The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us is full of standout scenes. While episode 8, “When We Are In Need,” is full of tension, drama, and even a bit more action than the show typically gets into, the moment that has viewers in a chokehold right now is one of its quietest: when Pedro Pascal’s Joel calls Bella Ramsey’s Ellie “baby girl.” It’s just one line, but in the overarching story of The Last of Us,it means everything.
Why it matters that Joel called Ellie “baby girl”
In both HBO’s show and Naughty Dog’s game, the relationship Joel and Ellie have fostered throughout their cross-country odyssey doesn’t culminate until winter sets in. At long last they’ve finally moved past their initial grievances about traveling together, and have started to really open up about their pasts and their hopes for the future. While the specifics of when and where differ between the show and game, Joel and Ellie have talked about grief, shared the things they wish they could have done in a world not overtaken by the cordyceps fungus, and openly shown care for each other. They’ve fought and survived together for a long time, but now seem able to drop their guard. Ellie finds the companionship she’s been missing in this desecrated world, and Joel opens himself up to care for someone in a way he hasn’t in 20 years.
He finally acknowledges this with words when he calls Ellie “baby girl,” which was a term of endearment he used for his daughter Sarah before she was killed by the military during the initial cordyceps outbreak, as seen in the first episode. Before this week, The Last of Us made several references big and small that suggested Joel’s initially guarded attitude toward Ellie was deeply rooted in his own grief. Consider his occasional glances at his broken watch, which Sarah gave to him the night she died.
While Joel and Ellie shared some brief moments of connection before, Joel’s already loved and taken care of a young girl once in his life, only to have her ripped away in the most traumatic way possible. The show made this explicit in episode six by having Joel and his brother Tommy discuss how his growing attachment to Ellie made him fearful for her life and his ability to protect her. This was to the point where Joel was ready to leave her in his brother’s care because he feared he would fail Ellie the way he feels he failed Sarah.
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By the time we get to the final scene of this week’s episode eight, Ellie has protected Joel in the same way he protected her. The gap between them has been fully bridged, and Ellie has had to survive the traumatic events of fighting through a group of cannibals and predators without Joel’s help. So when Joel finds her bloody and scared in the winter cold, he holds her and calls her “baby girl.” In a simple nickname, Joel and Ellie’s burgeoning relationship becomes indelible.
The fan reaction to Joel calling Ellie “baby girl”
Meanwhile, fans are having a moment about it.
And who could blame them? Pascal and Ramsey put their entire The Last of Ussy into that scene. They both sold that shit. Now that all The Last of Us newcomers watching are properly invested in Joel and Ellie’s relationship, I’m excited to see how these fans feel about the events of next week’s finale, which I’m sure will be universally accepted and not at all divisive.
With just one episode to go, we’re nearing the end of Joel and Ellie’s long journey together. This week’s entry, “When We Are in Need,” corresponds with the game’s winter section, though the HBO adaptation isn’t using the same seasonal structure of the game, and here in TV land, it’s been winter for a while.
When I first played The Last of Us ten years ago, in some ways the winter chapter felt to me like overkill, the game leaning hard into desperation and depravity just to be as gritty and bleak as it could, in order to help sell itself as a “mature,” serious game. “Enough, I get it. Humanity is awful and given half a chance, we’ll all do grotesque, morally reprehensible things.” Replaying the game now alongside the show, the purpose of the chapter within the narrative is clearer to me. Of course it’s common for stories to put characters at their most hopeless and desperate points right before the resolution, but the way The Last of Us does it, separating the characters while both are in dire straits, drives home the importance of their bond to each other. It also, importantly, illustrates that while Joel may have started out as Ellie’s protector on this journey, he now needs her at least as much as she needs him. Let’s take a closer look at this week’s episode, and its similarities to the same stretch of the game.
Ellie meets David in the show vs. the game
This chapter has its own villain in the form of David, a preacher and a predator whose flock reside in the resort town of Silver Lake and are suffering through a particularly harsh winter. In terms of dialogue, it’s one of the show’s more faithful episodes. In fact, it’s almost as if writer Craig Mazin’s screenplay for the episode just took this section of the game, cut out most of the combat sequences, and from there, sought to embellish the dialogue and build on what the game reveals to us about David and his congregation. It continues to be interesting to me how, in the game, combat is perhaps prioritized as the most important element, while in adapting the game to a series, it becomes the least important.
Screenshot: HBO
The winter chapter immediately distinguishes itself from the rest of the game by having you play as Ellie for the first time. (Today, playing through the story in order, you’d play the Left Behind DLC before this, but when the game came out in 2013, this was a surprising shift in perspective.) Desperate for food, Ellie hunts a deer she spots in the woods with her bow and arrows. Nicked and bleeding from multiple arrows, the deer runs, ultimately collapsing, but when Ellie finds it, two others, David and James, have seen it too. Just as in the game, David (voiced here by Nolan North, who plays Nathan Drake in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games) makes a deal with Ellie: penicillin for some of the deer meat.
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Screenshot: Naughty Dog
What’s unique to the game is that while waiting for James to return with the medicine, you have a multi-stage combat encounter fighting alongside David, involving a few standoffs against multiple waves of infected and a climactic battle with a bloater. Through it all, you might think that David is actually a new friend. He seems genuinely concerned for your welfare, and fighting alongside someone can be an experience that develops trust. Naughty Dog knows how to use combat as a tool for relationship-building, and here, they build up your trust in David a bit just to pull out the rug from under you and remind you that, in this world, the trust between Joel and Ellie is a rare and precious thing.
In the show, by the time Ellie first encounters David (played here by actor Scott Shepherd), we already have our reasons to be suspicious of him. The episode begins with him reading scripture to his flock, in the old steakhouse he’s converted into a church and town hall of sorts, a place where the abundant food of the pre-cordyceps past is sharply contrasted with the desperate circumstances of the present. (It’s an important location in the game as well, one you come to later, and the sign reading WHEN WE ARE IN NEED HE SHALL PROVIDE is a detail straight from the game.) The faces of the congregation’s members are lean and hardened, telling us much at a glance about what a difficult winter they’re having. A grieving daughter asks when her father can be buried and David says that it’s too cold to do so now, they’ll have to wait until spring. And outside after the service, David chides James (played by Troy Baker, the voice of Joel in the games) for his “doubt,” giving off the sense of a man who very much wants to maintain control.
Screenshot: HBO
Notably, in the show, Ellie hunts the deer not with a bow and arrows but with the sniper rifle, recalling in our memories the moment toward the end of episode six when Joel tried to teach her how to use it. When she takes a moment to focus with the deer in her sights, we can sense her recalling Joel’s words and trying to draw on what he taught her.
Both the game and the show have Ellie talking tough when she sees David and James near the deer she killed, with her calling James “buddy boy” and saying that if David tries anything, she’ll “put one right between your eyes.” The show, however, foregrounds David’s role as a preacher in their first conversation far more than the game does. In fact, perhaps the only real hint David gives off in the game that he has certain rigid moral standards might come when, after Ellie swears, he absurdly says, in the midst of a life-and-death battle against waves of infected, that she should watch her language. We definitely pick up on the fact that he’s a preacher eventually, but there’s no real character development done around it.
In the show, however, Ellie asks if David’s “hunger club” is some sort of cult, and he turns on the folksy charm, saying “Well, you sorta kinda got me there,” but saying that what he preaches is “pretty standard Bible stuff.” When Ellie wonders how he can still “believe that stuff” after everything that’s happened, he tells her it was actually after the world ended that he started to believe. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says in both the show and the game, and it’s here that whatever sense of trust you might have felt for David while fighting alongside him likely evaporates. His seeming friendliness reveals itself to be a guise for something more threatening, and he tells her that a “crazy man” killed someone in their flock recently at the university. A crazy man who just happens to be traveling with a “little girl.”
