When the first The Last of Us trailers came out two years ago, Creative Director Neil Druckmann was quick to say TLoU wasn’t a zombie game.
“If it were about the monsters, we would have not showed them. The story’s not about them, so [we thought] let’s get it out of the way.”
Druckmann’s statement is true, but misleading. The Last of Us is a story intimately concerned with monsters – how they’re made, why they prey on others, how they’ve vanquished. It just isn’t concerned with the ones made by infection.
During their live E3 interview, Naughty Dog’s developers cited the works of Cormac McCarthy as a major influence. No Country for Old Men’s bleak neo-Western aesthetic is clear in many areas of TLoU, and the plot – the somewhat aimless journey of an adult-child duo across a blasted, post-apocalyptic environment in search of a nebulous goal – certainly evokes McCarthy’s The Road. I was personally tempted to parallel the plot and themes with those of the film Children of Men (2006), another story about hope and hopelessness in the twilight of a dying society.
No mechanical element of TLoU is spectacularly innovative. Plotwise it’s a rather episodic road-trip narrative with a relatively sparse (but well-written) cast and a decided lack of epic heroics. By the same token, the game-play is superficially familiar to anyone who’s played Uncharted or similar third-person manshooters, polished rather then spectacularly innovative. But encounters are decidedly unglamorous, petty affairs: the scavenging focus and Joel’s relative fragility encourages murder and ambush over action-movie shootouts, and every foe – even individual zombies –can be deadly.
This decision to avoid grand spectacle must be intentional. The Last of Us is not a story that promises or delivers catharsis. From beginning to end it’s a study of despair, a monster impervious to blade or bullet.
TLoU’s twist on the standard apocalypse tropes begins with its twist on a familiar introduction: the initial outbreak of the mutated cordyceps fungus that ultimately destroys modern civilization. It’s already telling that the infected make only short appearances in this sequence; the focus is largely on the panic and selfishness of the fleeing refugees. The protagonist Joel doesn’t lose his daughter to zombie teeth or infectious spores; his little girl is gunned down by a well-meaning soldier reluctantly following the orders of an unseen superior.
Twenty years later, Joel is cut off from friends and family, living as a ruthless smuggler in the slowly decaying Boston quarantine zone. With the infection largely confined to enclosed spaces, humans have turned upon each other – paranoia, crime and well-intentioned rebellion by the violent Firefly militia are far more pressing threats than the cordyceps infection. Human life has lost its value in this bleak and hopeless world, and Joel and his fellow smuggler Tess have long since become casual killers.
Joel and Tess’s choice to transport fourteen-year-old Ellie across Boston to a Firefly outpost isn’t altruistic. “Just cargo,” they call her. Tess makes a few abortive overtures at friendship; Joel, still traumatized by the loss of his daughter and hardened by years of survival at any cost, is somewhat more reticent. When it’s discovered that Ellie is immune to the infection and that the Fireflies intend to create a vaccine, only Tess dares to hope – Joel is still trapped in survival mode.
“Guess what, we’re shitty people, Joel!” Tess shouts at him. “It’s been that way for a long time!”
“No, we are survivors!” Joel snaps back, angry and fearful. It’s hard to believe that this stone-cold killer is so afraid of death in a world where death has become mundane – what frightens him is hope. Survival is an acceptable cause in a despairing world, and Joel is a consummate survivor with few scruples and a past filled with desperate atrocities.
But in a world with hope, Joel’s survival-at-any-cost makes him a monster.
Leaving Boston and Tess behind them, Ellie and Joel move out into the countryside. Joel’s attitude changes subtly but immediately. Even while he’s determined to hand her off to his brother Tommy for delivery to the Fireflies, he grows more trusting, more attached to her than probably any other person in decades. By the time he’s resolved to take Ellie there himself, their dynamic has become that of an adopted father-daughter pair without either of them noticing.
But so far we’ve spoken only about Joel – let’s talk about Ellie, a compelling protagonist in her own right. She is a wonderfully believable mixture of softness and harshness. No damsel in distress, she’s perfectly willing to stab an aggressor with a switchblade, but sufficiently divorced from the murderous world outside the quarantine zones to remain reluctant to kill.
The Last Of Us further distinguishes itself from the “classic” sort of apocalyptic narrative in its treatment of Ellie and indeed the entire vaccine plot arc. A more conventional story would make the cure for the infection the key to recovering the planet, ramping up the threat of the infection as the journey progresses as an increasing departure from the safe normality of the quarantine zone.
But while Ellie’s immune status acts as an impetus for the plot, it increasingly takes a backstage role to her as a person. Ellie is not some ambulatory MacGuffin – she is an intelligent, determined young woman who fights and scavenges and has strong opinions of her own. She learns from Joel and bonds with him – and her “adoption” symbolizes the first steps back towards hope much more than any vaccine made from her blood could. (In fact, her immune status rarely even comes up.)
Joel’s journey brings him into contact with a spectrum of survivors. Some are armed and bearing weapons against him and his charge, some are friendly, and some are encountered only in records. But all are terribly, sympathetically human, and each seems to reflect an aspect of Joel’s wounded personality.
There is Bill, the shut-in survivor so embittered by his losses and desperate to survive that he refuses any human contact. The Hunters, oppressed refugees turned murderous brigands who lure in would-be rescuers and kill for supplies and comfort in the ruins of Pittsburg, as Joel vaguely admits to having done himself. Henry, whose obsessive need to protect his brother Sam rather than teach him ultimately dooms them both. The Cannibals, murdering to feed and protect their loved ones just as Joel turns his gun upon anyone who threatens him and Ellie. The Fireflies, Quixotic rebels lost, like Joel, in the vanished past and unable to build a stable future.
And the further West the duo travel, the more clear it is that the infection is secondary to the threat of other desperate survivors willing to stay alive at any cost – people very much like Joel.
There are positive examples in The Last of Us besides Ellie.Though the game is devoid of conventional catharsis, it isn’t without hope.
A telling chapter a little more than halfway through the game presents Joel’s brother Tommy and the community he leads as the only bright spot in a dying world. Intelligent, charismatic, and optimistic, Tommy rejected Joel’s scavenger lifestyle and the paranoid cutthroat mindset it required. He leaves the blasted cities for the clean wilderness of Wyoming, cultivating self-sufficient agriculture and attracting families. And, conspicuously, he and his people have adjusted to a world with the infection in much the same way as bad weather: a challenge to be overcome, but not obsessed over.
Tommy and his people are conspicuously the only people choosing to rebuild a nucleus for their new community. They repair a power planet through the help of skilled engineers. They live in lit homes instead of squalid ruins. They wear clean clothes and welcome – with reservations – outsiders with words rather than bullets.
Tommy and his people represent the only constructive approach in the game, and their constructive solution stands in stark contrast both to that of the Fireflies and the traditional apocalypse narrative. The very hope that so terrifies the survivor Joel is what drives them to make a better world for themselves and their families. Where every other group is slowly waiting to die, ground down by the prospect of the future, Tommy and his people seem to be moving forward.
And tellingly, it’s to them – not the doomed and deluded Fireflies or the dying Boston quarrantine – that Joel returns at game’s end. If there is optimism to be found in this bleak story, it’s in the idealistic message that it is possible to escape the murderous world through which Joel has sojourned – that the antidote to despair is found in looking to the future, not bargaining for a return to the past.