There are monsters out there. They lurk in the sewers, they scour the suburbs, they roam the crumbling, collapsing cities. The haunt the historic neighbourhoods of the east. They track through the thickening snow of the frozen west. They’re horrific caricatures of what human beings used to be and they all stare at Ellie with hungry, vacant eyes. Mindless, slavering, they’re motivated only by that most base self-interest: survival.
It’s truly horrible to see what human beings have become. They have turned. They have transformed into predators and even cannibals, amoral animals that prey on the weak. And I’m not sure if your journey is any different.
Somewhere in the background of all this are the Infected, those who succumbed to a mutated version of Cordyceps, the fungus that infects and takes control of insects, manipulating them to spread its spores before turning them into husks out of which new fungi sprout. In an act of magnificent misdirection, The Last of Us leads you to believe that it’s a game all about fighting the Infected, maybe even about defeating them.
The Last of Us is a game about lies.
Its narrative arc is perfect. Beginning with the merciless and clearly unnecessary killing of a girl, it doesn’t get any better from there. After clearly telegraphing who the real monsters are, it shows you both how they turn on one another and how their attempts to cope with a very different world create distrust and disorder. It ends with another merciless and clearly unnecessary killing as part of an attempt to save another girl. And another transformation into a monster.
Let’s Play The Last of Us – Late to the Party Watch on YouTube
Since Night of the Living Dead, zombie narratives have always been as much about how people treat one another as they are about surviving any apocalypse. They show them at their best, they show them at their worst and there’s frequently a subtext that comments on something such as humanity, morality or consumerism. The Last of Us approaches subtext with the same originality and harshness with which it approaches everything else. It says that we lie to ourselves, constantly, and that this has terrible consequences.