Ellie now understands that David is a threat if she didn’t before, but David lets her ride off with the medicine, telling her that there’s room for her in his group, that he can protect her. It’s almost as if he has some gross designs of his own for her.
Dinnertime at the steakhouse
One of the luxuries of HBO’s adaptation has always been that it can leave the perspective of Joel and Ellie behind entirely when it wants to, and here, we get more development of David’s congregation. In the kitchen, members of the flock lament their dwindling food supplies, and when a man brings in some fresh meat, one of them asks, “What is it?” “Venison,” he replies hesitantly, in a way that may have you asking, “Is it though?” Nonetheless, they put it into the evening’s soup.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David and James haul the deer Ellie killed into the restaurant, but the room still seems quiet. Sensing what the tension is about, David tells them that yes, it’s true, “we found the girl who was with the man who took Alec from us.” Come morning, he says, they’ll track her trail, and “bring that man to justice.” The grieving girl from the opening scene raises her voice, saying they should kill both of them. David walks over and, in a moment that shows us just what kind of congregation leader he is, backhands her across the face. Things get worse still a moment later when he tells her that although she may think she doesn’t have a father anymore, “the truth is, Hannah, you always have a father. And you will show him respect when he’s speaking.” Kenneth is not wrong when he saysthe show makes David even more disturbing than he already was.
The scene ends with shots of these hungry people eating their dinners, the thought lingering in our minds that it may be Alec they’re eating.
Hungry…for vengeance!
The next morning, David’s men do indeed come a-huntin’. In both the show and the game, Ellie does the only thing she can think to do: try leading the men away from Joel, who she’s injected with penicillin but who is still hovering on the edge of consciousness. In the show, she presses a knife into his hands and tells him to kill anyone who comes into the house, though he doesn’t even look like he has the strength to sit up.
The show gives us another brief exchange between David and James, as David insists that Ellie be brought in alive. James says he doesn’t mean to question David’s “sense of mercy” but the girl would just be another mouth to feed, and that yes, she may die if left alone out here, but perhaps that’s God’s will. David simply gives him a withering look, but it’s abundantly clear that David’s interest in keeping Ellie alive has nothing to do with mercy.
Ellie rides through the neighborhood on her horse—the neighborhood which, in the game, has a small army of David’s men on the streets—and eventually, her horse is shot out from under her. In the show, it’s James who does this, and David has to stop him and some other men from killing Ellie. Carrying her off himself and ordering a few men to haul the horse carcass, he tells the remainder of his men to go door to door hunting Joel. “You’re so hungry for vengeance? Deliver it.”
In the game, however, another extended combat sequence begins, as Ellie must sneak by or kill a number of David’s men. What we get here that we don’t get so much in the show is a lot of deep dissatisfaction among the flock with David’s leadership, with many men expressing doubt in David and suggesting that soon, his role as leader be put to a vote. Despite your best efforts, though, David does eventually capture and subdue Ellie, while his own delusions of grandeur about his own benevolence continue to manifest. “I’m keeping you alive here,” he says, as he jokes the consciousness out of her.
Ellie left Joel behind
In both the show and the game, Joel finally comes back to life, as if awakened by the cosmos just in Ellie’s hour of need. The Police have a song about that called “Synchronicity I,” but I digress. In the show, some poor bearded sap enters the house where Joel is stashed in the basement. Ellie was smart and hid the door to the basement behind an old piece of furniture, but the poor bastard rolls well on his perception check and notices something’s up. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t.
As he comes down the stairs, spotting the bloody mattress Ellie’s had Joel on for days, we know Joel has finally regained awareness, and is hiding down there somewhere. Yes, it turns out Joel has regained the strength not only to move, but to stab and choke the life out of a man. That’s the Joel we know and love!
Meanwhile, Ellie wakes up in a cage—in the game, to the sight of a man butchering a human body right in front of her, though in the show, it’s just David sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. In the show, which continues working to make David more overtly disturbing than he is in the game, he tells her that she’s in a cage because “you’re a dangerous person, you’ve certainly proven that,” and there’s an unmistakable hint of amusement and even admiration to his comment.
Screenshot: HBO
Joel’s back in action
Joel, desperate to find Ellie, tortures two of David’s men to get her whereabouts. It’s a startling juxtaposition with an exchange between Ellie and David in the game. When Ellie calls David an animal, he protests that she and Joel have killed a great many people too. “They didn’t give us a choice, it’s a video game,” she says. (Well, okay, she doesn’t say that second part.) “And you think we have a choice, is that it?” David says. “You kill to survive. So do we. We have to take care of our own, by any means necessary.”
I don’t really subscribe to that logic, but his words do on some level indict Joel, I think. Some may feel that Joel and David are points of contrast, one’s violence rooted in hate and delusion, the other’s in love and necessity. I certainly don’t think Joel and David are the same, but I also don’t think there’s anything innocent or acceptable about what Joel does here. And I’m fine with that. I want characters in my media who sometimes do awful things. What’s always troubled me about the reaction to Joel, though, is just how many people who played the game seem to think that everything he does is totally justified, while recognizing that the actions of others in the world aren’t. It’s as if we don’t want to closely interrogate the actions of the person we play as, the one we most closely identify with.
This may be a conversation for next week’s finale, but it seems clear to me that the game, and the show, at least want us to think about the lengths Joel goes to here, lengths that include brutally murdering one man after he tells Joel what he wanted to know, and then killing the other, too. When the second man declares that he won’t tell Joel anything, both the game and the show give us the chilling and memorable line in which Joel, referring to the man he just killed, says “That’s okay, I believe him.”
Cordyceps showed David the light
The show expands significantly on David’s conversation with Ellie, and makes it much more unsettling. He speaks to her—a 14-year-old girl—as if he sees her as some kind of equal, a kindred spirit, because they both have “a violent heart.” He fought to restrain his violent heart for a long time, he says, before he was shown the light, not by God, but by cordyceps. “What does cordyceps do? Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful. It multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence, if it must. It loves.” I appreciate the expansion of David’s ideas here, because I think the notion that love and violence can overlap is at the core of The Last of Us, and while David is clearly deranged, the debate over whether Joel’s violence is a manifestation of love rages on.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David, plainly a man who is used to having people respond to his charisma, makes the mistake of thinking that Ellie might be seduced by him as well, when, in both the game and the show, he puts his hand on the bars of the cage and makes it clearer still that his ideas about her are, to put it mildly, inappropriate. It’s a deeply sad moment to me, the realization that even in this world where society as we know it has collapsed, Ellie, like most women in our world at one time or another, in one way or another, still has to deal with the threat and the supreme bullshit of predatory men. Both versions punish David for his arrogance and delusion, as Ellie, briefly playing along, takes his hand and then snaps something in it before finally telling David her name. Tell the others, she says, that “Ellie is the little girl that broke your fucking finger!”
Here the game begins to employ the effective device of having us switch back and forth between Joel and Ellie at intervals, as Joel heads into town to find her, killing plenty of David’s men along the way while a blizzard gathers strength, raising the sense of drama and letting you pick off your prey in the low visibility. Yes, of course he’s doing it for her sake, to protect her, to help her, but by now, it also feels very much like he’s doing it because he doesn’t know what he would do without her. Of course historically, games once relied too often on putting underdeveloped women in peril and just focusing on the men who had to rescue them, but The Last of Us earns this setup by humanizing them both, by developing their connection, and by presenting their relationship as one of mutual care and benefit. By now, Ellie has taken care of Joel and saved his life about as much as he’s done for her.
