The Last of Us review: Me, you, and the infected

Who would you trust with your life in a zombie apocalypse? Think carefully about the answer, because it's probably the most important question you'll face if such an event ever occurs. Oh sure, there are questions of pure survival: how to avoid getting bitten, how to make sure you have enough food and medicine, how to protect what you have. But deciding who to trust is by far the biggest question of all. And it's a question that The Last of Us is really, at its core, all about.

Joel trusts Ellie, Ellie trusts Joel, and that basic relationship between those protagonists defines the game. But it doesn't start out that way. At first Ellie is just cargo, yet another smuggling job for Joel to take on to earn those basic resources that are increasingly hard to satisfy 20 years after a zombie infection has decimated the world's population. It's not an extremely natural pairing, either: he's a gruff, old, tough-as-nails survivor who absolutely refuses to deal with the obvious trauma of a loss he suffered decades earlier. She's a remarkably resilient, bright, self-reliant 14-year-old who has never known a world that wasn't defined by the response to an overwhelming zombie threat.

But they stick to each other because there really isn't much else to stick to. While the zombies are the extant threat in the world of The Last of Us, the way the humans have responded to that threat really defines the bulk of this world. The major cities have been turned into authoritarian quarantine zones where the military shoots on sight for an infraction as small as being out past curfew. The areas outside those zones are even worse, characterized by rubble-lined streets and buildings, roving packs of bandits serving as the de facto authority figures, and the ever-present threat of the infected. Underscoring it all are the Fireflies, a shadowy and elusive revolutionary group trying to restore America to the rule of law that existed before the outbreak. This is the group that Ellie and Joel are both desperately trying to find.

As they criss-cross the country, struggling together to just survive, Joel becomes just as charmed by the rambunctious Ellie as anyone who plays the game will. Like any 14-year-old worth knowing, she is at turns playful, reflective, tough, and mature beyond her years. One moment she's cursing out an enemy as she bashes in his head with a brick, the next she's admitting to a fascination with garden gnomes (but not garden fairies—they're creepy). She's just as likely to make a sarcastic crack about a new plan as she is to reflect on the role of the soul in a zombie-infested world.

But Ellie is also entirely a product of a world that's totally foreign to the one we know. She struggles to comprehend the concept of people going to college to "figure out what they want to do with their lives," because basic survival is all anyone can really want to do after the outbreak. She marvels at the vapid problems she reads about in discarded diaries ("Is this really all they had to complain about?") and can't imagine what it was like to ride a working motorcycle.

Simply being around someone as full of life as Ellie slowly but surely has an effect on Joel's hard exterior. He begins to warm to her in an almost fatherly way, patiently explaining how the world used to work, from football to coffee shops. He protects her in a way that shows she's more to him than just smuggled cargo. The shift can be as subtle as a change in Joel's tone of voice toward Ellie as the game continues. This evolution comes through in small animations—a single half-shrugged shoulder or upturned mouth corner—that can do the work of hundreds of pages of dialogue.

The tender relationship Joel and Ellie share is in stark contrast to the brutal violence both of them have to deal out in order to survive. Without giving too much away about how the story develops (I won't even hint at what happens in the brave and thought-provoking conclusion), there's a strain of amorality running through Joel and Ellie's quest. This isn't a game for people looking for the kind of escapism where they get to play as the unquestionably good guy taking down the cackling bad guys. This also isn't the kind of game where you even get to revel in consciously immoral decisions, picking a "dark path" just to enjoy being the "anti-hero."

Instead, the story plays out as it must given its characters and the situations they're put in. Naughty Dog is telling a tightly scripted, almost entirely linear story here. Keeping that story true to its characters sometimes means the game forces you into situations and decisions you might have preferred to handle in other ways. That's not to say the narrative doesn't benefit from the feeling of control and interactivity it gives you in plenty of important scenes. It's just that the game sacrifices true player freedom in exchange for a carefully controlled narrative that is true to its world.