The Last of Us pushes players to reexamine that idea, using the concept of the unreliable narrator to flip our once-accepted truths about video game language on their head.
We assume Joel is a hero, because games largely place us in the game of the righteous good guy. The brilliance of The Last of Us has always been in the way it preys on the player’s perception of video game protagonists. The focused nature of The Last of Us is still the game’s best trait. That cargo is Ellie, a young girl who is seemingly immune to the disease that turns humans into fungus-infested “clickers.” Perverting the fatherly ideal of the “protector,” Joel begins to treat Ellie like an unwitting surrogate daughter on his journey to deliver her to a group called the Fireflies. Long after that tragedy, Joel takes on a job to transport a piece of precious cargo across the country. The game tells the story of Joel, a father surviving alone during a zombie-like apocalypse after his daughter is killed. Purely focusing on the text, it remains a phenomenal experience that few games have fully replicated - including its own sequel. No matter how many philosophical gripes I have with the entire idea of the remake’s existence, it’s still the best version of what I’d consider the finest video game of the 2010s. The Last of Us Part I is a difficult game to critique for a variety of reasons that’ll become clear shortly. However, the project does once again push the industry forward in an important way: by raising the bar for accessibility in gaming’s past, present, and future. Though that’s largely because Sony won’t allow it to, as evidenced by a mostly superfluous remake that doesn’t meaningfully improve on the game’s perfectly modern (and much cheaper) 2014 remaster. The Last of Us Part I shows that Naughty Dog’s gritty action game is still an enduring classic that hasn’t aged a day. While many games I play today have its DNA, it’ll always be patient zero. Returning to the PS5 glow-up eight years after I first played the remaster feels a bit like going back to 1985’s Super Mario Bros. While it was a revelation even still in 2014, developers have since taken its coveted blood and injected it into everything from God of War to Tomb Raider. A lot has changed about video games between then and the release of The Last of Us Part I, Sony’s new PS5 remake of a PS3 classic that got a PS4 upgrade.
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