The show also now switches back to Joel’s perspective, showing him heading into town and finding Ellie’s stuff, not to mention human bodies strung up on meathooks. Better hurry, Joel.
The trick up Ellie’s sleeve
In both versions, David (with James’ help, in the show) hauls Ellie out of the cage to cut her up into “little pieces,” since she didn’t take him up on his excellent offer. Just as they’re about to start cleaving, however, she announces that she’s infected, prompting David to roll up her sleeve and reveal the wound on her arm. David says it can’t be real, James says it looks pretty fucking real to him, and that’s the last thing he’ll ever say, as Ellie takes advantage of their moment of hesitation to sink a meat cleaver into James’ neck and dash out of the room.
Screenshot: HBO
Here, the game becomes a kind of boss fight, as Ellie must sneak around the restaurant and stealthily attack David while a fire begins to spread. In the show, his ego more evidently implodes as the restaurant, his church, burns down around him. It’s a breakdown on multiple levels, with this deluded, awful, terrifying man shouting “You don’t know how good I am!” In both cases, it’s up to Ellie to protect herself, to defeat this supremely shitty, predatory man, whose intentions to inflict sexual violence on Ellie, implied but still clear in the game, are made much more explicit in the show. And in both cases, it’s immensely cathartic and satisfying to see her finally kill him, and not just kill him but stab him again and again until she herself is a blood-spattered survivor, a horror movie final girl. But part of what gives the final girl trope its awful potency is that the kinds of sexualized violence these women so often fight against can’t be killed by killing just one bad man. It’s a threat we all face, all the time. Ellie survives, of course, but the stare she gives in the wake of it, the way she reacts at first when Joel approaches her, suggests that she’s forever changed by the experience. Ellie is all of us.
It’s okay, baby girl
Joel shows up just after her fight is won, and as subtle a detail as it is, the fact that in the show, just like in the game, he calls her “baby girl” in the wake of the horror she’s just endured is tender and very meaningful. It tells us that there’s no longer any pretense of division or obligation between them, of Joel doing this just as a job, of her just being cargo.
By putting both characters in such desperate circumstances, and then having them finally come back together in the end, this episode and this stretch of the game are the cementing of the connection between Joel and Ellie that the story needs before it heads into its final chapter. That’s next week, when we’ll finally settle the discourse about whether or not Joel’s actions are justified once and for all. See you then.
The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.
Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.
A tale of two malls
First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.
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Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.
This hopeless situation
In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.
He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.
She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.
Screenshot: HBO
(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)
Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.
Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.
Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II
Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.
Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspacestarring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.
We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.
Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.
What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?
After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”
In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.
After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.
Screenshot: HBO
When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.
Take on me
The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.
As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.
Just like heaven
Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.
But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”
Screenshot: HBO
Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.
Pictures of you
Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.
As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning
The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.
This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.
In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.
Screenshot: HBO
Kiss me, kill me
Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.
In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)
In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.
Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.
Love and truth in the Halloween shop
She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)
Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.
Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”
Screenshot: HBO
Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.
For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.
I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.
They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.
“I’m not letting you go”
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Screenshot: HBO
Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.
Last week’s episode of The Last of Uswas perhaps the show at its most bleak and devastating. Thankfully, episode six, entitled “Kin,” offers us a bit of a tonal reprieve, with enough scenes of hope and possibility for life in the post-cordyceps world to remind us that it is still possible to carve out lives worth living. That’s not to say that it lacks for emotional impact, however. On the contrary, it contains the scene that arguably serves as the crux for the emotional journey that Joel and Ellie go on together, and it represents the show at its most faithful to the game that inspired it, recreating the scene beat for beat and almost word for word. It’s a good thing, too, as it’s one of those moments that works so well in the game that it’s best left alone. However, the episode also departs from the game in a number of key ways, making it a particularly interesting one to compare and contrast with Naughty Dog’s original version of the tale.
Marlon and Florence
The episode begins by briefly making us re-witness the horrible tragedy that ended episode five. From there, it’s THREE MONTHS LATER, and a landscape covered in snow. Interestingly, the events of this episode correspond to the game’s fall chapter, but the show transplants them to winter. A man is bringing white rabbits he’s killed back to a cabin, perhaps a nod to the scene that opens the game’s winter section, in which a white rabbit emerges from a mound of snow only to be pierced by one of Ellie’s arrows.
At first, I wondered if this might be Joel, thinking maybe he and Ellie had found a place to wait out the harshness of winter. But no, it’s someone else, a man named Marlon, and as he enters the cabin, we see his face: it’s the great actor Graham Greene. Perhaps best known for his performance in Dances with Wolves, Greene is one of those actors who I always felt deserved a more robust and prominent career. Sadly his role here is small, but he makes the most of his screen time.
Screenshot: HBO
Waiting for him in the cabin is a woman named Florence (played by the also-fantastic Elaine Miles of Northern Exposure), who tries to tell Marlon something with her eyes. (Neither Marlon nor Florence’s names are spoken in the show, but HBO has revealed them in casting announcements.) As he sets down his bow and takes off his coat, Joel makes his presence known, stepping out with a gun and telling the man to get rid of his. But what makes this scene a pleasure is the way that neither of the cabin’s residents seem all that shaken by Joel’s presence. It’s just one more thing for the two of them to bicker over.
It’s almost comedic, how unaffected they are by Joel’s efforts to be a fairly intimidating interrogator. When Joel says he’s looking for his brother, Marlon immediately says “Well, I ain’t seen him.” When Joel asks him to point out where they are on a map, he says “If you’ve got a map, why are you lost?” When Ellie, hiding out above, asks if she can come down, Joel says no but she does it anyway, prompting Florence to look at Marlon and laugh. Yep, Joel doesn’t exactly have great control of the situation, but these are decent people.
My favorite moment in this scene comes when Joel tells Marlon that he’s found a great place to hide. Marlon says he’s been there since before Joel was born, that he came there to “get the hell away from everybody,” to which Florence volunteers that she didn’t want to, and Marlon sighs and waves his hand dismissively at her. You get a sense of the understanding these two have of each other, having shared a lifetime together. They have great “old married couple” vibes, and after the bleakness of last week’s episode, it’s a welcome reminder that there are still people, here and there, living lives of love and meaning.
They leave Joel and Ellie with a sense of foreboding, however, painting a picture of nearby towns swarming with infected, and when asked for advice on the best way west, Marlon says “go east.” In particular, he warns Joel and Ellie not to go past a nearby river. “We never seen who’s out there, but we seen the bodies they leave behind,” Florence says. “If your brother’s west of the river, he’s gone.”
A more vulnerable Joel
As Joel and Ellie leave the cabin, something alarming happens: Joel has some kind of episode, perhaps a panic attack, that finds him leaning against a post and clutching his chest. Ellie seems concerned about him but in the moment, she may be more worried about herself. “Just a reminder that if you’re dead, I’m fucked,” she says. In the game, Joel doesn’t seem susceptible to issues like this, generally seeming far more physically capable than most people in their mid-50s and only ever appearing physically distressed when he’s seriously injured (more on that later).
Screenshot: HBO
This moment works to make Joel seem more human and vulnerable to viewers, and to set up a crisis of self-confidence that he tells his brother about later. It also reminds us of just how much Ellie is relying on him to remain alive and capable, as it crystallizes just how much is at stake for Ellie later when Joel does find himself in real peril. For now, though, Joel soon brushes it off, attributing the fleeting issue to “the cold air all of a sudden,” and Ellie urges them onward in their quest to find Tommy and the Fireflies. “All we have to do is cross the River of Death,” she says.
