of view, never happens — comes to define their relationship to both Joel and the game as a whole.

Players thus experience two Joels: the Joel presented in the story, a powerful father figure propelled to heroic heights by grief and love, and the version of Joel controlled by the player, a terrified man with poor aim, little endurance, and a perilously high mortality rate. As many viewers have already joked, no amount of fidelity will allow the HBO show to capture the frustration of watching Joel be repeatedly eviscerated by the same zombie. Druckmann has said the game was designed to give players the same protective relationship to Ellie that Joel develops, and this is true, in a sense: Ellie can die in just as grisly a fashion as Joel if the player misses a window to rescue her. “That’s why men like you and me are here,” a fellow survivor tells Joel in the show, urging him to give his life meaning by finding someone to keep safe. For Joel, this person is Ellie; but for the player, this person is Joel, and when he is gravely wounded late in the game, player control will shockingly pass to Ellie, who must now protect her protector in the most brutal stretch of gameplay yet.

This was the game’s masterstroke. Form erupts into content, the player’s ludic relationship to Joel at last given narrative flesh in the person of Ellie, whose bitter determination to keep Joel alive leads to a horrific loss of innocence from which — as players of The Last of Us Part II already know — she may never recover. Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding onto another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity. Of course, a TV show may treat these themes too, and the adaptation acquits itself admirably; the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach. That’s not a knock on the HBO show, which has genuinely demonstrated that you may adapt a video game for television by taking its story and swallowing it whole. But you’ll still have to spit out the bones.

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Analysis Of The Game The Last Of Us

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