The perfect video game.

Choosing The Last of Us for this collection was almost too easy. Many consider it the best video game of its generation[1], and some consider it the best video game ever made. These descriptors land at an intersection of mass appeal and artistic merit. The Last of Us was a blockbuster at the same level as anything with Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed in the title, but it also contained the thematic ambition of any game brought up in the previous decade’s now-tired “are video games art?” debate[2].

But even if you hold The Last of Us as gaming’s most significant cultural contribution in the 2010s, it’s still difficult to explain exactly why it was so important, because the main thing The Last of Us accomplished was its own success. Can something become indelible just because it’s perfect?

Like Grand Theft Auto V, The Last of Us appeared at the tail end of its coinciding console generation, releasing as a PlayStation 3 exclusive in the summer of 2013. The game’s acclaim was instantaneous and universal. Review aggregate Metacritic, which averages critical scores from a curated list of prominent publications, calculated The Last of Us’ average rating to be 95/100, good for second-best in 2013[3] and fifth-best ever on the PlayStation 3[4]. The game also received 144 documented year-end awards from various outlets[5] and has since been accepted as the pillar of gaming’s case as an art form. In terms of reputation, The Last of Us is the closest thing video games have to The Godfather, The Sopranos or To Kill a Mockingbird. If you make a list of all-time great anythings, it has to be considered.

But The Last of Us didn’t earn its reputation on the basis of any kind of innovation, unusual for games immediately and retroactively considered masterpieces. Video game critics assign tremendous value to boldness in design because video games are so rooted in and responsive to certain conventions (this is why video game genres are based in presentation rather than subject matter: they’re called platformers, side-scrollers, and first-person shooters as opposed to crime games, medieval games, or historical-fiction games) so you would expect, given all its clout and distinction, for The Last of Us to have helped gaming take some sort of impressive technological leap. It didn’t. The Last of Us actually didn’t push video games forward much at all.

The Last of Us’ premiere accomplishment was in perfecting every aspect of what a video game could do as a storytelling device. It didn’t necessarily expand the medium’s framework so much as fill the existing framework’s every corner. Nonetheless, it was revelatory.

On its face, The Last of Us is actually rooted in clichés. The game’s story is another in the 2010s’ most persistent (and eye-rolling, depending on whom you ask) genre: post-apocalypse. The player assumes the role of Joel, a classic “grizzled veteran” archetype of both video games and general stories of this type, and as Joel, the player traverses a ravaged United States to shepherd a young girl named Ellie to safety. Why Ellie? You already know: She’s special, and she’s special because she might be immune to the infection that wiped out humanity.

It’s not exactly a spine-tingling elevator pitch. The Last of Us’ influences are obvious because its beats are so well-worn, from The Road to Logan to Children of Men to Book of Eli to Terminator 2[6]. For every tough sonofabitch looking to embrace the darkness of the end of days alone, there’s a feisty and/or defenseless innocent ready to come along and remind them what it means to be human.

As conventional as it might be, remember The Last of Us is looking to clear one of the lowest bars in pop culture: video game narratives. The average game has no higher aims than to let you shoot stuff or go fast or beat your buddies in fake sports. They’re about fun, not feelings. And yet The Last of Us found special success because it veered in the opposite direction, telling not just one of the greatest stories in video game history, but one of the most sophisticated, responsive stories of the decade across any medium. The Last of Us would make a rich novel, a worthy TV miniseries or a prestigious-feeling movie[7]. This is what knocked people over upon release. The Last of Us is a video game with ideas, and it wants to communicate those ideas through story and gameplay. It’s a direct challenge to the misconception that says all video games are mindless brain melters.

Joel and Ellie’s journey in The Last of Us is divided into four parts, each corresponding with one of the four seasons. That alone communicates the game’s foundation lies in its narrative mission rather than any sort of gameplay mechanic, and while that temporal layout is simple by, say, literary standards, it’s a next-level construct opposite the pew-pew explosion-fest of most video games. If every other game wants to be a time suck, The Last of Us wants you to be hyper-aware of time’s passing.