Ellie the dream astronaut
The corresponding section of the game is just bursting with natural beauty, as Joel and Ellie make their way through a rainy autumn landscape, following a rolling river. I missed that a bit in the more spare but still striking winter landscapes we see Joel and Ellie traverse here, soon passing above what Ellie says is the River of Death Marlon warned them about. They set up camp, where Joel wraps duct tape around his boots, a moment that made me imagine a game mechanic in which you had to do this every so often or Joel would start taking damage from walking around in shoes that were falling apart. It’s not exactly something that happens in the game, but it is one of the show’s rare images of Joel using scrounged supplies as a resource.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Ellie’s standing on a nearby rock gazing at the northern lights, leading Joel to say one of the most dad-like things he’s said to Ellie thus far: “Come down from there, you’re gonna break your neck.” And after they share a swig from Joel’s flask (I love Ellie’s little “cheers” gesture before she drinks), she poses a thought experiment: what are we gonna do if the cure works? He pushes back on “we” so fine, she asks what he would like to do. He says maybe get a ranch somewhere—some land, some sheep.
Ellie’s stated desire is one she also voices in the game, and it explains her fascination with the starry sky: if things were different, she would have wanted to be an astronaut. The show’s writers add a nice bit of specificity to it, though, as she names a bunch of famous astronauts she read about in school before asking Joel if he knows who her favorite is. “Sally Ride,” he guesses correctly. “Sally fuckin’ Ride,” she replies. “Best astronaut name ever.” Absolutely.
Remembering Sam
Here’s another contrast between the game and the show that highlights their different approaches to Joel, and by extension, the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Dreaming of a better world in which her blood has made cordyceps a thing of the past, her thoughts turn to Sam, who she couldn’t save. “I tried, with Sam,” she tells Joel, saying that she rubbed some of her blood into Sam’s bite, hoping it would save him. Joel gives space to her feelings and, wanting to say something supportive, tells Ellie that if Marlene says the Fireflies can make a cure, they can do it.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, Ellie also brings up Sam, but Joel reacts very differently. You can stumble on a grave marked with a teddy bear, which prompts Ellie to mention that she forgot to leave a toy robot she’d picked up earlier on Sam’s grave. Joel shuts her down. Ellie protests that she wants to talk about it, which is the most understandable thing in the world. Joel forbids it, saying “Things happen and we move on.” Ellie relents, saying “You’re right, I’m sorry,” even though he’s not right at all. It’s just how Joel has coped with the suffering he’s endured, by not thinking or talking about it at all.
I think both dynamics work well for their respective mediums. In the game, we’re left aching for Joel’s facade to crack a bit, for him to finally start showing a little genuine compassion and tenderness to Ellie. In the show, Joel’s hardly warm, but he’s at least less quick to force her to deny her own feelings, which pulls us into their relationship in a different way: we’re starting to see the possibility for connection between them, which makes it that much more painful later in the episode when Joel does shun Ellie.
Welcome to Jackson
Joel and Ellie press on, at one point overlooking a dam, the show’s way of acknowledging the dam that plays prominently in this stretch of the game. Ellie says “Dam!” to which Joel responds that she’s no Will Livingston, the writer of her trusty book of puns.
Soon they walk past another river, at which point Ellie has an alarming thought: what if this is the River of Death? And sure enough, no sooner does she voice this thought than they find themselves surrounded by riders on horseback, holding them at gunpoint. There’s a harrowing moment in which a dog sniffs them both for signs of infection, and we don’t know if Ellie’s immunity also neutralizes any such signs or if the pup is about to sink his teeth into her neck, but the moment passes as the dog happily licks her face and she laughs. After Joel says that he’s looking for his brother, a woman asks Joel his name. It seems the name Joel means something to her, as they all promptly ride on horseback into the town of Jackson.
Screenshot: HBO
This is a significant departure from the game, in which the existence of Jackson is mentioned, but Joel and Ellie don’t actually enter the town. As players, we don’t get a good look at it until Part II. But here, we get to see the settlement now, a place where many families live a fairly normal life in the post-cordyceps world. It’s quite a sight, six episodes in, to see a street busy with foot traffic in a place where children frolic and people are working cooperatively. Among the people laboring on the street is Tommy, Joel’s brother, and the two share a heartfelt reunion. When Tommy asks what the fuck Joel is doing here, he says “I came here to save you,” before laughing at the absurdity of Tommy needing saving.
“We’re communists”
Joel and Ellie wolf down a meal while Tommy and the woman, whose name we learn is Maria, look on. At one moment, another girl furtively looks at Ellie, until Ellie loudly says “What?!” and scares her off. I imagine this was just a random Jackson resident, but I couldn’t help but think of Dina, a character who, in the second game, comes to play an important role in Ellie’s life. When Joel asks for a moment alone with family, Tommy tells him that Maria is family. The extremely unenthusiastic “congrats” that Joel eventually offers up is one of the funnier moments in the series.
Tommy and Maria give them a tour that covers the exposition bases, explaining how the town got started, how they stay safe from infected, and how it functions day in and day out. “Everything you see in our town—greenhouses, livestock—all shared. Collective ownership,” Tommy says. “So, uh, communism,” Joel says. “It ain’t like that,” Tommy refutes, but Maria corrects him. “It is that. Literally. This is a commune. We’re communists.” I appreciate the matter-of-factness of Maria’s statement, and the depiction of communism as a system that, when applied properly, can be beneficial to all. That’s not something you see in media very often.
Joel and Tommy, reunited
In both the show and the game, Joel and Tommy find themselves with some time to privately catch up as Maria and Ellie also spend a bit of time together. In both cases, tensions between the brothers run high, but there are some key differences as well.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, Joel’s stated hope is that Tommy will take Ellie off his hands and deliver her to his former Firefly buddies. Joel’s loss of Sarah is front and center in the scene, as Tommy says he went back down to Texas some time ago and found a photo of Joel and Sarah, which he offers to Joel. “I’m good,” Joel says, refusing the photo. The two get heated when Joel suggests Tommy owes him this favor for the things he did to keep them alive after the pandemic started, and Tommy replies that the horrendous things they did weren’t worth it, that all he has from that time is nightmares. Their argument is interrupted by an attack of marauders before anything can be settled.
Screenshot: HBO
In the show, rather than saying he wants Tommy to take Ellie off his hands, Joel says he wants Tommy to accompany him in delivering Ellie to the Fireflies. He lies to Tommy on multiple counts, both telling him that Tess is fine and that Ellie is the daughter of a high-ranking Firefly who he’s trying to reunite with her family. Here, too, Joel tries to use the violence he committed years ago as leverage. Tommy’s more forgiving here than his video game counterpart, but still remains ashamed of what they did. And as in the game, the memory of Sarah is close at hand, but not because of a photograph. Rather, Tommy tells Joel that he can’t go with him to the Firefly base in Colorado because he’s going to be a father. When Tommy says “I feel like I’d be a good dad,” Joel, obviously deep in his own feelings about Sarah, responds with a cold “I guess we’ll find out.” Tommy doesn’t take it well, and says that just because life stopped for Joel, that’s no reason it has to stop for him.
As he heads out into the cold, Joel once again clutches his chest and leans against a pole for support. He sees a woman nearby who, from behind, bears a striking resemblance to Sarah, but of course it’s not her.
Ellie learns about Sarah
In the game, we don’t witness the time Ellie and Maria spend together while Joel and Tommy are talking, but we do later find out that Maria tells Ellie about Sarah. In the show, we see how this discovery takes place.
After taking a shower and emerging to find that Maria has left her new clothes and a menstrual cup (which she finds both gross and amusing), Ellie heads across the street in search of her. She enters Maria and Tommy’s house and sees names and dates written on a chalkboard marking the lives of two people who died young: someone named Kevin, who died at the age of three shortly after Outbreak Day, and someone named Sarah, who died on Outbreak Day at 14.
