So far we've spent a good 15 minutes with Joel and Ellie in conversations that weren't in the game. After cementing their relationship, the show finally returns to the game's story, except instead of Pittsburgh, the pair arrive in Kansas City, Mo., a more sensible, on-the-way location to Wyoming. In a scene ripped straight from the game, the pair encounter a man pretending to be hurt, and are jumped by the citizens of Kansas City, now freed from federal military rule. They crash the truck, and a firefight within a laundromat is lifted straight from the game. This echoes how enemy combatants from the second game react, calling out their fallen comrade's name in an attempt to humanize the "villains" of Joel and Ellie as other people trying to survive.

"Fudge," I remember saying, only I didn't say fudge, I said fuck, a word for adults. I was playing The Last of Us, a narrative video game for adults about a zombie apocalypse, and I had just died for what seemed like the thousandth time in the first room with a "clicker," the game lore's name for a medium-difficulty enemy. These "infected"--it's classier not to call them zombies, and this is a classy zombie-combat game, one with a story--had become misshapen thanks to a cordyceps brain infection, which devoured mankind almost overnight. The clicker was ghastlier than others, because it had lived long enough for the infection to fully engulf its formerly human face, fungal fibers enrobing it, teeth jutting out like barbs. An older infected is a more resilient one.

The Last of Us came out in 2013 on the PlayStation 3 and is considered one of the best video games ever made. I know this because the week it came out I drew the curtains on the front room of my shared house, forbade all of my housemates from entering the zone unless they were going to watch in reverent silence, and completed it. In the game you play Joel – finally, some Joel representation! Every human you encounter is trying to stab you or scavenge bullets off you or recruit you to one side of a conflict between the citizen army and the underground uprising. Every monster you meet is infected with a brain fungus that makes them blind, bulbous and very bitey. But what made the game stand out was the story: Joel is escorting Ellie, a fungus-proof teenage girl and humanity's last hope, across a long trail that will take them both to safety.

Ever since Sony and Naughty Dog announced The Last of Us Part I, a $70, ground-up PS5 remake of the classic 2013 PS3 game, there's been an intense discussion around whether this even needs to exist. After all, Naughty Dog remastered the original game in 2014 for the PS4, giving it 1080p graphics at 60 fps, and it still looks solid. But, compared to The Last of Us Part II, which came out in June of 2020, the original shows its age. Facial expressions are less lifelike, and the environments, while still beautiful and well-designed, lack a certain level of depth and detail. As Naughty Dog co-president and The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann tells it, the idea for this remake came when they were animating flashbacks for Part II.