Time jumps are riskier in video games than other mediums because any sort of change threatens the immersion players feel as the puppet masters of the onscreen action, and because of this, there’s always been a struggle when games try to tell temporally ambitious stories and deliver seamless mechanical experiences at the same time. After all, characters are supposed to change with time, and if a game doesn’t evolve its characters and reflect that change within its gameplay, the story feels neutered and secondhand. It’s a difficult balance, but The Last of Us handles it with delicacy thanks to Joel and Ellie, two of the greatest characters in gaming history.

The involvement of the player as a controlling agent means character creation in video games is probably more difficult than in any other medium, because the game’s writers need to account for that surrogacy. That’s why most games default to power fantasies; it’s easy to make a player feel welcome in a story when you’re just letting them stand in for the protagonist and do whatever they want. However, great gaming characters feel specific, complex, and three-dimensional while also allowing players to inhabit them, understand them, and control them in a way that feels natural to player and character alike. In this sense, Joel and Ellie succeed because they’re well-written as both player extensions and independent creations. They might be built on archetypes, but as The Last of Us advances, they begin to subvert those archetypes in ways even the savviest storyteller wouldn’t expect.

Joel’s typical arc in a post-apocalypse story like The Last of Us would be to soften in the presence of Ellie’s innocence, but while Joel does become more emotionally available over the course of the game, this doesn’t affect his morality. In fact, Joel’s love for Ellie actually strengthens his most twisted convictions. Being careful to avoid spoiling the game’s final moments[8], The Last of Us ends not with a change of heart, but a decision not to change, and in this context it’s an uncommon twist.

Joel can’t really be called an anti-hero by the end of The Last of Us; he’s more of a monster. We’ve seen stories do this before, especially on TV, but inside of a video game, questioning the protagonist’s actions means also questioning your actions as the player, and that self-reflection packs an extra degree of power. This hits hard because it’s a well-executed payoff, but it hits harder because it’s a video game. More on this later.

Joel’s arc also lends Ellie’s more rote “loss of innocence” transformation with enough flavor to make her feel compelling besides. Many sidekicks in post-apocalyptic narratives acquire the hardened cynicism of their world-weary counterparts, but in The Last of Us, Ellie’s maturation is characterized by as much positive discovery as negative. For all her exposure to violence, death, and horror in this story, she also finds numerous moments of levity and optimism. She makes fun of old movie posters, raises an eyebrow over archaic technologies, and—in one of the game’s most famous scenes—meets a friendly group of giraffes.

In other words, both Joel and Ellie twist their archetypes enough to transcend them. Games push technological limits often, but they almost never challenge conceits.

It takes patience to weave in complication like this, and that’s where The Last of Us’ gameplay mechanics elevate its narrative ambitions. This is a slow-paced game even during its action scenes, where strategy and timing matter more than fast-twitch reflexes and repetitive button mashing. In the game’s non-combative sections, environmental puzzles keep the player exploring a given space for several minutes at a time. It’s a signal. The Last of Us built its world to be looked at and feel tactile. Usually, video game settings feel arbitrary (think of all the random cover-worthy concrete walls you find in military shooters), but not this one.

If The Last of Us has any bum technical note, it’s that it doesn’t do anything in its controls or gameplay a previous game hasn’t done already. When you place The Last of Us on a timeline of developer Naughty Dog’s previous works, it’s clear the game was a culmination of the company’s traditional mechanics rather than an evolution. The gunplay of The Last of Us feels like a refined, sensible version of Uncharted, and Joel moves likes a less athletic Nathan Drake (that series’ protagonist). Crafting items in The Last of Us is more rudimentary than something you’ll find in an inventory-involved role-playing game, but again, it’s streamlined—you’ll never come across something you won’t use.

