The 17 hours I spent playing through the campaign are among the most memorable I’ve ever spent with a game. Here, there are only survivors killing each other for food, weapons, or whatever they can get their hands on. Here is a population decimated by a modern plague. Here, you will find abandoned cities reclaimed by nature.

I lost myself in Naughty Dog’s vision of a pandemic-ridden United States, in the characters that populate this unfortunate wasteland, and in their individual stories. Survive an apocalypse on Earth in The Last of Us, a PlayStation 3-exclusive title by Naughty Dog. It’s PlayStation 3’s best exclusive, and the entire experience, from start to finish, is remarkable. It never slows down, it never lets up, and frankly, it never disappoints. The Last of Us seamlessly intertwines satisfying, choice-based gameplay with a stellar narrative. The beauty of The Last of Us when compared to The Road, however, is that it’s fully interactive, complete with all of the vulnerability, uncertainty and perpetual insecurity such a situation inherently provides. It’s the story of the characters at hand, and those characters alone, at the center of both plots. Like The Road, The Last of Us is perpetually dangerous and unpredictable, and like The Road, what happened to get society to a point of rapid decay isn’t the focus. Both present a hopeless, post-apocalyptic situation navigated by two characters – an adult and a child – with nothing but absolute despair surrounding them. → JThe Last of Us is a near-perfect analog for The Road, a literary masterpiece written by Cormac McCarthy.

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