By Adrian Equihua Cortes
Video games are mostly known for being a form of entertainment to get rid of our boredom or to distract us from our troubles. But there’s more to video games than just entertainment, video games can just be so beautiful.
Not only are the visuals so stunning, but so are the characters and the amazing story that makes the player feel all sorts of emotions. Like movies, video games have multiple genres to enjoy and there’s a video game out there that everybody can enjoy.
With technology getting better every year, the quality of video games has been spiking up like crazy. Some video games are even taking to the big screen! Whether it be a horror game or an action-adventure game.
But the game I really wanted to talk about is, “The Last of Us.”
May contain spoilers.
In “The Last of Us,” about half of the world has been turned into zombies and the story takes place 20 years after the outbreak already happened with a society that surprisingly functions (barely).
Rather than it being a virus, it is a fungus that infects all humans turning them into zombies, and that fungus is one that actually exists in our world and it’s called the Cordyceps! But wait, how come we haven’t been turned into zombies yet?
The very same fungus that exists with us only affects certain insects, the game basically explores, “What if this fungus mutated and began affecting humans?”
A very interesting yet horrific idea…
In the story, we follow Joel Miller, a 32-year divorced man, and his only daughter Sarah Miller who is 12 years old. When the outbreak began they were forced out of their home and they bumped into someone from the military who coincidentally at the same time was ordered to kill ANY bystanders around the city to prevent infection from spreading. Joel’s brother shoots the military man AFTER he had already shot a couple of times but Joel luckily came out unscathed. The same couldn’t be said about his daughter…
20 years later, Joel is living in a new society in Boston in a very small town with some survivors and is tasked to deliver an important teenage girl, Ellie Williams, to a different state. But why would he risk his life traveling such a far distance for this girl? Why is she so important? Find out in The Last of Us.
The story is mostly about Joel and Ellie and how they travel from Boston to Wyoming for a chance to find a cure to fix the mess happening all over the world. All while Joel is dealing with the trauma of his daughter while traveling with a teenage girl who reminds him of his daughter in a dystopian world.
In this new world, most major cities have been completely abandoned and are crawling with weird fungus zombies. Some buildings are just completely covered in vines and some have fallen over due to accidents happening on the day of the outbreak.
This game does an amazing job of showing off every single little detail in all the places that they travel to.
The story ends with a very dramatic plot twist that forces Joel to make a very difficult decision and the decision he ended up making was very controversial, but I enjoyed how he made the decision he did because while it wasn’t the best, it was realistic. I love it when games are realistic and show the bad side of things rather than an “everyone lived happily ever after” and that’s why I think the story is a work of art.
The video game was adapted into a show and first aired in spring 2023 on HBO Max and was a massive success. When the first episode dropped it had 4.7 million U.S. viewers and as of March 2023, it reached 40 million U.S. viewers. We’re talking about a show based on a game released 10 years ago.
On release in 2013, this game sold only 6 million copies.
Before the show was released in December 2022, the game sold about 37 million copies worldwide, the very same game that was adapted into a show and gained 40 million views JUST in the U.S. 2 months after release…
This statistic tells us just how much people look down on video games with many people believing that “games are just for kids.” Not to mention that the game takes about 20 hours to finish and the show is just 9 hours, many fans are missing out on tons of content just because they watched the show rather than playing the game.
There are so many games out there with stories that are good or just fun and some people haven’t touched a game in their life!
Video games are something everyone should experience.