The apocalypse is something that has been on the hearts and minds of creative people for years and its influence has spread across novels, films, and now more recently videogames. Many of you will be familiar with games like Fallout and Left 4 Dead but one of the most interesting games narratively is The Last of Us.
The game begins with the world as we know it and you start off controlling a young girl. Her dad is not in the house and she is left to find her way around. As she makes her way downstairs her dad comes crashing through the door with an infected man attacking him. He kills the man and afterwards they begin to flee the town. But when escape seems near his daughter is shot and killed. From there we jump into the future twenty years. The dad (a man named Joel) wakes up in a desolate room and we are greeted with a lot of similar imagery that we have seen throughout the course. The broken down city, soldiers and zones, and, of course, zombies. The outbreak turned out to be a virus that infects people and slowly turns them more and more plant like until they eventually turn in to huge monstrous bloaters and expel a poisonous puss on the player.
Although the game is a lot of fun and the action never stops this is not what is the most compelling thing about the game. It’s the story and the characters that stand out. As you make your way through the game as Joel you meet a young girl named Ellie (who is around the same age as his daughter who died) and although she is similar in age the two girls are very different. Slowly as they make their way through cities, sewers, and forests they build a relationship that is genuinely felt by the player, to the point where you really care about what happens to this young girl and her father figure. In the narrative it is revealed that Ellie is immune to the virus and may carry the key to humanity’s salvation. Now of course there are factions looking to capture her and unlock the key to the mutation. At the end of the game they find her and the player is tasked with breaking her out.
It is at this point, at the end of the game after making your way through different levels of the hospital, where you find Ellie and you are given a choice. You can walk out with her or kill the doctors holding her and then walk out. This is the most interesting part of the game for me. Because having a daughter myself I became so angry that someone would be willing to kill a little girl in order to save the human race (which is a big if) that I actually killed the doctors in the hospital. Now obviously I am not a killer but I was amazed at how hooked this story made me and what I wanted to do to a fictional character that threatened this young girl.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that this game succeeds on many levels but would not do so if it did not have the apocalyptic setting and fallout of that event. But it is a brilliant story and I have only given a taste of what it is like. I would strongly recommend playing it if you enjoy videogames and the post apocalyptic genre. However, if you are not a gamer and would like to watch it, there is a channel on Youtube that takes all the cut scenes from videogames and puts them together to form a mini movie. I will leave the link to this below.
