The Last of Us: How Games Tell Stories Better Than Films

In June 2013, Naughty Dog released The Last of Us on the PlayStation 3, and within a year it had sold roughly 7 million copies, eventually surpassing 17 million worldwide across multiple re-releases. Those numbers matter less than what the game proved: that interactivity, not better writing or better acting, is what lets games move players in ways film cannot. This article breaks down the mechanism behind that claim, tests it against the game's own flaws, and explains why the 2023 HBO adaptation, for all its acclaim, could not fully replicate it.

What The Last of Us actually is

The setup is simple. Twenty years after a fungal pandemic collapses civilization, a smuggler named Joel is hired to escort a 14-year-old girl named Ellie across the ruins of the United States. Ellie is immune to the infection. The Fireflies, a resistance militia, believe her immunity could be the basis for a cure.

That premise could have produced a conventional zombie survival game. Instead, Naughty Dog built the entire 15-hour campaign around a single relationship, and structured every mechanic to reinforce it. Joel starts the game refusing to feel anything for Ellie because he lost his own daughter, Sarah, in the outbreak's opening hours. By the game's end he has decided he would rather doom humanity than lose a second daughter figure. That arc is the whole story. Everything else, the infected, the raiders, the crumbling cities, exists to pressure-test it.

The Last of Us won Best Game and Best Story at the 2014 BAFTA Games Awards, along with Action & Adventure and Audio Achievement honors, and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences named it its 2013 Game of the Year. Source: [Filmaffinity Awards Database](https://www.filmaffinity.com/us/movie-awards.php?movie-id=156214), [Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki accolades list](https://ultimatepopculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_The_Last_of_Us).

Why interactivity changes the emotional math

A film gives you a character's decisions as finished facts. You watch a protagonist choose, and you judge that choice from the outside, the way you'd judge a friend's decision over coffee. A game gives you the decision itself, before it's made, with your hands on the controller.

Think of it like the difference between reading a transcript of a difficult conversation and being in the room for it. The transcript lets you analyze; being in the room makes you complicit. In The Last of Us, you press the button that swings the machete. You choose whether to search one more drawer for bandages while infected shuffle in the next room. None of those choices are narratively optional, the game is linear, but the physical act of performing them closes the distance between you and Joel that a film could never close for you and an actor.

This is the core argument narrative designers make for games as a storytelling medium: agency, even constrained agency, produces a different neurological and emotional relationship to events than passive observation does. You don't sympathize with Joel from a comfortable seat. You inhabit the choices that make him who he becomes.

How does interactivity change emotional engagement with a story?

Interactivity replaces observation with participation. Instead of watching a character suffer a consequence, the player performs the action that produces it, which activates a sense of ownership and responsibility that passive media cannot replicate. Studies of player psychology consistently find that self-performed in-game actions generate stronger affective responses than the same events witnessed passively.

The mechanics carry the theme, not just the cutscenes

Most games from the 2000s kept story and gameplay in separate lanes: cutscene tells you what's happening emotionally, then gameplay resumes as a separate combat or puzzle challenge. The Last of Us collapsed that separation, and the collapse is the single biggest reason critics singled it out.

System	Narrative function	Player-facing effect
Resource scarcity (bullets, alcohol, rags)	Communicates a world stripped of margin for error	Player hoards, hesitates, feels the desperation Joel feels
Ellie's companion AI	She reacts to danger, calls out threats, never becomes a liability	Player begins to protect her instinctively, without being told to
Melee combat	Slow, clumsy, brutal, never stylish	Violence reads as survival, not heroism, matching the story's theme
Crafting system	Same raw materials (rags, alcohol, blades) build either medicine or weapons	Forces a constant trade-off between healing and killing, mirroring Joel's choice between saving Ellie and saving strangers
Checkpoint/death loop	Failure repeats the same trauma until resolved	Reinforces stakes without a cutscene explaining them

Table: How The Last of Us's core systems double as narrative devices, not separate from the story but load-bearing parts of it.

