The Last of US: More than meets the eye

Since the release of The Last of Us, in 2013, as a PlayStation 3 exclusive, there have been nineteen big triple-A games that are considered zombie games (I dare you to name one more iconic than Naughty Dog's zombie survival game).

The Last of Us was released to high commercial success and praise, becoming one of the top 50 best selling games and managed to receive 144 awards out of 220 nominations. It is regarded by many video game journalists and critics as the best game of all time.

But how? How did a simple zombie survival shooter manage to create such a big impact in a market so over saturated with that genre? Just to add some perspective of the landscape of pop culture in 2013: the most watched TV show that year was The Walking Dead, the second season of Telltales take on that franchise came out and World War Z was released during the summer of the same year. There was a zombie apocalypse in 2013 and still The Last of Us managed to survive.

From an outsider perspective, the game seems the generic zombie shooter with a tough guy as the main character and a little girl as his companion. The game takes a known and overused formula and flips, remixes, and transforms it into a masterpiece of narrative storytelling and gameplay.

"To the edge of the Universe and back; Endure and Survive"

In our world there's a specific type of fungi that are able to take control of ants in tropical forests, making their behavior change to be more tuned to benefit the fungus instead of their own well being. These ants are known as zombie ants. Naughty Dog imagined a world where a mutant strain of these fungi takes control over humans instead of ants and the game takes place twenty years after the United States are ravaged by them.

You play as Joel, a man in his late 40's that has lost everything when most of the world was turned. He survived twenty years by blurring many moral lines. He lives his life by being a smuggler, contrabanding every kind of product out of military zones. He shut down his emotions a long ago in order to come to terms with everything he has done and what he has lost.

He's tasked with transporting Ellie, a naive but explosive teenage girl, out of his quarantine zone and deliver her to a group of rebel survivors. What seems like a simple task turns into a journey across the post-apocalyptic U.S. through towns, forest, and sewers.

The center stage isn't the zombies or Joel, but the relationship between him and Ellie as they learn to live with one another, how to endure after losing everyone and survive a world that wants to kill them.

"You have no idea what loss is."

You want to know what differentiates The Last of Us from the dozens of other zombie games that over-flood the market? The way it doesn't focus on zombies. Yes, that has been done before, where the zombie apocalypse is just a way to move characters forward but isn't the focus.

However, this is a particular case of using something that has been done before but elevating it to a whole new level. The zombies, or the infected as they are called in the game, don't get any attention for hours on end, serving only has obstacles that Joel and Ellie need to go through in order to move forward in their journey.

The writing team decided to focus the story in the companions you meet on your journey. Instead of force-feeding you exposition about the backstory of each of the characters you meet, the game only hints you on what happened to them before you meet them. Making the dialogues feel much more organic.

Let me give you an example of how subtle the game is when it comes to exposing a character backstory. There's a time in the game when you have to go and meet one of Joel's old buddies, Bill. He has taken a whole town for himself, planting traps everywhere to protect himself from anyone or anything.

When you finally meet him, you realize the guy is crazy and violent. He comes across as someone that could kill you in a second if he felt like it and it looks like he feels like it, all the time. In fact, he only helps Joel because he owes him a favor. During one of his first scenes, he said that he once cared about someone but decided it was dumb to trust anyone and, fearing for his life he chose to be alone. Later, he talks about a former partner called Frank. When we find out that Frank was bitten and committed suicide, Bill acts grim about it and just says "F@ck him".

At the end of the whole segment, we find out that Ellie stole some magazines form Bill and it's implied that they are homosexual pornographic magazines. What I first understood of Bill and Frank's relationship was that they were surviving partners that helped each other, now I realize that Frank was the one who Bill once cared about and was his life partner for a while.

"After all we've been through, after everything I've done, it can't be for nothing."

The first time I played The Last of Us was in the summer of 2013 in the PlayStation 3. Later I played it again with my girlfriend to show her how beautifully well made it was. Recently, almost six years after my initial playthrough I played it again, in the PlayStation 4 (mainly for its photo mode). At first, I didn't notice so many important things that are necessary to understand the nuances of the game. The relationship between Joel and Ellie is so well-drawn to the point you believe that those two are real people. The outstanding level design, by itself, is so detailed that it tells the story of what happened in the places you visited, over the last twenty years. The soundtrack and sound design are brilliant and both make you feel exactly what you need to feel at any particular time.

It took me time to grow up as a person to understand what the writers were saying and, at least to me, this proves that this game improves with age. It was an instant classic on release but, more than that, it is a timeless classic that everyone should experience with full attention.

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