The Last of Us

This post contains spoilers for the original The Last of Us

I need to talk about The Last Of Us.

Not The Last of Us: Part 2. Just The Last of Us. And yes, I know I am very late to this party.

First released in 2013 and remastered in 2014, The Last of Us is pretty much universally regarded as a masterpiece of a game. It tells the story of Joel and his initially unwanted charge Ellie as they try to cross zombie-apocalypse-ridden America to get the zombie-immune Ellie to a group of scientists who are searching for a cure. So far, so tropey. But the story is elevated by pretty much everything about it — the acting, the writing, the environmental design, and of course the story of these two characters that drives you through the game.

It is famously graphic and famously heartbreaking, and after seeing a Let’s Play of the prologue, where Joel is unable to save his daughter, I put it firmly into the mental “amazing games I’ll never play” camp. I don’t really play “shooting games.” I certainly don’t play games where people make realistic choking noises as you strangle them to death. But I recently caved and got a PS4 to supplement my Xbox and Switch and let me play all the supposedly amazing PS exclusive single player adventure games I’d missed, and although the thing came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted 4, The Last of Us Remastered turned out to be the game I reached for.

It is incredibly graphic. It’s heartbreakingly sad. And it is a masterpiece. Thank god I finally picked it up to play it.

But full disclosure going in: I already knew what happened at the end of The Last of Us when I started the game. I didn’t know all of the details, but “doctors must kill Ellie, Joel kills the doctors” was very much on my radar. It was a game I was never going to play but that people were obsessed with, and so over the years I didn’t stop myself from learning more about why people loved it and picking up plot details along the way. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have reacted if the end had been a surprise. Even going in knowing how it would end, it was a lot to deal with.

First, let’s talk about Joel. For all that he’s the protagonist and the player-controlled character for most of the game, Joel is kind of a terrible person. He’s a character who Does What It Takes To Survive, and that means he’s brutal, killing often without any apparent compunction or concern. Joel is a smuggler, which is basically genre-fiction code for “cool criminal,” but later we find out that he used to be involved in a group that chased down and murdered people to steal their resources for their own survival. We learn this while desperately fighting to escape such a group ourselves, so we get a true, visceral sense of how much of a villain Joel was in many, many other people’s stories.

Joel, we quickly learn, cares about Joel, and the few things in the world that he loves enough to include in that definition of himself. In the early game, that’s his smuggling partner Tess to some extent. Later on, it is Ellie. He lost his daughter, so he does not like to think on the past or let anybody get close, but anyone does get close to him, he’s sure as hell going to make sure that he doesn’t end up losing them too.

And one of the most heartbreaking things about the game is seeing how Joel’s harsh survivor philosophy affects Ellie. When we first meet Ellie, she is bright and fierce and full of joy, despite all that she’s already suffered, and then she is forced to suffer more, and more, first to see gruesome death, and then to beginning killing people herself, all in the name of her and Joel’s survival. She suffers more loss. And by the final sequence of the game, she’s a shell of her former self, clearly traumatised by what she was forced to do to rescue herself and Joel in the previous chapter, terrified of what is to come when they finally reach the Fireflies, knowing she can’t turn back, because all that she’s done and been through can’t have been for nothing.

Beyond the characters, though, one of my favorite things about The Last of Us was its world building and its masterful use of environmental storytelling. It’s perhaps slightly unwise to play a zombie apocalypse game during an actual global pandemic, especially when you start finding notes written by kids talking about school being closed due to the outbreak and other highly covid-relevant things, but I was captivated by how the game included unspoken stories everywhere, the struggles and victories of other survivors told by the things, the damage, and sometimes the zombies they left behind.

One of the most affecting segments, for me, was the part in the sewers. So much of The Last of Us paints a bleak picture of humanity and of the cruelty and brutality of those who fight to survive. But in the sewers, we follow the story of a guy named Ish, who hid from the initial outbreak on a boat, and then moved into the sewers and eventually began to build a community there. It’s a safe haven, full of families with kids, thriving… until someone accidentally leaves the door open one day, and the infected get in. We see all of this assumedly many years later, forced to fight infected that must once have been residents while surrounded by cheerful children’s drawings across the walls.

