A while ago I wrote a script for a video I wanted to make about The Last of Us. This was right after finishing my first playthrough, and I think it tells a lot about what I think about the game if within the first week I decide that I’m going to write and record a 30 minute long video about how much I love the game.

Anyway, I never got around to doing that, mostly because I’m pretty self-concious about recording myself in the paper thin walls of my student accomodation. Regardless, I’m still super happy with what I wrote so here it is.

The Last of Us is, without exaggeration, the greatest story I have ever seen told in a video game. It’s something I feel could only truly be told through the video game medium because of the innate connection to the player that that it provides.

As someone who grew up during the zombie craze of the 2010’s, when I first heard about The Last of Us, I initially brushed it off as another generic formulaic game where the end objective is to find a cure for some highly-contagious potent virus or disease that has ravaged the earth for the past decade or so. I saw it in Resident Evil, I saw it in Left 4 Dead, I saw it in Call of Duty and I saw it in the Walking Dead. So I moved on.

Only recently did I actually pick up the game when I was looking for a distraction after moving away from home for the first time to go to university, feeling incredibly alone for the first time in years. I don’t know exactly why I chose this game of all things, but that is beside the point.

So? I was kinda right. I think a lot of people go into this game hoping for something like Uncharted, maybe less extreme and more grounded but similar nonetheless. Instead, they are disappointed after playing a game I could only describe as claustrophobic in comparison.

Yet, it has become one of my favourite games of all time, up there with games like Outer Wilds and Undertale.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that this is a story told in the greatest WAY I have ever seen. While the premise of the story is great, the overall plot generally quite cliche. Where The Last of Us really shines, is in it’s genius way it tells that story.

At it’s core, The Last of Us is about unravelling what it means to be human. How far are you willing to go to survive, and how much humanity are you willing to shed in the process? And at the centre of it all is a focus on a single human emotion: empathy.

Neil Druckmann is quoted with saying “simple story, complex characters”. Real great stories don’t come from a grand overarching plot, where universal set-pieces cascade upon each other as it comes to this bombastic conclusion. Rather, they come from the individual micro-interactions between characters that act like glue; forming bonds on, not an ineffable level, but a human level that we as the player can relate to in our own personal ways.

For an example of where writing fails, look to Detroit: Become Human. It’s a good game, but ultimately let down by having a far too convoluted story that overshadows the very real characters that build it up. Rather than continuing to develop existing characters, it tries to introduce more story elements than it can handle and collapses under the added weight, which left me and many other players with an ending that felt unsatisfying and unfinished.

In contrast, The Last of Us demonstrates how effective writing can be when it keeps the overall narrative scale constant. The way the world works and the end objective of Joel and Ellie never changes - it’s only disrupted, and these interruptions drive the development of the characters.

In practically every other game released today, characters take turns speaking as though there is some invisible talking pillow they exchange. It’s artificial and contrived, which leads to a complete disconnect between the player and the game. You can see this at it’s most extreme in the Horizon games and even worse in Assassin’s Creed, where you navigate through seemingly endless dialogue trees featuring a stilted mess of meaningless filler, where only one option actually progresses the story and maybe two have interesting dialogue. The catch being you don’t know which is which, so you’re left playing Russian roulette whether you end up with something meaningful or just garbage.

This is in stark contrast to a real conversation - something with a very uneven, improvised tone. People talk over each other, sometimes they don’t even respond at all; they shout, they whisper; they talk to themselves or even have multiple conversations on going at once. The conversation tends to pause for uncomfortable stretches of time and then seemingly speeds back up, like a runner trying to keep their balance after tripping. The Last of Us captures this perfectly.

Scenes hit us harder and resonate deeper because we are there to experience them with Joel and with Ellie. When Joel loses Sarah, we are there, inescapably stuck with him; when Joel and Ellie discover the giraffes, we are there, experiencing this discovery with them; and when Joel saves Ellie from the Fireflies, we are there to see it executed. It isn’t something laid out to us through exposition or diluted storytelling, it is right in front of us. Dialogue feels so much more innate when it’s in reaction to something that we as the player are seeing happen.

For most of the main game, we play as Joel. In many ways, he is a true perfected survivor of the apocalypse. He is cold, quick-witted, intelligent and brutal. In the beginning of the game he may as well be the same as the blighted zombies that plague the landscape, going off of sole muscle memory and instinct, killing without any attachment or remorse. This is something we see reflected in the last mission of the game, though for vastly different reasons.

