The Last of Us is a
really great video game about post-pandemic America. It’s also a perfectly written
story about being a man —one that makes good on promises that stories like The Walking Dead or the film adaptation
of The Road failed to keep.
Audiences have come to accept Hollywood’s reliance on
spectacle to obscure its own mediocrity. And because of that, stories this engaging
are too hard to come by. We find ourselves in a near-constant state of having
to mentally fix stories in order to love them.
In response, The Last
of Us is almost anti-epic. Its apocalyptic themes are really just set
dressing for a small, visceral, very human story. The questions it poses are
complex and it understands that you’re smart enough to answer them for
yourself. And the merciless brutality of the world it depicts confirms every
suspicion that the minutia of life in the Western world might be just that.
I don’t have children, and it would be preposterous for me
to claim that a PS3 could provide any real sense of what paternity must be
like. That said, last night I awoke suddenly from an exhausted sleep, and in a
moment so elusive that only its absurdity prevented it passing from my mind, I
wanted to check on Ellie.