Combat, which leans toward stealth over bullets, is more a triumph of tone and feel than complexity. As Joel, the player sneaks around in a crouch, using items to distract enemies and isolate them so they can be killed without detection. If an enemy spots you sneaking around, you can pull your gun to try and shoot your way out of a jam, but bullets are hard to come by, and you’ll have to make each shot count.

Moment to moment, the incorporation of resource management and survival tactics into the game’s action scenes puts the focus on consequence rather than fun. It’s by design. When bullets are this rare, you think about the implications of firing more than the satisfaction of doing so, and when the encounters are this prolonged and challenging, kills feel more like grim notes of progress rather than outright triumphs.

Enemies in the The Last of Us are smart, and they’re not typical faceless gaming goons, either. Violent video games tend to let players off the hook by hiding enemies behind masks, morphing them into inhuman monsters, or stripping them clean of context. The Last of Us goes the other way. When you sneak up on a group of foes, you might hear them talking about the camp they’re patrolling for, the survivors they’re trying to protect, or the families they lost in the plague. Maybe they’re sharing an inside joke or worrying about a friend who’s gone missing. These snippets of backstory are only cut short by your gunfire, and taking aim isn’t something you’ll always want to do. Killing in The Last of Us isn’t an activity, it’s a necessity, and if that feels tense to the player, it means the game is working.

The Last of Us’ more filmic aspects underline its violence. In certain instances, Joel can execute a stealth or melee kill when he’s in proximity to an enemy, and when the player performs one of these moves, the camera will hustle forward to capture the action with greater intimacy. It’s horrifying. You might hear a man’s dying plea as you choke him out, or see someone cower in horror, eyes wide, before you finish them off with a shotgun blast. The Last of Us asks which human impulses are necessary to survive and which are indulgent and selfish, and that means every combat sequence folds back onto the player in disturbing ways.

This decade saw video games use their cinematic potential more than ever to elevate storytelling. The Last of Us’ developer Naughty Dog made tons of advancements in this regard between TLOU and their action-adventure series known as Uncharted, but until these titles, movie-like games were exceptions[9], and the relationship between cinema and gaming hardly ever manifested in the latter’s unique mode of audience involvement.

Santa Monica Studio’s God of War franchise (another exclusive to PlayStation[10]) is an instructive precursor and successor[11] to The Last of Us’ cinematic stylings. Early games in the God of War franchise were cinematic more for their atmosphere than anything else. The player fought monsters as tall as skyscrapers and executed kill moves with a then-innovative, now-derided mechanic called a “quick-time event,” which layered button commands over a video cutscene. Players would push the buttons on command and the cutscene would continue in response to those clicks. God of War’s cutscenes were probably some of the most impressive in the history of games given their scale and density, but the button inputs made them feel, well, gamey. It wasn’t very immersive, even if the cinematics were blowing people’s minds at the time.

In the wake of The Last of Us’ blend of cinematography and gameplay—the dynamic camera, the Oscar-worthy score[12], the patient gameplay—the 2018 God of War revival overhauled the series’ tropes. It abandoned quick-time events completely (now you could sit and watch the epic cutscenes like they were movies) and, in one of the flexiest flexes ever flexed in a game, placed the camera behind the main character and shot the entire game in a single take. It’s like a 30-hour Alfonso Cuarón or Alejandro Iñárritu movie. Gameplay and cutscenes were indistinguishable. The player could go anywhere and do anything and they would never see a loading screen or a splice in the footage. It’s one of those things you can’t quite catch the gravity of until you see it or play it. It makes you realize the potential of video games as a cinematic medium, and the audacity of God of War’s gutsy developmental choices are rooted in The Last of Us. If Naughty Dog’s game had any influence beyond its acclaim, it’s there.

