My take on The Last of Us

PS3 Attitude: "After seven weeks, The Last of Us has finally been dethroned from the top of the UK videogames chart, so I thought now was a good time for a retrospective look at my own personal experience with the game. This is the story of how my feelings towards Naughty Dog’s latest adventure went from scornful indifference to something not too far from reverence.

WARNING: The following article contains MAJOR spoilers for The Last of Us. Please only read if you have either completed the game or don’t mind the story being ruined."

[ArchangelMike]

First thing. The *infect* are not zombies. Zombies are the living dead, i.e. people who have died and then are re-animated.

The 'infected' in TLOU are people who have contracted a parasitic disease. This is THE important plot point, especially given the whole story about Ellie.

***SPOILERS***

Ellie is immune to the disease and can be used as a cure. If they were zombies (i.e. dead bodies reanimanted) there would be no possibilty of a cure. You can't cure a dead body!

TLOU is not a zombie game.

[iBlackyi]

*Spoiler* half agree/disagree. How would you know that the cure would work? We have never seen it. Everyone should make his own conclusion... But i agree that there are no zombies in the game. It's like saying a horse is a cow because it has 4 legs.

[slivery]

Yea The Last of Us approach to this is far more original. There is actually a fungus in the rain forest that can do this to small insects and animals there.

To apply that real concept into a game is far more incredible than any Zombie concept.

[SillyBastid]

28 Days later took the approach of a virus as well. This was the "rage" virus. The virus made the person consumed with rage. I still constitute that movie as a "zombie" movie.

[stefhutch20]

I understand what you're saying, but I still believe that TLOU is, for all intents and purposes, a zombie game.

A quick google search of 'The Last of Us zombies' delivers 318 million results in 0.2 seconds, so it would seem my opinion isn't completely unfounded.

[BluEx610]

They almost took the infected entirely out of the game. The theme of this game was always about the story of Ellie and Joel in a post-apocalyptic theme. Zombies/Infected were never the focus from the start.

As far as zombie/infected post apocolyptic games goes, this one is by far my favorite. Resident Evil 2-4 are my other favorites. =)

[ArchangelMike]

@stef - TLOU is not about the infected at all, ergo TLOU is not about zombies. BluEx said it, the infected are not the focus of the game. All the zombie games out there, are all about - guess what, the zombies. Infact, in TLOU you fight humans much more than you fight the infected.

[DigitalRaptor]

Want to know why it yields those results?

The people searching, writing articles about the game and indexing content don't plan on looking beyond the surface and look into definitions, and compare the culture or the genre. To most people, if it looks like a zombie game, it is a zombie game.

You must've heard all the "yawn, not another zombie game" when the early trailers were revealed, and before we knew anything about the story, the characters or the background. And it turns out that The Last of Us is more of a character piece that also analyses the best and worst parts of the human condition in a crumbled, post-pandemic world, than it is a game about the infected and your encounters with them.

You can even detect the strains of humanity in the Runner and Stalker stages of the infected and it's pretty horrifying to see their struggle even while attacking you. It's a tale about humanity - the lost and the found.

From what I gather from the general public, if they look like zombies, they are zombies. Like you said "for all intents and purposes". However, that phrase doesn't equate to anything factual about how culture defines and separates "zombies" and "infected".

This mindset is what influences mass misunderstanding.

[Hicken]

It's a zombie game because people keep calling it that, not because it actually IS. BIG difference.

[dmonee]

This may be a spoiler, but during the last part of the game and I picked up an audio player and could have sworn the scientist or doctor speaki g suggested that there could be more like ellie out there. Therefore making Joels lies at the end, half truths

[Lovable]

Nope that's not true. Much discussion has been put in this topic and its proven that the scientist never said anything like that in the recorder.

[dmonee]

I went through again and checked. Your right. He just discusses the process in which ellie will go through to manufacture a cure, giving you the idea that she will die for the cure to be made. My bad

[Khajiit86]

Here is my take.....

If you have not played this game yet, then go out immediately and buy it?

Dont have a PS3? then go and buy one and play all of the games made by naughty dog because you are missing out on gaming greatness.