When Tess reveals her bite and describes her dying wish, she completely breaks down in this desperate plea for her life to mean something. She wants to go out knowing her sacrifice did something for the greater good. How much she begs and pleads is not only telling of her own character, but Joel’s as well. This is what it takes to get him to abide her dying wish.

Joel makes a very clear point to never reflect on his own past and just move on. This leads to him building up the psychological barriers that the rest of the game will be spent disassembling. He doesn’t want to talk about Sarah, he doesn’t want to talk about Tess, and he doesn’t want to talk about Henry and Sam.

And yet, despite all of this attempt at emotional disconnection he never ever removes the watch his daughter gave him on his birthday. Deep down he knows he can’t run away from his past.

It’s only until Joel meets Ellie that these barricades he has carefully architected over 20 years of trauma slowly begin to be chipped away, and the pre-apocalyptic version of himself begins to shine through the cracks as their relationship solidifies.

Throughout their journey they meet Henry and Sam, it’s a stark realisation that ultimately they are no different, a parallel even. Ellie just happens to be immune. It shows that despite how hard they try, they are always on the edge of suffering. Perhaps instead of a zombie bite, it will be a stray bullet, or even something as simple as food poisoning. Joel knows this but doesn’t say anything, and the idea of Ellie dying, his daughter dying, begins eating away at him.

When they get to Tommy’s, Joel attempts to get rid of her from his life as fast as possible, realising he’s forming the same care for Ellie as he did for his daughter. He comes up with all of these bullshit excuses like his brother knowing the area better, or trusting him more or whatnot. His psyche simply can’t take the idea of opening himself up to someone in the same way he cared for his late daughter.

But Ellie is perceptive, and rightfully calls him out on his horseshit which only angers him further. Her explaining the reality that she can’t take the idea of losing someone either, brings Joel to his lowest point. It’s a depressing scene but it has to happen for the next stage of their development. It all culminates in Joel going as far as to suggest she doesn’t know what loss is, which to say this lightly is a complete fuck asshole shit-eater statement.

Ellie has lost practically everyone she cares about, seemingly always within mere weeks of meeting them. She yearns for attachment and yet is repeatedly denied it. Even we as the player don’t learn the true extent of this until the very last scene of the game. Joel is the last remaining person that she feels any form of attachment to, and the fact he wants to push her away is utterly devastating to her.

It’s why his further development later on in the game hits so hard to the player. The world of The Last of Us is so perfectly crafted to punish any form of moral good and attachment with misery and death so consistently that it is no wonder people like Joel are the last remaining survivors. For the same reasons then, it is so satisfying when through his connection and development with Ellie, his walls begin to break down.

Then David is introduced. David is the epitome of the darkest aspects of human nature.

Up until now, Ellie has been a shining beacon of hope, both literally through her immunity but also through her approach to the world, her love of life. She’s a reminder of humanities ability to find joy and contentment in even the bleakest of circumstances. David however, challenges this.

He is a grim reminder that people like Ellie do not belong in this world, that no matter how long Ellie wants to remain childish and innocent it cannot be that way forever. He is someone who has completely abandoned their morality in exchange for power and control. His manipulative and predatory behaviour highlights the possible dangers that lurk within every human being in the game, including Ellie. He forces Ellie to face her own capacity for survival at any cost, and the liability that comes with trust.

From the very first time we meet him up until the end, David is constantly switching between two polarising personalities. He is warm and welcoming and then suddenly he isn’t. He is generous and understanding and then suddenly he isn’t, the mark of a true serial manipulator. And what makes him truly evil is that he doesn’t just do what it takes to survive in the same way that Joel does, instead in a sick twisted way he almost thrives in the apocalypse. He immediately begins toying with Ellie the moment they meet her, and he creates plans for her that not even people on his side know about. He is a truly monstrous individual, who only does what is best for him and his interests.

Right from the start of the fight with David, he is depicted as the strongest and most powerful enemy in the entire game. Every enemy in the game can be killed instantly using a backstab, but he can weather three and STILL keep going. He takes Ellie’s gun and he locks the door. He is someone in complete control of himself and of the situation, and he is Ellie’s final test.