Screenshot: HBO
Maria insists on giving Ellie’s hair a trim, and tells her that she’s always liked cutting hair. “Maybe it was a mom thing,” she says, before mentioning “the little memorial Tommy made” in the living room. “I’m sorry about your kids,” Ellie says, and Maria says only Kevin was hers, Sarah was Joel’s daughter. The heavy silence that follows tells Maria that Ellie didn’t know that before.
“I guess that explains him a little,” Ellie says. Maria, with a sense of cool practicality and likely a wariness of Joel based on the stories Tommy’s told her, expresses concern about Ellie being with him, but the teen remains typically testy. “Tommy [killed people] too, are you worried about him?” she asks. Maria says that Tommy was following Joel, “the way you are now,” seemingly seeing Joel as a bad influence, someone who pulls people into his orbit and leaves harm in his wake. “Be careful who you put your faith in,” she warns Ellie. “The only people who can betray us are the ones we trust.” Ellie clearly resents the advice and Maria’s distrust of Joel, perhaps because she senses there’s good reason for it and doesn’t want to admit it to herself.
The Goodbye Girl
In the town hall, Ellie joins the other youngsters at a screening of the 1977 film The Goodbye Girl. (Jackson likely has a pretty limited selection of film reels on hand.) However, despite the novelty of seeing an actual movie projected on an actual screen, Ellie remains distracted, paying more attention to Tommy and Maria talking nearby than to the wit of Neil Simon’s screenplay.
The show’s writers clearly didn’t pick The Goodbye Girl at random. The plot involves an actor, played by Richard Dreyfuss, forming a connection with a dancer and her ten-year-old daughter. The woman has a history of being abandoned by the men in her life (hence the title), and fears that the actor will do the same. Ellie herself has a history of being left as we’ll soon learn, and her fears of being abandoned by Joel are at a peak in this episode.
Screenshot: HBO
Meanwhile, Joel is alone in a workshop, struggling to repair his boots and getting immensely frustrated. Tommy comes in with a peace offering of new boots and an apology for his earlier behavior, saying “I know you’re happy for me, it’s just…it’s complicated for you.” Joel asks Tommy for more details on whether the trip to the University of Eastern Colorado where the Firefly base is located is survivable, and finally offers him the truth: Ellie is immune.
As he tells the story of his journey with Ellie thus far, he appears much more vulnerable than the Joel of the game ever does. No action hero, he admits to being far less capable of recognizing and reacting to threats than he used to be, and to sometimes being paralyzed by fear. “I’m not who I was. I’m weak,” he says, describing those moments where “the fear comes up out of nowhere and my heart feels like it’s stopped.” He’s haunted by dreams he can’t remember but that leave him with the feeling that he’s lost something.
The Joel of the game also tries to pass Ellie off onto Tommy because he’s afraid of the pain of emotional involvement, of potentially losing someone again, but he’s much more guarded about it. This Joel is more overtly shaken, riddled with self-doubt and a crippling fear of failure. He seems to honestly believe, when he says “I have to leave her,” that it would be for Ellie’s own good, that he’s incapable of being the person she needs him to be. He presents it to Tommy as a chance to make up for the awful things they both did, “to bring your kid into a better world.” I think it’s definitely a more emotionally persuasive appeal than the one Joel makes in the game, where Tommy just seems to change his mind and decide that taking Ellie on to Colorado is something he has to do.
When Tommy returns to the town hall after speaking with Joel, the look he gives Maria tells her everything, and the look she gives in response tells us everything about how she feels: That bastard Joel has done it again.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
And now we come to the scene that may be the emotional heart of both the game and the show, a crucial turning point in the central relationship. In the game, Ellie senses that Joel is abandoning her, steals a horse, and rides off to a nearby ranch. Joel and Tommy pursue her, and within the faded normalcy of the old house, she and Joel have an argument that reflects the crisis point in their relationship.
There’s no ranch here in the show, but the house in Jackson they’re staying at offers a similar backdrop of pre-pandemic life, and the conversation between them starts the same way, with Ellie reading an old diary and saying, “Is this really all they had to worry about? Boys? Movies? Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt?”
Screenshot: HBO
“If you’re gonna ditch me, ditch me,” she says, telling him that she overheard some of his conversation with Tommy in the workshop. And soon, after asking him what he’s so afraid of, she says “I’m not her, you know,” another line straight from the game and in some ways the emotional excavation of past anguish that both the game and the show have been building up to all along. It’s a scene on which so much hinges in the development of their relationship, and so it’s little surprise that it’s recreated so faithfully here.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In both cases, Ellie tells Joel that she’s sorry about his daughter but that she has lost people too, and in both cases, he says “You have no idea what loss is,” a pretty awful (and incorrect) thing for him to say. And in both, she tells him that everyone she’s ever cared about has either died or left her, “everyone—fucking except for you. So don’t tell me that I would be safer with someone else because the truth is that I would just be more scared.” Joel’s painful response: “You’re right, you’re not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain’t your dad.” Both Joels say that soon, they’re going their separate ways. Ellie’s a goodbye girl, all right.
Ellie the human cargo
The next morning, Tommy comes to collect Ellie, who sits with no display of emotion, her things packed, waiting to be carried along on her journey. It made me recall Joel’s comment to her in an earlier episode, “You’re cargo.” The feeling I got here is that this is now how Ellie feels about herself: she’s a thing that needs to be taken to a place for the good of humanity, but as a person there is nobody to whom she means anything, nobody who cares about her for her sake, only for what she might mean for humanity.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
But when they get to the stables, Joel is saddling up one of the horses. He says he got there 30 minutes ago with the intention of stealing the horse and being on his way, but now, he’s decided Ellie deserves a choice. “I still think you’d be better off with Tommy,” he starts to say before Ellie cuts him off, shoves her stuff into his arms and says “Let’s go.” In the game, Joel just decides he’s continuing on with Ellie. He says to Tommy that his wife kinda scares him and he doesn’t want her coming after him, but it’s obvious that that’s just something he’s saying, and that he’s decided that he belongs by Ellie’s side, for a little longer, at least.
Joel and Tommy share a hug, and as in the game, Tommy tells them that there’s a place in Jackson for them.
To the University of Eastern Colorado
An amusing interlude finds Joel trying to give Ellie a lesson in using a sniper rifle. All her shots miss and she’s convinced the gun doesn’t aim right. As he talks about proper technique, she asks him if he’s trying to shoot the target or get it pregnant. Of course, he hits the target dead on, to which she says “You dick!” as he shrugs and smiles.
Joel also talks a bit about being a contractor. “The Contractor,” Ellie says in a deep voice, as if she’s imagining some kind of construction-oriented superhero. “That’s pretty cool.” “Yeah, we were cool. Everybody loved contractors,” he says. And then, mirroring a conversation from the game, we hear Joel explaining some of the basic rules of football to Ellie.
Screenshot: HBO
As they explore the campus of the fictional University of Eastern Colorado, Joel volunteers that, more than running a sheep ranch, he wanted to be a singer, but of course he refuses Ellie’s request that he sing something. (He admits this in the game as well, and without going into specifics, I will say that it becomes more than just a throwaway detail later in the series.) In another moment straight from the game, a group of monkeys scurry away from them as they approach and Ellie confirms that it’s her “first time seeing a monkey.” Soon, though, the stillness of the campus starts to feel ominous, and it’s clear things aren’t quite right.
