The Last of Us opens with a death it never lets you forget. In the suburbs of Austin, Texas, Joel flees the collapse of civilization with his brother Tommy and his daughter Sarah. A soldier shoots Sarah. She dies in Joel’s arms. That is the first twenty minutes of Naughty Dog’s 2013 action-adventure game, and it is the wound the next fifteen hours keep pressing.
The Last of Us is not a game about killing infected. It is a game about what a man will do to keep one girl alive, and how that question rots him from the inside.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
A Fungus That Takes the Brain
The game’s outbreak is a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus. It spreads through bites and airborne spores. It takes over the neural functions of its human hosts and turns them into aggressive, cannibalistic creatures. Twenty years after Austin, civilization is gone. Quarantine zones run on fear. The Federal Disaster Response Agency, known as FEDRA, controls those zones and enforces them with deadly authority.
Joel works as a smuggler in a Boston quarantine zone with his partner Tess. They hunt a black-market dealer named Robert to recover a stolen weapons cache. Robert traded it to the Fireflies, a rebel militia fighting FEDRA. The Fireflies’ leader, Marlene, offers Joel and Tess double the cache if they smuggle a fourteen-year-old girl named Ellie to Fireflies hiding in the Massachusetts State House.
That is the setup. What follows is a road trip across a ruined country, and the road trip is where The Last of Us earns its reputation.
Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson Carry the Story
Troy Baker plays Joel. Ashley Johnson plays Ellie. Both performed through voice and motion capture, and both worked with creative director Neil Druckmann on the characters and the story. Joel and Ellie’s relationship became the focus of development. Every other element in the game was built around it.
You can feel that decision in the quiet stretches. The Last of Us has long periods without combat. Joel and Ellie talk while they walk. Ellie asks questions Joel does not want to answer. She reads a pun book she found and will not stop reading it. The game lets these two people exist in the same space without a firefight to interrupt them, and the effect is that when the violence comes, it lands harder.
Baker’s Joel is a man running out of reasons to care and finding one anyway. Johnson’s Ellie is a teenager who has grown up inside the collapse and does not know what she is missing. The performances are the spine of the thing.
Rifles, Bricks, and Listen Mode
The Last of Us is played from a third-person perspective. The player moves through towns, buildings, forests, and sewers. Combat mixes firearms, improvised weapons, hand-to-hand fighting, and stealth.
The arsenal is specific. Long-range options include a rifle, a shotgun, and a bow. Short-range options include a handgun and a short-barreled shotgun. The player scavenges melee weapons like pipes and baseball bats. Bottles and bricks can be thrown to distract, stun, or attack enemies. Weapons upgrade at workbenches using collected items. Health kits, shivs, and Molotov cocktails are found or crafted from scavenged materials. Pills and medicinal plants upgrade attributes like the health meter and crafting speed.
Stealth is not a side option. It is often the only sane one. “Listen Mode” lets the player locate enemies through a heightened sense of hearing and spatial awareness, shown as outlines visible through walls and objects. A dynamic cover system lets the player crouch behind obstacles for a tactical edge.
The player controls Joel for most of the game. Ellie takes the lead through the winter segment. Joel’s daughter Sarah is playable briefly in the opening.
Boston, Lincoln, Pittsburgh
The plot moves through set pieces that stick.
Joel and Tess find Ellie at the State House and learn the Fireflies there are dead. Tess reveals she was infected during the journey. She believes in Ellie’s importance and sacrifices herself against pursuing soldiers so Joel and Ellie can escape.
Joel decides to find Tommy, a former Firefly, hoping he can locate others. Bill, a smuggler and survivalist in Lincoln, Massachusetts, helps them acquire a working vehicle. Driving into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bandits ambush them and wreck the car. They ally with two brothers, Henry and Sam. After they escape the city, Sam is bitten.
The game keeps tightening. Every ally costs something. Every city is a trap with a story in it. The Last of Us understands that the apocalypse is not a spectacle. It is an accumulation of small, terrible decisions.
Factions, Trophies, and Santaolalla
The single-player campaign is the reason to play. But the package is not thin.
There is a competitive online multiplayer mode called Factions. Up to eight players engage in cooperative and competitive gameplay. Trophy support is included. Additional downloadable content was made available separately.
The score was composed and performed by Gustavo Santaolalla. His work is spare and mournful, built on a few repeating figures. It never tells you how to feel. It sits with you instead.
What the Game Gets Right
The Last of Us was released for the PlayStation 3 in 2013. It drew acclaim for its narrative, gameplay, visuals, sound design, score, characterization, depiction of violence, and portrayal of female characters. It sold over 1.3 million copies in its first week and 17 million by April 2018.
The sales numbers are not the story. The story is that Naughty Dog split into two teams for the first time to make this game while the other team built Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. The studio bet on a new property with no established hero and a teenage girl as its emotional center. That bet paid.
Here is what matters most, ranked:
- Joel and Ellie’s relationship. Everything else in the game exists to serve it, and it holds.
- The violence. The Last of Us does not make killing fun. It makes killing heavy, and it makes you complicit.
- The pacing. The quiet stretches are not filler. They are the point.
- The stealth and crafting systems. They force improvisation, and improvisation creates panic.
- Factions. A solid multiplayer mode that most players will never touch.
The game’s biggest flaw is that its systems can buckle under pressure. When stealth fails and the shooting starts, the combat can feel loose and unfair. The game knows this. It gives you bricks and bottles for a reason.
But that flaw does not sink it. The Last of Us is a game about a man who chooses one girl over the world, and the game makes you understand why. It does not ask you to approve. It asks you to watch.
The winter segment, where Ellie takes the lead, is the best stretch of the game. It reframes everything. The girl you were protecting becomes the person doing the protecting, and the game does not soften it.
Where It Lands
The Last of Us is a landmark. Not because of its mechanics, which are good but not revolutionary. Not because of its graphics, which were impressive for 2013 but are not the reason anyone remembers it. It is a landmark because it treated a video game story with the patience of a novel and the nerve of a tragedy.
Naughty Dog built a world where the monsters are fungal and the humans are worse. Then it handed you a girl to protect and asked what you would do. The answer the game gives is not heroic. It is human, and that is harder.
The Last of Us earns its reputation. It is not a perfect game. It is a game that knows exactly what it is doing, and does it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