Throughout the fight however, as Ellie continuously outsmarts David his power diminishes, in much the same way that she gradually eroded his legitimacy among his peers. We see him become more and more frustrated with the fact that he cannot kill her. He is losing control. His internal narcissistic beliefs that he is always behind the wheel are now his greatest weakness.

At the end of fight, Ellie gives in to depravity. She HAS to give in, to survive the fight against David, to give in to the most vicious, violent part of herself. By the end, she and David BOTH have lost all control.

She hacks and slashes and cleaves away at his face, gripped by fear and desperation. Her will to survive completely engulfs her entire character. It took a monster as machiavellian as David to push Ellie over the edge, to reveal HER inner darkness. Seeing this deplorability, the worst of humanity, leaves a permanent mark on Ellie, almost as if while she physically hacked away at David he metaphorically hacked away at her. It’s a side to her that we don’t see again for the rest of the game, a side that when revealed completely shuts her down emotionally all the way until the beginning of the next chapter.

The next (penultimate) chapter is also the first time we truly see Joel leading the conversation with Ellie, recognising the hell she had gone through. We see Joel actually entertaining the kinds of questions that Ellie would ask him and he would dismiss, except now it’s Ellie shutting them down. She’s constantly pensive and lost in thought until she discovers the giraffes, which brings out Ellie’s optimism again.

After seeing Ellie back up on her feet, Joel voices his concerns about the Fireflies, that Ellie shouldn’t feel pressured to do this. However, Ellie recognises that if they have gone this far and sacrificed this much, all the pain they’ve experienced would be for nothing. It reminds us that internally, Ellie copes with the immense amount of loss that she experiences by legitimising it with “it will all be worth it”, that if somehow she manages to get to the Fireflies to help with the cure, their deaths won’t be in vain.

Ultimately the game boils down to a paradoxically both selfish and selfless choice by Joel. To choose to save Ellie, to protect her and to protect himself because his own psyche couldn’t take the possibility of losing her. And then to tell her more lies in an attempt to soften the blow, which in reality adds more insult to injury. He knows more than anyone that she couldn’t live with the idea that she could have fulfilled her purpose and he got in the way of that.

And the beauty of the situation is that we, the player, completely understand this despite knowing the repercussions. His actions were wrong but he did what any loving father would do for their daughter. I would do the same. Ellie may be able to save the world, but Joel’s world is nothing without Ellie. Every player knows deep down that Marlene is correct - sacrificing a 14 year old for even a chance of saving literally all of humanity is a no-brainer, but we sympathise with Joel regardless.

What’s interesting about Marlene however is that she acts as though her own suffering and experiences are somehow more important than that of Joel and Ellie, that her actions are somehow more virtuous than those of everyone else. Her condescending tone when she says “What you are going through right now is NOTHING to what I have been through” speaks volumes. No it wasn’t, you can’t compare tragedy at this level Marlene. “This isn’t about me!” - it absolutely IS. You NEED this to be about you. Literally everything the Fireflies have done has been a complete failure, you are DESPERATE for a win.

It’s difficult to sympathise with a so-called freedom fighter group that cares about humanity when their first response seeing a man perform CPR on an unconscious 14 year old girl is to bludgeon him in the head and knock him unconscious. Regardless of if they knew it was Ellie, the fact they act like this to people they don’t deem “important” enough is utterly disgusting. In fact, Joel is only alive because of Marlene stepping in, the other Fireflies just wanted to kill him on the spot. Marlene thought she could just march Joel away while ordering Ellie killed, without even the original payment they agreed on. And she dared to call that a gift.

Imagine you’ve gone weeks without seeing the girl that supposedly holds the cure for humanity, and one day a man who has gone through hell and back gets her to you. What “good” or even just deluded organisation thinks the response to this would be to just kill you. They didn’t even give Ellie the decency to let her decide whether she wants to go through with the operation or even just see Joel and talk about it, they never even woke her up from being unconscious. Instead they started pumping her full of drugs immediately and told Joel to just fuck off after killing him wasn’t an option.

Probably because they don’t actually care about them as people, they just see Ellie as a package to be opened up for the source of the cure and Joel as dead weight. How can you call yourself an organisation “fighting for humanity” if you fail to be human at this level?

This is where my one criticism with the games story lies. If the writers wanted the decision to save Ellie, to fight the Fireflies, to be ambiguous all of this would not be in the game.