Naughty Dog's own design team has described this approach as building gameplay and story from the same source material rather than writing a script first and fitting mechanics around it afterward. The crafting system is the clearest example: because bandages and shivs draw from the same pool of rags and alcohol, every decision to heal is also a decision not to arm. That's not flavor text. That's Joel and Ellie's whole ethical dilemma, expressed as a resource-management choice the player makes dozens of times per hour.

The ending, and why it works only as a game

Roughly 12 hours in, Joel learns that curing the infection requires removing a part of Ellie's brain that will kill her, and that she was never told this or asked to consent. The Fireflies plan to operate anyway. Joel kills the surgeon, kills several Fireflies, carries Ellie out of the hospital, and later lies to her about what happened.

As a plot summary, that's a monstrous act, one man deciding humanity's fate is worth less than his own attachment. Described in a film review, it would read as villainous. But by that point in the game, the player has spent 12 hours performing Joel's protective instincts: rationing supplies for Ellie, fighting off threats to keep her alive, listening to her jokes on long walks between set pieces. The player hasn't just watched Joel become attached to Ellie. The player has built that attachment through hundreds of small, repeated actions.

That's why the ending divided audiences without breaking the game commercially, and why it's cited repeatedly as one of gaming's most effective uses of player agency to complicate morality rather than reward it. Naughty Dog never gives you a "good" or "bad" ending option. You perform Joel's choice as though it were the only possible one, because by the point you make it, emotionally, it is.

Was The Last of Us's ending controversial among players?

Yes. Some players and critics read Joel's decision as an unambiguous betrayal of humanity's only chance at a cure, while others read it as the only human response available to a man who had already lost one daughter. Naughty Dog has said publicly it intended the ambiguity, not a clean moral verdict, as the point of the story.

Ludonarrative dissonance, and why The Last of Us mostly avoided it

In 2007, game designer Clint Hocking coined the term "ludonarrative dissonance" in a widely cited blog post critiquing BioShock, where the game's story argued against selfishness while its gameplay rewarded players for acting purely selfishly. The term describes the gap that opens when what a game's story says clashes with what its mechanics actually let, or force, the player to do.

The Last of Us is frequently cited as a counterexample precisely because its systems and story pull in the same direction. Combat is scarce, ugly, and consequence-heavy rather than a power fantasy, which matches a story about desperate survival rather than heroism. That alignment is not automatic in narrative games, and reviewers and academics have used The Last of Us as a teaching example of how to avoid the dissonance Hocking identified.

The single biggest reason critics still cite The Last of Us in design courses a decade later: it is one of the few AAA action games where killing someone in gameplay carries the same emotional weight the story insists it should.

That said, the alignment isn't perfect. Joel mows down dozens of human enemies across the campaign with mechanical efficiency that occasionally slips back into conventional action-game rhythm, especially in mid-game combat encounters that exist mainly to space out story beats. Naughty Dog itself acknowledged this tension and used it as a design lesson heading into the sequel.

Where the story stumbles

No article honest about this game should skip its real weaknesses.

• Combat pacing versus narrative pacing. Several mid-game chapters exist largely to deliver more combat encounters, and their emotional stakes don't always match the intensity of the fighting required to get through them.
• Quick-time events. A handful of scripted sequences interrupt the otherwise diegetic flow of the game with prompts that feel more like a film with a controller attached than a game telling its own story.
• Linearity versus agency. The game gives players almost no narrative choice. Every major story beat happens regardless of how the player plays. Some critics argue this limits how much the game can claim credit for "interactive" storytelling, since the interactivity is entirely about performance, not consequence.
• Cutscene reliance in key emotional beats. Despite the mechanics-as-narrative thesis above, some of the game's most quoted moments (the giraffe scene, the ending itself) are delivered through non-interactive cutscenes, not gameplay, undercutting the purity of the "mechanics tell the story" argument.

These aren't fatal flaws. They're the reason The Last of Us Part II changed as much as it did.

The sequel pushed the same idea further, and split its audience

The Last of Us Part II, released in June 2020, sold more than 4 million copies within its first three days and became the best-selling PS4 exclusive of that year in the United States, ultimately reaching around 10 million units sold by mid-2022. Commercially, it was the biggest success in the franchise's history.

