Games, tv shows, and movies that center around the apocalypse tend to be big hits. As was the case for one of my all-time favorite games, The Last of Us, and its predecessor The Last of Us 2. There are close calls with zombies and monstrous humans. Though it is predictable in parts, some of the twists hit hard. The game centers around two main characters, Joel and Ellie. Joel is a man in his late 40s that lost his daughter at the beginning of the outbreak. He’s a hardened man that has a hard time caring about anyone since his loss at the start of the game. Ellie is a young girl that turns out to be immune to the virus that is ravaging the world. The main mission is to get her to a group called the Fireflies that are working on a cure to save the world. The first leg of the journey is just to get her to the Fireflies so that they can figure out why she is immune. It all seems very straightforward until they accomplish their goal and Joel realizes that for them to figure it out, they would have to kill her. It tests the major moral dilemma between one person versus the greater good.
The main premise of the game is that in the real-world things aren’t as cut and dry as they may seem on paper. When faced with the death of Ellie or the fate of humankind, Joel chooses to save Ellie. While she is under sedation before the surgery, he kills the doctor and nurses then runs with Ellie to escape from the Fireflies. “There's no real ambiguity about what Joel does next. He murders the entire hospital of Fireflies, and even doctors, nurses and his contact, Marlene, in order to save Ellie from the scalpel, destroying chances for a cure in the process.” (Tassi, Paul. “Coming To Terms With The Difficult Ending Of The Last Of Us”). When she wakes up in the backseat of a car instead of a recovery room, he tells her that there was nothing she could do to help. The whole game your objective is to keep Ellie safe, but throughout the game the way you are doing it changes. The creators of the game did an excellent job of showing that moral dilemmas aren’t black and white. Which choice was the right one? What if they still couldn’t find the cure and she was dead, would it still have been the logical choice?
Difficult Ending
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/17/coming-to-terms-with-the-difficult-ending-of-the-last-of-us/?sh=538243605f47
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