After finding a map indicating that the Fireflies packed up and headed for Salt Lake City, they see a group of men prowling the campus and attempt to make their escape. But before they can safely leave, a man attacks Joel with a baseball bat which breaks as he strikes a tree. Joel breaks the man’s neck, but in the struggle, the sharp wooden hilt of the bat gets stuck in his abdomen. In the game, Joel is severely injured when he and an attacker go toppling over a railing and he gets impaled on a bit of rebar, leading to a sequence in which Ellie must be Joel’s protector for a time, killing attackers as he limps weakly toward the horse. Even in his injured state, he’s still Joel, though. She says that if she gets him out of this, he really owes her a song and he responds with a dry “You wish.”
Soon they’re safely free of their attackers, but Joel falls off his horse and into the snow, and for the moment at least, Ellie’s worst fear is realized, a fear she admitted to Sam at the end of the previous episode. Just as the two seem to have come to some understanding about their importance to each other, he leaves her. “I can’t fucking do this without you,” she says. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going or what the fuck I’m gonna do. Joel, please.” But she is alone, as a moody cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” plays, the song that ended the show’s first episode. That choice, the moody cover callback, struck me as a bit cliche, the show going through the motions of doing what we expect prestige TV to do, but given that much of this episode rang emotionally true, I guess I’ll allow it.
It’s the best-selling home video game console of all time. So yeah, the PlayStation 2 has some good games. But which of them are the best?
We’ve put this list (which is not in any kind of order or ranking) together based on a couple of considerations. Firstly, the list includes our own personal favorites from the time, of course. But also, given the fact we’ve got some perspective on the PS2 now, we wanted to acknowledge some special games that defined the PS2 experience, the kinds of games that we maybe only ever got because of the combination of the console’s place in time and its market dominance.
Before we begin, though, please remember to spare us your sob stories. If your favourite PS2 game isn’t here, chin up. Just because we didn’t dig a game—or didn’t think it was good or weird enough to make a list called THE BEST, or felt it was more deserving of going on another platform’s list (Rez, Resident Evil 4, etc)—doesn’t make your own feelings on it somehow invalid!
It seems I was too quick to judge HBO’s The Last of Us. While the first four episodes certainly kept my attention as well-written and delightfully-shot prestige television, I had been a little let down as the adaptive process of turning the game into a show has, so far, left out the recreation of specific, memorable action sequences from the game. Well, with “Endure and Survive,” the fifth episode of the first (but not the last) season of The Last of Us, the show has revealed that it’s more than capable of adapting the action of the video game, and in some cases, just might be doing a better job with it.
Adapted from the hit PlayStation 3 title of the same name, The Last of Us’ gripping, character-driven plot exists alongside tense, deadly, moment-by-moment combat encounters. The player, as Joel, must overcome both hostile humans and infected with a combination of stealth, firearms, and crudely improvised weapons. For its first four episodes, HBO’s adaptation has, mostly, prioritized the story elements, choosing in some cases not to recreate memorable action sequences or feature unique, crafted props of the kind we’ve seen in the game. It makes sense for television to focus on the actors and the story, but until now I’ve found the show to be missing that key action ingredient I’ve loved so well, not just from seeing the game, but from playing it.
There’s a reason The Last of Us appears on our list of the best action games you can play this year. With a slower cadence than what you find in something like Naughty Dog’s other recent series, Uncharted, and an emphasis on survival, The Last of Us as a game injects tight, intense, action sequences throughout the narrative, reminding you that, however much things might feel under your control during the narrative downtime, you’re never actually safe in its deadly world.. The action sequences are when the rug has been pulled out from under you and you must deal with a situation in the here and the now. Mess up, and someone’s dying.
Our action game list highlighted the sequel, Part II, as being a bit more flexible, with more options for how you approach and respond to various situations. But the sequel follows what the first game already did so well: Moments where, forgive the cliche, all hell breaks loose and you must respond. Immediately. It’s stress-inducing action for sure, but damn, is it a thrill.
While I would’ve certainly traded the first game’s “upside-down” shootout sequence in the “Bill’s Town” level for the beautiful story of Bill and Frank we got in episode three of the show, I was beginning to worry that HBO’s TV adaptation would continue to leave out other, more explosive sequences rather than attempt to translate the immediacy of the game’s action to the screen. But here we are with episode five’s suburban sniper sequence. This gripping scene not only translates the game’s action particularly well, but does so with a narrative revision that makes the carnage even more intense.
Just like in the game, Joel and Ellie have teamed up with Henry and Sam. But this time, Henry and Sam’s situation is a bit more urgent. Kathleen, the leader of a revolutionary force, obsessively wants to see Henry die for his role in her brother’s death. Like the game, Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam must travel down an abandoned suburban street, moving from car to car to avoid getting shot by a sniper overlooking the area.
The TV show does depart a touch from this scenario as it exists in the game. To start, Joel isn’t faced with additional hostile forces on his approach to the sniper’s nest. And it becomes clear once Joel deals with the sniper that this individual belongs to the revolutionaries in Kansas City (the game’s parallel version of these events takes place in Pittsburgh and doesn’t feature Kathleen or any of the revolutionaries introduced in episode four). This is one of the improvements the show makes over the original game, something its sequel also worked harder to achieve: lending faces, complicated motivations, and identities to the antagonists.
But we need to talk about the sound design in the sniper sequence first. Though the show has caught my ear before (a particularly unnerving-yet-satisfying ambient music swell as Joel, Ellie, and Tess ascend the stairs in episode two’s museum is one such example), I am unhealthily obsessed with the gunshots in this scene. The exacting and penetrating strike of the sniper rifle’s shot is chased by a split second of silence that could swallow the universe, followed up with a timeless whisper of air and sensually percussive hits on the bodies and windows of cars. Satisfying bangs funneled into powerful clangs, sharp shatters of glass…heavy metal bands will spend their entire careers trying to deliver something so sonically beautiful and destructive at the same time. This is bliss.
The sounds are loveable as special effects and creations on their own, but the effect really drew me in with an intimacy of the kind I’ve felt in video games—and in particular, the one this show is based on. The scene that mirrors this one in the video game is one example, but the latter half of The Last of Us Part II also has a similar sniper scenario. Cover-to-cover movement with the threat of violence pressing you back is successfully brought to life on screen. But we’re not done yet.
Screenshot: HBO
Like in the game, Joel eventually gets to the top of the sniper’s nest, eliminates the shooter and must then get behind the scope as hostile human forces march forward. In the show, the personality-less mob of foes is replaced by new-character Kathleen on her quest for revenge, with her forces in tow. Joel must make several needle-threading shots, one of which is recreated from the game: Hitting the driver of a hostile vehicle, with the camera going behind the scope of the rifle itself. And yes, like the game, that car crashes into a house…a house which has a surprise in store.
The TV show’s vehicle veers off and crashes to the right side. It crashes on the left in the game; this mirror image of recreated scenes seems to be a common element of the show. Joel and Sarah are flipped in their position on the couch in the opening episode; Joel’s “I am sure you will figure that out” line of dialogue to Ellie asking what the hell she’s supposed to do while he naps in the first episode sees the couch he lays on flipped to the other side of the room.
And while a cluster of infected does ultimately flood the street in the game as well, it’s quite different in the show. Here, the emergence of a horde of infected from underground serves as the payoff to some wonderful foreshadowing in the previous episode and earlier scenes in this one, where we learn that FEDRA had previously chased all the infected underground as a way to “fix” the problem. It’s clear that this is something that will resurface to cause a problem. And in this scene, once you see that truck fall into the house…you know what’s coming, and that the hubris that led Kathleen to go to such extremes will soon claim its price.