Eventually, you find a note on the body of a man behind a locked door, saying he and the kids were trapped in there by the zombies. Next to a small pile of bodies hidden by a blanket, there’s a note on the floor scrawled in chalk: “they didn’t suffer.”

It’s entirely missable, but I think it was one of the most affecting and memorable details of the entire game.

It seems par for the course for The Last of Us that Ish and his community did not survive. Although Ellie and Joel find a successful safehaven in Jacksonville, there’s a general sense in The Last of Us that the people who survive are the people willing to do anything to do so, and that the good cannot thrive in this world. Even Ish seems to have learned that — we last hear from him after the zombie attack, having survived, not knowing what to do, and although we don’t get to know how his story ends, it seems fair to assume that he may have become one of the bandits that you fight in the next area in his traumatised struggle to survive.

Of course, The Last of Us isn’t all bleak, and its bleakness only highlights and sweetens the small moments of joy it also offers. Although the game does not end here, its emotional climax, its reward for the player, must be the giraffe scene. I cried, at least, feeling strangely overwhelmed, as Ellie gazed in wonder at the giraffe right before her. I certainly didn’t expect looking out over a field of now-wild giraffes with Ellie to be the thing in the game that affected me the most. But it’s the marvel of nature, a quiet moment of joy despite the darkness, and one that I did not want to end. I did not want to make Ellie move and continue the story to whatever horrifying place it was going.

I wanted to let Ellie stand and marvel at the giraffes forever, for once safe from the horrors of the world. Ellie deserves safety. She deserves joy. She deserves LIFE. She deserves to not have had to experience ANY of this. And for one moment, she is transported outside of her trauma and fear. As she talks about her journey needing to have been worth it, you get the sense that perhaps this moment, this small quiet moment looking out over a field of giraffes, was the catharsis and the reward.

Because the ending itself sure does not give the characters or the players either of those things. We feel that Ellie deserves life and joy, and I assume most players, like me, have long had fierce feelings of “I would die for Ellie,” but in the end, we don’t get that opportunity. We can’t die to save Ellie; we can only kill to save Ellie, and this time, it is killing people who are working to end the horrors we’ve seen this entire game, and who need to sacrifice Ellie to do it.

Ellie is unconscious, so she doesn’t get a say in what is unfolding, and the Fireflies are villains in the sense, at least, that they did not give Ellie any chance to make that choice. But Ellie has already made her feelings quite clear to Joel. It can’t all have been for nothing. All the struggles, all the death, all the nightmares that they have seen… their journey has to have had a purpose.

But Joel cannot bear to lose her. So we kill the doctors and we get Ellie out. And then we lie to Ellie about what happened, so she doesn’t have to deal with the guilt of it herself — or perhaps just so that Joel does not have to risk losing her by choice after almost losing her to death. But it’s clear that Ellie does not really believe him.

And that’s it. That’s the end. After a stealth section through the hospital, the “final boss” is shooting unarmed surgeons who are about to operate on Ellie. The final scene is a conversation with no satisfying resolution. There’s no victory, no catharsis. The game ends with us controlling Ellie, simply walking through the woods behind Joel, seeing him from the outside and knowing the lie. It ends with Ellie challenging Joel again for the truth, telling him how important this all was and all that she’s lost, and having him lie to Ellie’s face again… and Ellie saying nothing, but seeming to know the truth.

It’s bleak, and it’s unsatisfying. After everything, Joel has let Ellie down, even as he saved her, and Ellie achieved nothing. Her choice was stolen from her, even though we emphasise with Joel for not wanting to lose her. Normally, I’d say an unsatisfying ending is a bad thing, but I think it fit the tone of the game far better than any happy or blatantly tragic ending would have. We get the feeling that it was all for nothing — Ellie’s loss, her trauma, crossing the US, her being immune, all of it. The only thing gained is the love between Ellie and Joel, and that too has perhaps now been ruined by Joel’s actions and his final lie.

And now I have to play The Last of Us Part 2. I hear it’s even bleaker, but that seems natural, given the world and the characters and that ending.