Creatively, it took the interactivity-creates-empathy argument from the first game and used it as a weapon against the player. Roughly halfway through, Part II forces the player to switch perspectives and play as Abby, a character introduced earlier in the game specifically because she kills a character players had grown attached to. The game makes you spend a dozen hours performing Abby's small kindnesses, her relationships, her own grief, using the exact mechanism that made you love Joel and Ellie in the first game, now aimed at making you empathize with someone you arrived hating.

That's a much riskier use of interactive storytelling than the first game attempted, and it's why Part II's user reviews and critic reviews diverged so sharply, a pattern documented across major review aggregators at launch. Critics largely praised the ambition; a portion of the player base felt manipulated rather than moved. Both reactions are evidence the mechanism worked. Games can only provoke that kind of reaction by making the player complicit, and complicity is uncomfortable when it's engineered against your preferences.

Industry impact: what came after

The Last of Us didn't invent narrative-driven games, story-heavy titles existed well before 2013, but its commercial and critical success gave publishers confidence to fund mechanically-integrated narrative design at a AAA budget level. In the years that followed, several games explicitly built on the same premise, that gameplay systems themselves should carry theme rather than just decorate it:

• Life is Strange (2015, Dontnod Entertainment) used a rewind mechanic to make consequence itself the subject of the story, not just a byproduct of choices.
• What Remains of Edith Finch (2017, Giant Sparrow) told each family member's death through a different, mechanically distinct vignette, so the controls themselves changed meaning per character.
• Firewatch (2016, Campo Santo) built its entire narrative around a two-way radio conversation, using dialogue choice as the only mechanic and proving a story-first game didn't need combat at all.
• A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019, Asobo Studio) mirrored The Last of Us's structure directly: a sibling-protection story where crafting and stealth mechanics reinforced desperation rather than power.

None of these are direct clones. What they share is the underlying design philosophy The Last of Us popularized at scale: build the mechanics first as an expression of theme, then let story and gameplay reinforce each other rather than compete for the player's attention.

The HBO adaptation proved the story, and the limits of adapting it

HBO's The Last of Us premiered in January 2023 to a Metascore in the "universal acclaim" range and went on to earn 24 Emmy nominations that year, second only to Succession, including nods for Outstanding Drama Series and lead performances from Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. It won eight Creative Arts Emmys, covering categories from prosthetic makeup to sound editing, becoming the first live-action video game adaptation to receive major awards recognition at that scale.

That success is proof the underlying story, characters, and world are strong enough to survive translation to a passive medium. It is not proof that film can replicate what made the game distinctive. The show, notably, earned some of its strongest praise for episodes that expanded beyond the game's exact events (a standalone episode built around two supporting characters, for instance), material invented or substantially extended for television rather than lifted directly from the game's script.

What the show cannot do, and doesn't try to, is put the audience's hands on Joel's decisions. You watch him choose to lie to Ellie. In the game, you walked out of that hospital yourself, controller in hand, after fighting your way through it. That gap between watching a choice and making one is exactly the gap this entire article has been describing, and it is the reason the show, as good as it is, is a different kind of artifact from the game it's based on.

What people get wrong about this game

"It's just a good story that happens to be attached to a game." This gets the causation backward. The emotional intensity critics praised in 2013 wasn't achieved despite the interactive format, it was produced by it. Strip the interactivity out, as the HBO show necessarily does, and you get a well-acted, well-written drama, which is genuinely good, but not the same experience. The show's Emmy wins are for writing, acting, and production design. The game's BAFTA wins included "Best Game," a category acknowledging something the show structurally cannot compete for.

"Part II's divisive reception proves games can't handle morally complex storytelling." The opposite is closer to true. A story that produces genuine disagreement, rather than universal comfortable agreement, is usually a sign it took a real position rather than playing it safe. Part II forced players into uncomfortable empathy through gameplay mechanics rather than narration, which is a harder and rarer trick than delivering an ending audiences can nod along to.

