Discovering & Dissecting The Last of Us Way Too Late

When The Last of Us came out in 2013 it was only vaguely on my radar. I didn’t follow the game industry very closely at that point in my life and I didn’t own a PS3. I caught a glimpse of the opening minutes on YouTube and I remember being impressed. It seemed very next-gen. The lifelike character animations in conjunction with the slick cinematography of its cutscenes made me feel like I was looking at the future of gaming- a kind of “game of tomorrow”. It piqued my curiosity because every game I had seen before that was undoubtedly a game in how it presented itself, whereas this wanted to blur the lines as much as possible so that it felt like a movie.

Backseat Gaming Impressions

I wouldn’t find out how the opening cutscene ended until two years later however, when I watched my roommate play the remastered version on his new PS4. For me, the most interesting part of any apocalypse story is “day one”, where we see the world change for the first time. The appeal is tantamount to that of a disaster movie where you see an equilibrium that resembles your own descend into chaos from the perspective on the ground. And it’s this mundane, familiar…