Sarah – The Last of Us. Twelve Most Memorable Deaths in Video Games
Table of Contents
Game: The Last of Us
Cause of death: shot by a soldier
Last words: "Daddy, what about uncle Tommy?”
How we will remember her: as a 12-year-old with a sense of humor worthy of an adult, and a girl who made us realized that if we expected a light story like in studio's previous game, we came to the worst possible place
The Last of Us has a lot of moments when it is difficult for us not to break down and cry, but the fact that we are witnessing one of them as early as the prologue says a lot about the quality of the story that Naughty Dog has delivered. In the first hour of the game, we meet Joel and his teenage daughter, Sarah, and see the beginnings of the outbreak that has brought the world to the brink of destruction. At this point, we are well aware that the following part of the story will probably not inspire optimism. But when Joel and Sarah escape the city and are stopped by a soldier who opens fire on them, things take a shockingly grim turn. While the man comes out of the battle without serious injuries, his daughter is hit in the abdomen and after several dozen seconds of painful agony dies in the arms of her father.
Although we only knew this girl for half an hour, her death was extremely shocking. Gustavo Santaolalla's dramatic music or the emotion delivered by the voice actors is certainly one of the reasons why the scene strikes with such force, but its secret lies somewhere else. Naughty Dog used it to show that it creates a game for mature audience and does not intend to refrain from presenting the horror of the apocalypse it conceived. Not just because an innocent child is killed – although I don't think anyone was prepared for that either.
However, Sarah's death in the prologue of The Last of Us is primarily a death to which digital entertainment has not accustomed us – lacking sacrifice, high-flown monologues and heroism, but full of pain and helplessness. Maybe it's because of this that Joel immediately becomes a character with whom each of us sympathizes – seeing him at the most tragic moment of his life, it's hard not to feel empathy.
Although Sarah appears only in the prologue, and Joel is reluctant to talk about her with anyone, through interactions with various items we can get to know her a little better. An attentive player will learn, for example, that the girl was a football fan and played in a youth team, that she liked movies like Twilight, which in turn her father hated, and that she was fond of British rock bands.