Screenshot: HBO
Shattering the calm insanity of Kathleen’s myopic quest for vengeance, the fallen truck and the chorus of screams and roars from the mob of infected it unleashes is a powerful release, snapping us out of the daze of trying to follow Kathleen’s justification for cruelty. We’re barely given time to digest the contours of her bloodlust as the infected’s long-buried rage drowns out all, the great equalizer that considers no one safe and needs no justification for its wrath and violence. At the end of this scene, I felt the instinctual urge to put down the controller and take a breath. Except there was no controller.
Episode five’s sniper scenario doesn’t just adapt a key action sequence of the game, it makes it better. The pacing is tighter, more intense. The narrative wrapping pulls you into what’s at stake in a far more satisfying way, and it earns its zombie mob scene. This is the kind of game sequence adaptation I’ve been waiting for in HBO’s show, and it did not disappoint. Until next time, I’m gonna go see if Whole Foods has crow on sale.
Wersching at WonderCon in April 2022Photo: Daniel Knighton (Getty Images)
Actor Annie Wersching, who played the role of Tess in Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us video game, has died at the age of 45.
Wersching was diagnosed with cancer in 2020 but continued to act throughout her illness and treatment, appearing in series like Star Trek: Picard. As Deadline reports, her husband, Stephen Full, said in a statement:
There is a cavernous hole in the soul of this family today. But she left us the tools to fill it. She found wonder in the simplest moment. She didn’t require music to dance. She taught us not to wait for adventure to find you. ‘Go find it. It’s everywhere.’ And find it we shall.
She is perhaps best known for her role as Renee Walker in the seventh and eights series of 24, though she also made regular appearances on Bosch and Timeless as well. Wersching is survived by her husband and three sons.
Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann wrote, “Just found out my dear friend, Annie Wersching, passed away. We just lost a beautiful artist and human being. My heart is shattered. Thoughts are with her loved ones.”
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As you can see in the video below,Wersching didn’t just provide Tess’ voice, but also acted out the role for motion capture as well
This Go Fund Me is for them. It’s so Steve can have time to grieve without the pressure of needing to work. So he can be daddy to Freddie (12), Ozzie (9) and Archie (4) as they navigate the future without their mom, without sweet Annie. It’s so they can continue to go to baseball games (Go Cardinals!) take music lessons and play little league. It’s to help pay for college. It’s so Steve can continue Annie’s tradition of filling the house with every life-sized balloon that’ll fit in the car for birthday mornings. It’s to give them time to navigate life as a family of four without the burden of paying medical bills or funeral expenses. It’s so they can continue to live life in a way that they know would make Annie proud.
Everyone loved Annie. Everyone. But however much we loved her, she loved her boys more. Let’s help take care of them for her.
Some developers on the space horror blockbuster Callisto Protocol say they were omitted from the end credits sequence despite extensive work on the game and key contributions to the finished product. The claims come amid a renewed push throughout the video game industry to fix a broken crediting system that often punishes lower-ranking employees and those who leave prior to the final release date.
In a new report by GamesIndustry.biz, former employees at Striking Distance Studios say they believe around 20 developers were left off Callisto Protocol’s long end-of-game credits roll. Many were surprised by the omission, and say the studio never formally communicated a policy of leaving developers off the credits if they left before the game shipped. A few regard it as punishment for taking a job somewhere else.
“[The credits omission] felt like an obvious F-U to those who were left out,” one source tells GamesIndustry.biz. “Somebody wanted to send a message, and the message was, ‘Next time have a bit more loyalty to us.’”
Striking Distance was formed by former Dead Space director Glen Schofield in 2019 after leaving Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games. Late last year as its debut game was finishing development, Schofield was criticized for a tweet that endorsed crunch culture, celebrating sacrifice and long overtime hours.
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
While he later deleted the tweet and apologized, Bloomberg subsequently confirmed that at least some developers at the studio had crunched during production. Schofield told Bloomberg that some staff were “working hard for a few weeks” but that no overtime was mandatory.
Some former developers now tell GamesIndustry.biz that studio management would make promises to address crunch culture in the very same meetings where it would praise the long hours people had put in. “My issue is those of us who took part in that culture, who put in that time, and worked intensely to help craft this product, were punished with a credit omission for not going the extra mile…to stay until it shipped.”
The International Game Developers Association announced a plan last August to try and standardize how developers are credited for their work, and foster the spread of tools that can make it easier to update end credits scrolls when they are missing someone or contain other inaccuracies. “Game credits are hard, particularly in AAA,” former Naughty Dog communications manager, Scott Lowe, tweeted in reaction to today’s GamesIndustry.biz report. “But the answer is easy: credit everyone. Gating by time and subjective assessments of value/impact is messy and cruel.”
Striking Distance Studios did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
PlayStation expanded beyond the console in 2022.Illustration: Angelica Alzona
The decision-makers behind Sony’s console juggernaut spent a lot of 2022 putting down railway for 2023 and beyond, dumping money and time into growing the PlayStation brand beyond the funky-looking device in your entertainment center. The company wants the PlayStation name to be ubiquitous, and that has meant expanding not just in the form of video game acquisitions and new services, but bringing the PlayStation line into new mediums and markets. So, while Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarök bookended the PlayStation 5’s 2022 on the video game side, the brand was busy throughout the year.
Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg brought Nathan Drake and Sully (or people going by those names) to the big screen in 2022.Photo: Sony Pictures
PlayStation becomes a movie and TV brand
PlayStation Productions, Sony’s film and television subsidiary dedicated to putting out adaptations based on the company’s video games, released its first project this year in the form of the Uncharted movie. Featuring Spider-Man star Tom Holland as a vague amalgamation of Nolan North’s original interpretation of Nathan Drake and his own version of Peter Parker if he was slightly more stoic, the film also has Mark Wahlberg as a character who shares his name (and little else) with Nate’s father figure, Victor “Sully” Sullivan. The movie is, at best, aggressively fine. It took a critical beating, but did rake in over $401 million globally at the box office. Sony has plans to make Naughty Dog’s cinematic action game series into a full-blown movie franchise.
Whether any of the above will be any good remains to be seen, but Sony is making deals to put PlayStation characters on more screens and subscription services. The company has clearly decided that PlayStation games aren’t enough, and that they can instead be the origin point for an expanded universe that ties into the games its first-party studios are putting out. Speaking of…
Sony and Naughty Dog released The Last of Us a third time with its PS5 remake.Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
PlayStation movies and TV get re-released tie-ins
Putting an Uncharted movie in theaters and a Last of Us show on TVs is one piece of Sony’s new business model, but the company is also pairing these live-action adaptations with re-releases of the source material. Just a week before the Uncharted film launched, Sony released the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which brought both Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy to PlayStation 5, a console they were readily playable on through backward compatibility. Oddly enough, this only included the last two games in the series, rather than the three games that preceded them. But it was an Uncharted product that people could buy after seeing the movie, or even before, as it included a free ticket to the film.
The Last of Us Part I, a remake of the 2013 original, launched in September to both praise for the source material and the technical upgrade the release brought to it, as well as a slew of criticism surrounding its $70 price point. The remake carried a cloud over it after a Bloomberg report exposed internal politics at Sony surrounding the project, which began under a PlayStation support studio before gradually becoming a Naughty Dog product. The whole situation stinks to high heaven, but it did conveniently fit into Sony’s business model of making its games into an extended universe. Now, there will be a (near) full-price Last of Us game on store shelves when the HBO show premieres on January 15.