It’s even hinted that Marlene knows something is wrong with her choice. At the end, she has a clean point-blank shot at Joel’s head, but against all reason she doesn’t fire. In my opinion, it’s because Marlene views Joel as more understanding of Ellie than the other Fireflies. Marlene is the type of person to believe anything she does is automatically the right thing to do, and so her entire world breaks down at the idea that killing Ellie somehow isn’t right, that someone like Joel could go so far to save her life didn’t make sense. Perhaps she needed Joel to share her same view, in order to cope. And when he clearly doesn’t at the hospital bed she can’t take that and desperately tries again at the end. I don’t think she was ever convinced that what she did was the right thing.

However, while all of this about the Fireflies being a dysfunctional operation is completely true, it’s actually completely irrelevant when considering the dilemma at hand. The world is completely made up by the writers, and if they want a cure to be created from Ellies brain by killing her and only by killing her then they can make it that way. To Joel, he one-hundred percent believes Marlene that a cure could be found from Ellie’s brain and the kicker is that he chooses to save her anyway - because ultimately that is the kind of person that he is. Joel will always make that choice.

What I can’t understand is Joel’s lie. It’s a complete betrayal of Ellie’s trust. A sad callback to the fact that Joel isn’t a saint and never will be. How is his lie any different from the Fireflies taking away her agency when they were going to perform the operation? Is it okay that it’s Joel withholding information from her now? Information that would make her sacrifice herself, something she confirms in the very last scene?

“No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for” - Joel is describing exactly what he just did. Joel needs Ellie now, he’s become inseparable from her. The bonds have formed in their father-daughter relationship and they cannot be undone. He needs Ellie to keep fighting for.

It’s these sorts of deep connections between characters, this ability to place their psyche under a magnifying glass to examine the inner workings of their logic decades after the release of the medium and still find something new is what I associate with the great classics of literature - something I didn’t even think could be achieved to such an extent in video games until I played The Last of Us.

I mentioned in the beginning that The Last of Us can only truly be experienced as a video game. I’ve seen the TV series, and it’s great! But it doesn’t capture the same emotions I felt playing the game. Something about being so close to the characters, about having direct control over their actions, the smaller details that occur like the comments they make on things that they walk by. It all feeds into creating a wafer-thin barrier between me and the game. And it is necessary for the core emotion of empathy to have it’s strongest effect and to hit you when you least expect it.

Empathy is one of the most complex emotions humans can experience, and probably the hardest emotion to master in storytelling as a whole. It’s something that is inherently paradoxical and seemingly goes against our own selfish drive for survival. For instance, Uncharted in many ways fails at empathy, Nathan Drake for all his crazy Indiana Jones adventures is a mass murderer - and the game never addresses this. There is never any empathy for the people he kills, because it would make it a lot harder to play as Nathan Drake if the game brought it up. It’s almost like a secret contract between the player and the game to not talk about it.

Contrarily, this is where The Last of Us thrives. It forces players to confront the moral ambiguity and consequences of violence. It takes time to humanise the characters, every character, and constantly challenges the player’s empathy by putting them in situations where survival and morality are at odds. Every person encountered is a complex, flawed individual, and the game doesn’t shy away from showing the emotional toll that Joel and Ellie’s actions take on themselves and others. In doing so, The Last of Us creates a deep emotional connection and forces the player to reflect on the weight of their choices.

The prioritisation of characters over plot and an increased focus on complex human emotions is something I now find myself reflecting upon and seeing in some of my favourite games of this decade, and it’s no doubt that The Last of Us had a generational effect on the way storytelling is done in games. It’s a completely novel approach to the type of storytelling that I originally grew up on.

I could continue talking for a lot longer about how amazing this game is, it’s a game that had such an unprecedented effect on me that I really don’t know how to describe. For instance, themes of fate in Joel and Ellie, I mentioned earlier that Joel will always choose to save Ellie, or how Ellie feels her fate and destiny is simply being the cure and that is why she must go through all this suffering, in many ways Ellie succeeded at being a cure, but for Joel. Maybe, how PTSD is portrayed in Joel’s emotional disconnection from his surroundings, and how that affects the relationships he holds with the people around him.

However, I think I’m just going to ask you to play the game for yourself. And if you have played it, what did you think?