The Last of Us is a key link in the blockbuster-ization of video games, but its epic single-player experience, and those it influenced and inspired, are now alternatives to the mainstream model of ever-expanding video-game content machines like Grand Theft Auto V. Companies with their bottom line foremost in mind aren’t going to spend the money it takes to develop a game like The Last of Us when a cheaper, more profitable option is available. The modern notion of “games as a service”—essentially games that don’t stop producing content for the player—has manifested more as an insidious sales tactic than an idealistic value-to-the-player strategy.

Because of this and in spite of this, however, The Last of Us remains the idyllic modern video game. It isn’t just the messianic experience gamers were waiting for, the thing that would legitimize the form as something emotional, effective, and “important.” It’s the product that represents a player-minded approach to development; ongoing revenue potential be damned. The Last of Us is populist video game art, and it earns this descriptor not for pretentious abstractions or stylings, but because it uses the conventions of video games to communicate provocative ideas about the world we live in and the people we are. The Last of Us, in other words, is great art because it’s a video game. It’s a relief we don’t have to debate that anymore.

[1] Note: In video game parlance, a “generation” describes the life span of a series of consoles. The Last of Us’ generation included the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii. On a timeline, this translates more or less to a period between 2005 and 2013.

[2] This conversation dominated the previous decade, as greater technical capability allowed developers to become as innovative with storytelling and art style as they had been with gameplay. Titles like Shadow of the Colossus and Bioshock shifted their focus away from traditional video game “all fun, all the time” values in favor of mature experiences meant to challenge the way people viewed games as power fantasies. These games are artistic statements through and through, but it took a long time for non-gamers to be convinced that was even possible. By the time The Last of Us came out, most people were savvy to how sophisticated gaming could be, but people still point to The Last of Us as the trump card in the conversation. It’s gaming’s great “I told you so.”

[3] To Grand Theft Auto V.

[4] In order from 1 to 5: Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Batman: Arkham City and The Last of Us (other games with a 95/100 score include Red Dead Redemption, Portal 2 and—weirdly—LittleBigPlanet, a game everyone seemed to have and no one seemed to play).

[5] Compared with GTA V’s 35 documented year-end wins, this is the one area where TLOU definitively exceeds its closest critical “rival.”

[6] I know The Book of Eli is a super random example on what is otherwise a list of exceptional stories, but take it as proof the “odd pairing who learns to survive the apocalypse together” trope is so prevalent at this point that it produces as much garbage as it does greatness.

[7] There have been numerous attempts to lift a movie version of The Last of Us off the ground, but so far—thank goodness—none have found real traction.

[8] We’re talking about one of the best endings in gaming history here. In fact, 2013 was a banner year for fantastic endings in video games. The Last of Us tops a list of intense competition including Gone Home, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, The Stanley Parable and Bioshock Infinite. You can run out of superlatives in a hurry talking about that crowd.

[9] It might seem counter-intuitive given their camerawork, but in the late 90s and early 00s, most of these exceptions were actually first-person shooters. Half-Life, Halo and the early Call of Duty games in particular all delivered jaw-dropping “never seen anything like this” moments in their innovative, influential campaign modes.

[10] People have debated the advantages and disadvantages of each major console since the systems started competing, but it is curious how PlayStation’s biggest advantage has always been its platform-exclusive titles. While Nintendo certainly has classic series to lord over Microsoft and Sony, PlayStation has maintained a fascinating propensity to house new original franchises throughout its history, from Silent Hill to Kingdom Hearts to Sly Cooper to God of War. Add Uncharted, The Last of Us, Shadow of the Colossus and Horizon: Zero Dawn, and you arrive at legitimate questions about what in the actual fuck Microsoft’s problem is with making way for high-quality single-player storytelling.

[11] God of War released for the PlayStation 2 in 2005, and after two direct sequels for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, plus a handful of decent spinoffs, the franchise was capped with a 2018 PlayStation 4 game that was also called God of War.

[12] Literally. The Last of Us’ composer, Gustavo Santaolalla, won back-to-back Oscars in 2005 and 2006 for his work on Brokeback Mountain and Babel, respectively.