God of War came to PC this year, but its sequel only came to consoles.Screenshot: Sony Santa Monica / Kotaku
PlayStation continues to expand beyond consoles and to PC
Both of these re-releases were part of a PlayStation initiative to get more of its games on PC. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves brought the series (again, just the last two games, rather than any of the foundational ones that came before) to PC for the first time in October, and The Last of Us Part I will bring Joel and Ellie’s story to a computer near you in March. But it wasn’t just Naughty Dog’s games that got PC love, as God of War, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and Marvel’s Spider-Man and its Miles Morales spin-off also launched on PC in 2022.
All that being said, we still have yet to see PlayStation release its first-party games on both its consoles and PC simultaneously. God of War launched four years late on PC this year, but its sequel, Ragnarök, only came to PS4 and PS5 in 2022. It’s been heartening to see Sony make more strides in the space, but hopefully in 2023 we see a more immediate commitment to bringing its games to those who play on PC.
Sony paid a lot of money for Bungie, but Destiny 2 will remain multiplatform.Image: Bungie
Outside of the AAA space, Sony also acquired Savage Game Studios, whose founders previously worked on mobile hits like Angry Birds and Clash of Clans, in an attempt to kickstart a new mobile gaming division. The studio is apparently at work on a new project for phones and tablets based on an established PlayStation IP.
The PlayStation VR2 will launch next year, but won’t be usable with old PSVR games.Image: Sony
PlayStation VR2 seems like an upgrade, but with caveats
Sony kicked off 2022 by announcing its second virtual reality headset, aptly named the PlayStation VR2. It sounds like a meaningful upgrade from the original PlayStation VR headset Sony released in 2016, with an impressive-sounding OLED, 4K resolution display, dedicated controllers so you won’t have to use your old PlayStation Move wands anymore, and a single-cord setup that will make using the whole thing more manageable. However, as news has come out about the device, things have gotten a bit more troubling.
The most egregious drawback Sony has confirmed is that original PlayStation VR games won’t be compatible with the PSVR2 headset. Senior Vice President of Platform Experience Hideaki Nishino said on the PlayStation Podcast that this is because “PSVR2 is designed to deliver a truly next generation VR experience,” citing much of the new headset’s tech as being incompatible with old PSVR games. Regardless of whatever explanation Sony has to offer, it’s a bummer that the PlayStation 5 seemed to be developed with more future-proofing in mind and now we’re dealing with backward compatibility issues again. So if you want to keep playing your old PSVR games, don’t throw your old headset out.
PlayStation Plus now has tiers, and whether you’ll get much value on them depends on where you live.Image: Sony
PlayStation Plus launches new tiers with new problems
PlayStation Plus, Sony’s long-running subscription service for playing games online and collecting a vast array of “free” games, saw a revamp this year that put it more in-line with Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass. It doesn’t seem like it’s gotten the same resounding love as its direct competitor, though. PlayStation Plus now has multiple tiers, which each have different included features and perks.
The cheapest is Essential, which is basically just what PlayStation Plus has been for years: online play, sales, cloud storage, and a few free games each month. The second tier is called PlayStation Plus Extra, which includes all of the above, as well as an on-demand library of PlayStation 4 and 5 games. The most expensive tier is PlayStation Plus Premium, which adds a streaming library of classic games from across all the PlayStation consoles, and even the PlayStation Portable.
The PlayStation 5 is two years old now, but the console is still relatively difficult to find due to supply chain issues that are expected to last well into 2023, if not longer. But as we get further away from the original launch and demand starts to calm down, it’s become marginally easier to track down and buy a PS5 of your own. Brick-and-mortar stores are still hit or miss, but Kotaku had a bit more luck finding the box on digital storefronts. So hopefully by the time Spider-Man 2 launches next year, those still looking for a PlayStation 5 won’t face a massive ordeal.
The PlayStation 4 is nine years old and still got most of Sony’s big games in 2022.Image: Sony
The PlayStation 4 hangs on a little bit longer
That being said, Sony still wasn’t quite ready to let go of the PlayStation 4 in 2023. The company’s biggest games this year, Horizon Forbidden West, Gran Turismo 7, and God of War Ragnarök, all launched simultaneously on the PS4 and PS5 and were pretty alright experiences on the last-gen console. You know, if you’re cool with your PS4 sounding like it’s ready to take off on a flight across the Atlantic.
But looking forward, it seems 2023 will be the year Sony really starts to leave the old system behind. That’s a respectable ten years of service since its original 2013 launch, and PlayStation Studios now seem squarely focused on the PS5. Spider-Man 2, the VR spinoff Horizon Call of the Mountain, and Insomniac’s take on Wolverine were all announced as PS5 exclusive, so hopefully as this transition takes root, the PS5 becomes more readily available next year.
2022 was truly the year of Elden Ring, with FromSoftware’s latest game exploding into the mainstream unlike anything it had previously created. As such, a lot of people played and finished Elden Ring. In fact, according to one set of data, Elden Ring was the most completed game of 2022. But funnily enough, the same source also pegs it as the game players were most likely to abandon before reaching the end.
If you’ve read Kotaku (or any other gaming website) in 2022, you are likely already familiar with Elden Ring, the latest game from Dark Souls creators FromSoftware. And like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Elden Ring is a tough-as-nails action-RPG with a heavy focus on mystery, world-building, and boss fights. However, this time around FromSoftware added a true open world to its popular “Soulslike” formula. The end result? One of 2022’s most acclaimed, best-selling games. The open world in particular helped sway many to try Elden Ring for the first time, letting players avoid harder areas until later and ostensibly making it easier to finish than past FromSoftware adventures. And it seems that design choice paid off.
According to data on HowLongToBeat.com, Elden Ring is 2022’s most completed game, with nearly 6,000 users of the site reporting they have played and finished the massive open-world RPG. That’s an impressive number when you look at the runner-up games on the list. Stray, that adorable futuristic cat game, was completed by nearly 4,000 users. Meanwhile, in third with 2,500 completions, was Game Freak and Nintendo’s Switch hit, Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To see such a big and difficult game top the list is both a sign that Elden Ring is very good and also a hint at the kind of audience that is primarily using HowLongToBeat.com.
Screenshot: Howlongtobeat.com / Kotaku
But perhaps more interesting is that Elden Ring is also the most “retired” game. When users “retire” from a game on Howlongtobeat.com it means they have given up on it, either permanently or temporarily. Now, even though only 261 players officially retired from Elden Ring on the site, that’s still more than double any other game in 2022. Even if the dataset is a bit small and weird (how many people are logging into this site to admit defeat?) it’s still an interesting data point.
This all makes sense to me. Elden Ring was the most talked-about game of 2022, and with that many people playing, it makes sense that a good chunk of them might give up on it. Other data seems to suggest around half the people playing Elden Ring never reached the end. So I buy that Elden Ring could be the most completed game of 2022 while also being the game more people gave up on than anything else.
Some other interesting 2022 data from the site: Turns out Elden Ring is also on the most backlogs, has the most reviews, and is the longest game of 2022. However, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part 1 is the most positively reviewed game, and Diablo Immortal is the worst-reviewed.
Other publications wrote about the discourse, developers weighed in, and the lead-up to The Game Awards became less about speculation over which game would win GOTY (spoilers: it was Elden Ring) and more about whether or not Josef Fares would wear a skin-tight t-shirt again (spoilers: he didn’t).
Ultimately, it seems like my call-out worked. Numerous people who attended the event told me via DM that I shamed attendees into dressing better. The presenters and on-stage talent at this year’s Game Awards were almost uniformly sharper-dressed than in previous years, and even Phil Spencer seemed to be wearing a slightly more formal outfit.
The Game Awards is a chance to have fun with fashion and to lean into the themes that are so often in the games the night is celebrating, so it was great to see some people really doing that last night. That’s why I decided to highlight the best-dressed attendees and honorees at gaming’s biggest night. You all did amazing, sweeties.
