WWhen it comes to video game adaptations, film and television producers have historically had the unfortunate habit of using the game as a sort of Mad Libs advert for something completely unrelated. Characters you’ve spent 30 hours getting to know in a game may remain in name and appearance alone, given personality transplants to fit new, incongruous plotlines. There’s been an endemic disrespect for video games from decades-old filmmakers who, in the words of gaming satire site Hard Drive News, have been excited to take a beloved franchise and adapt it into something not for dumb babies.
HBO’s The Last of Us finally marks the end of this era. There has been a change in the tenor of game adaptations in recent years; Detective Pikachu was arguably written by huge Pokemon fans, the Netflix series of Cyberpunk 2077 was actually better than the game, and the plot of Paramount TV’s version of the military space opera Halo is as heavy and self-important as it gets. the games. But The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann’s close involvement in the TV series takes the HBO adaptation to another level. The Last of Us not only retains the game’s premise and characters; tells us something new about them.
The Last of Us was always a good candidate for television. It’s a linear story, so all players experience it in a similar way: you can’t play with the plot or defy the director’s intentions with your decisions. It is a story about Joel and Ellie, about an elderly survivor closed off and hardened by suffering and a teenager who is full of humor, defiance and life despite the terrible circumstances into which she was born. It’s a horror tragedy with moments of heart and hope amid desolation, not a simple story about saving the world. There is much to explore.
Immersion is the magic of video games. When you inhabit a character for hours, when you act What them, identifying with them in a way that is not possible when you are just looking. In the game, we never leave Joel and Ellie’s perspectives behind, which is great for immersion but not so great for story building, but the TV series is free to show us a lot more of other characters and perspectives.
The moments for which we are absent in the games are seen in detail here. In the second episode, in a harrowing scene that will stay with me for a long time, we are left with Joel’s partner instead of him as they part ways. The third episode is essentially a short film about a character named Bill who appears briefly in the game, and is powerfully well. Meanwhile, I learned more about the nightmare of the cordyceps fungus infection that initiates the end of the world in a few episodes of the series than I did in over 50 hours of playing, half-reading the notes and newspapers I found. Abandoned malls infested with zombies.
The series isn’t just about Joel and Ellie; it’s bigger, sadder, and scarier, too. I am easily disturbed; I confess I had to play through most of the original Last of Us with a spoiler-free text guide from GameFAQs, so I knew when the zombies were going to attack and could prepare myself for the terror. I have always been gripped by a paralyzing dread in the presence of the clicks and screeches of clicks, ancient humans whose parasitic fungal infection is so advanced that it has taken out their eyes, leaving them reeling at every slight sound in search of a new host, but instead at least in the game I could smash their bulbous heads with a brick, or hide from them under a table. Watching the clicker scenes feels terribly daunting, on the contrary; they’re even more horrible when you can’t turn and run from them.
More than anything, the TV series captures the stark, ravaged beauty of the game and its mood. Looking down at the skeletal remains of collapsed skyscrapers from a hotel rooftop, Ellie cracks jokes as she fights her way through an open stretch of the ancient city with Joel, amid moments of tension and horror so intense it gives you heartburn. .
Just about every single heartbreaking, scary, or awesome moment I remember from the game also happens here, but it also gave me a lot I hadn’t seen before. It gave me nightmares, honestly. It is a tribute to the show that I was moved and disturbed again by a story that I already spent so much time with and thought about for years. Ten years ago, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us was a game that expanded on what games could be and what they could put us through. The program cannot recreate the game’s devastating interactive experience; instead, explore what you can add to it.
