#GAMERTHOUGHT - Last of Us and why it still lingers in my mind

A friend recently completed Last of Us.

And the journey with Joel and Ellie comes to an end. The plot's easily the strongest point and yes, as Yin pointed out you really grow to feel for the characters towards the final chapters. Indeed, the living are far scarier than the dead.

The reason why I've always felt Last of Us was just... different as a zombie post-apocalyptic war game is because the plot and the characters mirrored so much of real life. Even without a post-apocalyptic war setting, you can find similar character subsets in our society.

It's not a happy feel good game, sorry for the spoiler. True, there are times where you punch your fists in the air in victory for overcoming a Clicker or one of the Hunters, that rush of adrenaline when you successfully sneak stealthily past heavily defended or infested areas with minimal casualty and ammo loss. But peel away the fun factor of the game and you find something that can either be more troubling or a subtle reminder to reality.

I'm reminded of a quote whereby man's greatest enemy is himself.

We'd like to think and believe in times of crisis and hardship, that if we were fighting for our survival, that we would band together. Yet that isn't the case. Stumbling across High School of the Dead (Japanese anime about a group of high schoolers trying to survive a zombie apocalypse) further drove the fact. We band together to form small communities, the bigger it is, the higher the risk of conflict and enmity. For some reason, humans are just programmed to want to fight against one another, to cause friction. Even if it's something small and trivial.

While the Clickers, Runners and Bloaters are the primary enemies in the game, the surviving humans pose a great threat too. They are far more intelligent, equipped with weaponry and force you to stop and think because they are the same specie as you and yet, you have to kill them in order to survive.

I've written how it can be a bleak game and if you're not prepared for it, may find yourself feeling depressed once the game ends and credits roll. But I doubt the developers, Naughty Dog, meant for that. Perhaps they wanted us to think of why this survival, this course of action, is a necessity. You sacrifice innocents for a cure but what if that one chance turns out to be a fluke. Denying a life, a chance to live. Would a small scrape in progress be able to end the disease, the plague?

Hope can keep people alive, but it can also lead them to desperate and sometimes insane measures.

Ellie and Joel don't really come off as likeable characters at first. Found one too stoic and bristling and the other plain annoying (as expected for a human her age). But then you are forced to put yourself in their shoes and experience the anxiety, fear, tension and even trauma of some of the scenarios and situations you're put in. We're lucky we respawn when we die, but imagine in a real-world setting, could this possibly train us and help guide us in making better instinctive decisions as opposed to panicking or acting impulsively?

I'm still holding on to my CD.