"Games tell better stories because of better writing than film." The writing in The Last of Us is good, but plenty of films have comparably good writing. What the game has that films structurally cannot is the player's own hands on the controller during the decisions that matter. That's a design property, not a writing property, and it's the actual mechanism behind every claim in this article.

The takeaway

The Last of Us didn't win Game of the Year in 2013 because Naughty Dog wrote better dialogue than a good film would. It won because it built resource scarcity, companion AI, crafting, and combat pacing to carry the same theme the plot was carrying, so that by the time Joel made his final, morally indefensible choice, the player had already spent 15 hours making smaller versions of that same choice with their own hands. Interactivity is the mechanism, not a marketing gimmick layered on top of a story that would work just as well as a film. The HBO show's Emmy wins prove the underlying story travels. They don't prove the experience does. Those are two different claims, and this game is the clearest evidence anyone has that they're not the same thing.

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Read next:

• Grand Theft Auto III: The Open World Game That Changed Everything
• World of Warcraft: The MMORPG That Changed Gaming
• Overwatch: Team Coordination and Hero-Based Gameplay

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Should I play The Last of Us Part 1 before Part 2? A: Yes. Part II is a direct continuation and its structure, including the mid-game perspective switch to Abby, depends on the emotional investment built in Part I. Part I runs roughly 12-15 hours; Part II runs 20-25 hours and assumes full knowledge of the first game's ending.

Q: Is The Last of Us Part 2's ending better or worse than Part 1? A: They're doing different things. Part I ends on a single morally ambiguous choice (Joel's decision). Part II ends on a bleaker note about the futility of cyclical revenge. Critic consensus favored both games; player reception was far more divided on Part II, largely because of the forced perspective shift to Abby.

Q: How does the HBO show compare to the game? A: The show earned a Metascore in the "universal acclaim" range and 24 Emmy nominations in 2023, and it expands some material (notably a standalone episode built around two supporting characters) beyond what's in the game. It cannot replicate the game's core mechanism, though: the player performing Joel's choices rather than watching an actor perform them.

Q: What is ludonarrative dissonance, and did The Last of Us avoid it? A: Ludonarrative dissonance, a term coined by designer Clint Hocking in 2007 to critique BioShock, describes a gap between what a game's story argues and what its gameplay actually rewards. The Last of Us is frequently cited as a counterexample because its scarce, brutal combat and resource-scarce systems reinforce its story's themes of desperate survival rather than contradicting them, though some mid-game combat encounters still lean toward conventional action-game rhythm.

Q: How many copies has The Last of Us sold? A: The original 2013 release sold roughly 7 million copies within its first year and has surpassed 17 million lifetime copies across its PS3, PS4 remaster, and PS5 remake releases. The Last of Us Part II sold over 4 million copies in its first three days in 2020 and reached about 10 million units by mid-2022.

Q: Did The Last of Us win Game of the Year? A: Yes. It won Game of the Year at the 2014 BAFTA Games Awards along with Best Story, Action & Adventure, and Audio Achievement, and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences separately named it its 2013 Game of the Year.

Q: Why did Part II's player reviews and critic reviews diverge so much? A: Critics largely praised Part II's ambition in forcing players to empathize with a character, Abby, introduced specifically because she kills a beloved character from the first game. A significant portion of the player base felt manipulated rather than moved by that structure, producing a split between strong critical scores and a more polarized player response.

Q: Can a game's mechanics really tell a story without cutscenes? A: Partially. The Last of Us demonstrates that systems like resource scarcity, companion AI behavior, and crafting trade-offs can carry thematic weight on their own. But the game still relies on traditional cutscenes for some of its most pivotal beats, including its ending, showing that mechanics-as-narrative and cinematic storytelling work best combined rather than as a full replacement for one another.

Q: What genre is The Last of Us? A: It's a third-person survival action-adventure game with stealth and crafting systems, set in a post-apocalyptic United States twenty years after a cordyceps fungal outbreak. It's often categorized alongside narrative-driven action games rather than traditional survival-horror titles, despite sharing some mechanics with that genre.