the Last of Us ââ†the Art of Video Game Storytelling
The Last of Us is equally much well-nigh the bonds between Joel and his surrogate girl Ellie equally it is nigh their post-fungal-apocalypse globe. Sony/Naughty Dog hibernate caption
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Sony/Naughty Dog
The Concluding of Us is every bit much well-nigh the bonds between Joel and his surrogate girl Ellie as information technology is virtually their postal service-fungal-apocalypse world.
Sony/Naughty Dog
For years now, some of the all-time, wildest, nigh moving or revealing stories nosotros've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we have a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.
I played the game through the first time in something similar a perfect state of awe and terror. Enraptured is, I call back, the discussion that all-time describes it. Carried away completely into this ruined, beautiful world and the story of Joel and Ellie in The Final of United states. Usually such a completionist — then obsessed with exploring every hide and hollow in these imaginary worlds I throw myself into — in this instance I only rolled with the narrative. Ran when running was proper. Slogged through nighttime and rain and snow and sunshine. Stood my bloody ground when left with no other options.
Joel came to love Ellie, his surrogate daughter, and Ellie came to beloved Joel, the simply father she'd ever known. And I (a father, with a daughter roughly Ellie'south age, with Ellie'due south 4-letter of the alphabet vocabulary and Ellie's foreign, discordant humor) loved Ellie, besides. So when I reached the endgame and was presented with a terrible choice (no spoilers ... yet), I drew my guns and slaughtered my way to the end credits, alight with fury and certain knowledge that I'd fabricated the only option I could.
Second run: The beats are all the same, the story a known affair. Joel and Ellie fight zombies and soldiers and bandits and madmen. They lose friends and come across sunrises and, this time, I play with an awful wisdom. Cassandra's curse. I know how this story ends and I have made upwardly my mind that, this fourth dimension, I will make the other choice. The right ane (morally, mathematically, humanistically), and and so I walk with ghosts the whole manner, right up to the cease, and and so ...
And and so I make the exact same selection over again. I can't make the other. Information technology hurts too much. Because that is how skillful the storytelling is in The Last Of United states of america. It makes you intendance so deeply for a smart-donkey agglomeration of pixels in the shape of a teenage daughter that yous volition damn the whole world twice just for her.
(OK, so now we're gonna get spoilery. Fair warning.)
The Concluding Of Us is a zombie story. Information technology is incredibly derivative, borrows liberally from a hundred different books and movies, is structurally simplistic, trope-heavy, melodramatic, viscerally tearing, and despite all this (or, arguably, considering of all this) tells one of the most moving, affecting and satisfying stories you'll find anywhere. At its heart, it is the story of Joel — a broken and difficult-hearted thief and smuggler living xx years deep into a zombie apocalypse. He and his partner, Tess, are forced into a job that requires them to smuggle a young daughter out of the Boston quarantine zone and evangelize her to an army of revolutionaries because, of course, this girl is The 1 — the just person ever to exist immune to the spore/virus that turns infected people into gross, murderous mushroom zombies. That young daughter is Ellie. And, unsurprisingly, the task does not exactly get as planned.
If this all sounds familiar, that'due south fine because information technology is familiar. The story-story is a stock frame — tested and dependable. It is a road trip story in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is, or Mad Max: Fury Road. Get from betoken A to point B, survive the journey, get there whole. And there's null at all wrong with a elementary narrative architecture when it is being used to support complex character arcs, every bit information technology is here. The Last Of Us is a simple road trip story underneath, existing in service to the complex and rich redemption story on height.
All the stakes and ruination are laid out in the first 10 minutes, in a prologue and then powerful that it'll break your heart even if yous don't have ane. Joel loses his daughter on the nighttime the world ends, his little daughter dying in his arms, under the gun of a panicked soldier trying to hold dorsum the infected. When Ellie floats into his life two decades afterwards, the jaded gamer in you says, Oh, so here'southward where he learns to love again. ... And you're right.
Only then you lookout man it happen — in tiny moments like when Ellie, blowing off caution, walks a rickety plank between two buildings and Joel glances briefly downward at the picket he wears, a gift from his girl that he's been wearing for 20 years — and you participate in it happening (protecting her, defending her, eventually becoming her for an extended chunk of the game in a vivid bit of perspective switching), and it all just clicks. This is a love story — one of the best parent-and-child narratives always told.
Which is when that ending comes and you are presented with the ultimate parental nightmare scenario: Will yous sacrifice the life of your child to save the world? Not a stranger, a friend or even a spouse, merely your own daughter (which is what Ellie is now — Joel's daughter, blood or no). Because in Ellie lives the cure to the mushroom zombie plague. Merely in gild to create it, she has to dice.
I started a tertiary playthrough before writing this piece. I am walking slow, taking my time, listening to Ellie read from her joke book, watching her swarmed by fireflies on the outskirts of Boston and admiring the natural dazzler and deep environmental storytelling of the game. Nature has reclaimed near of this abased world, giving us an unusual apocalypse run riot with wildflowers. And while I take non fabricated it to the cease yet, I know it's coming. I know the choice I'm going to have to brand.
And I know exactly what I'k going to do.
Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. Merely when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/31/505592646/reading-the-game-the-last-of-us
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