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month free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity.
Recently, in anticipation of the now imminent release of its sequel, I decided to revisit
The Last of Us.
All told, it was a surprisingly uneasy experience (and not just because of, you know, everything
going on in the world today).
This was a game that, despite not having played it in full for many, many years, I still held
extremely fond memories of; forming part of that 2013 trifecta alongside Bioshock Infinite
and GTAV—a blowout for the previous generation with these ridiculously high-budget, quote-unquote
“cinematic” games that pushed the hardware to its limits.
These felt like games that, due to their high production values, you could see “legitimising”
the medium somewhat—the kinds of titles you could point to and tell the naysayers
that “look!
Games look like this now!
They’re saying something now!”
And what worried me about revisiting The Last of Us was that, well, that perspective seems
comically naïve in retrospect.
Infinite’s gunplay is at odds with its story and GTAV… well, imagine Heat if Waingro
was the protagonist.
You know, these games just don’t hold up like I remember and I was extremely worried
the same would occur with The Last of Us.
It and the discussions surrounding it were a big part of what encouraged me to start
writing about games in the first place.
The Last of Us meant a lot to me.
And indeed there are ways in which it shows its age—its attempts to create a more naturalistic,
grounded experience butt up against some odd technical issues here and there.
But for whatever flaws it might have, there’s a part of The Last of Us where, for me, all
that fades away, where it gleefully ascends above the other big titles of that year, where
I’m reminded of everything I loved about the game both then and now.
It’s the ending, or specifically the last three lines—where after Joel’s brutal
rampage through the hospital to rescue Ellie, she demands that he promise her that everything
he said about what went down was true.
He replies “I swear,” she responds “okay.”
Cut to black.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve thought about this ending probably more than any other
in a video game.
For a couple of years post-release it would pop into my head on a daily basis and it still
floors me just as hard now.
And when I think about why, I keep coming back to those pauses; so pregnant as they
are with meaning and unbearable tension, taking such a seemingly simple exchange and complicating
it with the vast wealth of reasons the characters got to this point and full of the things they
desperately want to say to each other but can’t.
It’s Joel knowing his facade has reached its breaking point and Ellie knowing there’s
nothing she can do about it.
And these three lines carry all of this meaning because, rather than heavy-handed exposition
telling us exactly how these characters feel, all of this is inferred through the slightest
of details.
We don’t know how much time has passed since Ellie woke up on the back seat, how long her
suspicion towards Joel has been stewing, nothing.
in a way shockingly dissimilar to a lot of games of the time that needed to spend so
long explaining their outlandish concepts to you, the beauty of the ending here
is the stark absence of words.
It is so soul destroying precisely because the game trusts the player enough to stumble
across these horrible layers of meaning themselves.
See, this could have been a case of Joel rescuing Ellie, lying to her about what happened and
that would have been gut-wrenching enough.
For sure, Joel not only doomed humanity by destroying any chance of a vaccine but did
so in a particularly ferocious way.
You don’t need me to tell you how bad this is.
But… you can perhaps also see where he was coming from.
Ellie, at this point, is more than a friend, more than a travel buddy—after hours and
hours of playtime in which Joel tries his hardest to reject the notion, Ellie finally
becomes a vector through which he is forced to confront and mourn the loss of his actual
daughter.
This is by far the deepest connection he’s formed in twenty years, where every small
bit of joy has simultaneously been ripped away from him.
The idea that this too would be taken, and so unceremoniously to boot (without so much
as a goodbye), after both he and Ellie fought so goddamn hard to get there…
Don’t get me wrong, Joel did a really, truly monstrous thing (well, several monstrous things
actually) and I’m not here to tell you he’s somehow the good guy—but at the very least
I can trace the throughline that got him to that point.
These are the despicable actions of a desperate, desperate man.
As a player, you’re wrestling with this understanding of the seemingly endless torture
that Joel has endured and why he did what he did, against the utter monstrosity of what
he did.
The game suddenly cuts away before giving you any kind of resolution.
Already we’re at a point of unsettling ambiguity—this would be enough for most games.
But not The Last of Us.
The writers here manage to take this already devastating ending and propel its tension
even further.
Those three lines that hit so hard only get to happen because the team decides to insert
the tiniest of details moments before—that slightly confused look in Ellie’s eyes when
she wakes up in the back of the car, shocked that she even opened them again to begin with.
There are no extra words spoken here.
And suddenly, all these additionally torturous layers now compound an already shocking twist.
Her despondance upon waking up wasn’t simply post-anaesthesia grogginess—she knew.
She goddamn knew she was sacrificing her life for what she saw to be the greater good—we
can even infer from her speech about Riley that this was her choice to overcome
her survivor’s guilt—and Joel not only took that from her but had the gall to look
her in the eye and lie about it.
With one look, on top of all the thoughts the player might have about Joel, both the
player and Ellie now need to rethink their entire relationship with the only person she
could trust—the one we just spent fifteen hours of game time building this relationship
with.
One detail.
Three lines.
That’s all the game needs to get all this.
Even talking about it now just destroys me.
It’s so good all these years later.
And what’s more, this is just one of several similar occurrences where the most subtle
of details tell the game’s story in a remarkably restrained way.
You don’t need to be told Joel is thinking of Sarah when discussing the need to survive
during the final scene, he’ll just lightly graze the watch she got him—the one he’s
still wearing all these years later—for just a few harrowing frames.
There’s no big speech where Joel reveals to Ellie that he’s finally ready to open
up to her after so long of repressing the pain and trauma of losing his daughter—all
he needs to do is call her “baby girl” and you’ll figure out the rest.
This is detail-oriented storytelling at a level that few AAA games have managed to achieve
before or since—either laying it on too thick with the exposition or just saying the
same thing over and over again.
And all of this has gotten me thinking a lot about the upcoming sequel, because honestly,
I’m not sure I even want a sequel at this stage.
That ending is so perfect, left so much for the player to interpret themselves, that the
announcement trailer had me more trepadatious than excited.
But I dunno, after playing through the original again, and being surprised at just how well
this form of storytelling holds up, I just hope the team at Naughty Dog (beyond, you
know, not crunching their employees to death) place that same trust in the player to have
them figure out the finer points of what’s going on, because beyond massive budgets or
big flashy production values shared with its contemporaries, the way this game really stands
the test of time is in its unique ability to communicate so much with three lines and
a wayward glance.
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Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video, and I hope you all enjoyed this piece
about The Last of Us!
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And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.