The Last of Us. Video Games With the Best Stories
Table of Contents
INFORMATION
- Genre: action adventure game
- What's good beyond the plot: solid stealth mechanics
Naughty Dog is one of Sony's most important devteams, making great games for the Japanese giant's consoles from the very beginning of the PlayStation brand. Before The Last of Us, the studio was associated with anything but deep, ambitious storytelling. Crash Bandicoot and Jak were platformers that treated the script pretty much as necessary evil, and the Uncharted series, while offering an enjoyable story, aimed rather at relaxing summer adventure cinema vibes.
Much can be said about the script of The Last of Us, but certainly not that it is relaxing. This action adventure game with survival elements takes us to the future, an America ravaged by a fungus that turns Homo sapiens into mindless and extremely dangerous creatures. Civilization has fallen, but people are somehow coping – some under the yoke of a government trying hard to keep what is left of the world in its grip, others by being part of the Fireflies, a group resisting the authorities, and still others by simply living in the middle of nowhere, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group of feral bandits.
In a world like this, we play as Joel, an old courier who kills off the memory of his past tragedies and a better world with cynicism. The man is given the task of transporting a unique package – a spunky teenager who could be the key to saving the world. Like in McCarthy's The Road, the pair travel across devastated areas, meeting other survivors and learning about their dramas, fighting for survival and gradually learning to trust each other. All this leads to one of the most powerful, morally ambiguous finales that developers of high-budget video games dared to give us...
