Thoughts On The Last Of Us

Warning. Spoilers for The Last Of Us!

Even given the nature of this platform, I've found myself shying away from ever fully writing about The Last Of Us. When a game is as highly publicized as this one has been and being heralded by some as, “one of the greatest games of all time,” I felt it was hard to come up with something unique to say about the game that wasn't already being typed ad nauseam by other websites. The Last Of Us is not a “play your own way” type of game. Joel and Ellie's decisions are their own and whether or not you agree with these decisions is trivial because you're going to play through them and see them made. As I have played through The Last Of Us Remastered I realized that this is where the importance of this game lies, as it forces you to face your feelings on tough matters by stripping any choice from you. The Last Of Us makes you uncomfortable by making you think about personal losses you've encountered in life as well as make you reflect on the gratuitous violence we ingest regularly as gamers with no second thought. The Last Of Us makes you walk away with heavy thoughts about yourself by telling a story about humans with little-to-no choice. This game is important for so many reasons, but instead of typing another article that speaks on how amazing the story of this game is or how well crafted the characters are, these are the two main feelings I had as I played through the game. They are by no means good feelings, on the contrary, they are uncomfortable and stay with me while I'm not playing, but they are important in understanding why the Last Of Us is special to each unique player of the game.

There is a moment about halfway through The Last Of Us that makes a potent statement about loss. Outside of the hydroelectric dam, ran by Joel's brother, Tommy, the player can find a grave that Joel comments as, “too small.” This prompts Ellie to want to talk about Sam and Henry's death, which had happened in the previous scene of the game, to which Joel stops her and simply says, “things happen... and we move on.” In a post-pandemic world where the fight for life eventually trumps the mourning of death, this statement may make sense. Joel and Ellie live in a world where no matter who they lose, be that Sarah, Tess, Henry, Sam, etc., if they wish to live, they have no time to stop. But to a kid sitting in a suburban Kentucky neighborhood who has never had to live in a world gripped by a cordycep infection, I have no way to relate to this. It was extremely hard to watch Sarah die, every time I see Henry put a gun to his own head I choke up slightly. But it was the moment that Ellie wanted to talk about death with Joel that finally hit home for me.

I don't live in a world where I have to keep moving simply to survive. I am free to sit and, more importantly to my point, I have time to think about things. As I subconsciously tried to relate to Ellie and Joel, in that moment my mind had to take me to a point of loss, which obviously in modern society, is not something we walk away from. On the contrary, we make grandiose gestures of death rituals that are meant to celebrate one's entire life and harken back on our shared moments with that person. For us to simply walk away would be viewed as barbaric and inhuman. So to understand why Ellie was curious about death, I had to think of times loss was in my mind. But these losses were real and these people were real. Without divulging too much personal information, since it's not the point of this essay, I went through a major loss on February of 2014. But after the casket was underground, I swept the sorrow and mourning under the rug to worry about later or possibly never at all. For me to understand Ellie's questions about death I was forced to remember a death in my own life and questions I had surrounding the event. The only difference is that in my life, death is not an everyday event, I had to relive the moments of watching that person's health deteriorate and eventually succumb to other forces. The importance of all of this is not that this small moment is a genius piece of writing, which in my opinion it is, it is that a video game took the time to pull the player out of a hail of bullets, expose him from cover, and make them feel something other than the satisfaction of a head shot. These feelings are uncomfortable and unexpected. But to to be forced to relate to a fictional character and forced to better cope by real life events is important for video games as a medium.

Four-hundred fifty-nine. That's how many people I had killed by the end of my thirteen hour playthrough of The Last Of Us Remastered. With my slaughters ranging from rifle shots to the forehead, baseball bats to the ribs, and shards of glass to the throat, The Last Of Us is certainly one of the most graphically violent games to come out recently. But the violence in this game is approached very differently than it is by other hyper-violent games such as Grand Theft Auto or even the fellow Naughty Dog-developed Uncharted series. I was never proud of achieving a head-shot in The Last Of Us and I cringed each time I broke a brick over an enemy's head. The violence left me feeling on edge, out of breath, and wrong. There is definitely something to be said about the mechanics that play to the unease in the combat. The camera zooms in when you hit an enemy, blood sprays everywhere when you shoot someone, the sounds of bones breaking as you hit them with a metal pipe send your skin crawling. But the mood that the violence evokes is far more troubling than the actual visual element. A game that is consistently violent from start to end, yet never stops being shocking or troubling, even as you reach several hundred kills, really is trying to say something about game violence.

There are far more than 459 enemies in the game, but I wasn't always able to bring myself to kill every foe I encountered. Sometimes this was strategy and it was easier to leave a couple survivors to progress. But sometimes the violence simply exhausted me. The Last Of Us seems to be taking a close look at how desensitized gamers are to gratuitous violence by making it so graphic that it never ceases to be hard to look at. This is the only game that made me wince at the same death and kill animations every time they happened and when NPCs actually begged for their life when I had a gun pointed at them I always hesitated and thought whether or not what I may be about to do was okay. I'm not by any means taking a stand against video game violence, but I think The Last Of Us is saying that we do need to be conscious of the violent imagery we as video game players ingest very regularly and personally I think they are right in doing so. It's no surprise that a vast majority of AAA games are rated M and glorify and stylize violence. We as players eat it up; headshots are badges of honor and tea bagging a dead foe is a right of passage and there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that. What I believe The Last Of Us is saying by making its violence so violent is that we need to be aware and mindful of how much we allow ourselves to see without a break. Maybe playing five shooter games in a row is doing more to us than we realize. I know that after I finished the game a trip through Journey as a pallet cleanser definitely didn't seem like that bad of an idea.

The Last Of Us is a game that will continue to be talked about for years to come. As long as people are finding new meanings in the game and new ways they relate to it, the conversations will continue. I plan to replay through the DLC, Left Behind, soon and I'm sure it as well will leave me with strong feelings that maybe I will be compelled to share here on PBG. The Last Of Us truly is a special game and weaves such a personal tale that each player will have something unique to take from it. And as long as that goes on we will have new things to write, talk, and think about from the shared, yet unique, experience we have encountered with The Last Of Us.