Sam’s Review of the Last of Us

Mushrooms are stupid, and so is this game.

I didn’t pay that much attention while Henry was playing The Last of Us, but I heard enough of it to know that it’s a pointless waste of time with a stupid idealistic message and that the main enemies are pizza toppings. Don’t waste your time playing it or the sequel that comes out this week.

If you’re reading a review for this game that came out years ago and expecting not to hear spoilers for the ending, you’re a dumbass. 

The Last of Us is a survival horror video game where you play as a boring generic white dude with a dead wife and daughter issues and try to escort a boring white girl to have her brains cut open to cure the mushroom plague that ended the world. Along the way, you find out that man was the real monster all along or some bullshit as lots of crazy postapocalyptic cannibal militias or whatever try to kill you for reasons that probably would have been stupid even if I’d paid attention to them.

The game ends when you get to the hospital and it turns out they’re going to cut the girl’s brain out to cure the virus, and you go on a rampage that proves that white dudes with guns really can solve all problems, killing something like fifty people in your quest to prove that saving the human race isn’t worth it if you have to kill one person. At the end of the game, you escape with the girl and live happily ever after even as the mushroom zombies presumably grow in number and prepare to kill everyone, which will totally be all your fault when it happens. 

Oh, and along the way, all the black people die. 

Henry seemed to enjoy this game, but I thought it sounded stupid. It was mostly a lot of walking interspersed with some screaming and then more walking. The premise that the cordyceps fungus turned people into zombies seems cool, but it doesn’t really make sense and it would have been cooler if it were sentient or something, so that there was an actual enemy you could fight and lose to. The losing part is incredibly important. The ending of the game is cheap. Oh look, another story where the white guy and the white girl live happily fucking ever after.

The reason why I was there for most of this game instead of leaving when Henry booted it up is because he made me stay when two characters showed up who were called Henry and Sam. They were a pair of brothers (not the interesting kind) who showed up part way through the game to give generic white man more people to protect and to give white girl another black friend who can die. On a personal level, I can’t say that I liked that they made Henry the older brother, but whatever. It was kind of funny when he killed himself after Sam turned into a mushroom zombie and had to be put down. Funny in a way that made me feel weird. 

I don’t know what else happens in this game. Something in a mall, I think? Climbing? I think there’s a swimming part at one point. I really wasn’t paying attention, and I made Henry stop describing it to me after a while. 

I guess you’d like The Last of Us if you were into survival horror games, white people, or boring shit. But all in all I’m glad it’s over and I hope Henry doesn’t play the sequel.