Naughty Dog's arguably best game, The Last Of Us has been showered with countless GOTY awards, not to mention the massive amount of wins in other smaller categories, and may I add, rightly so. 

The Last Of Us at a glance may seem like your average third person adventure game. You have a protagonist with their main objective being to escort a person to a specific location. The gameplay features are for the most parts, standard as well. Shooting, hide, collect, craft etc. Technically, it does not invent anything groundbreaking. So why is the Last Of Us gaining all of this praise. It's the story.

A fungus has spread wiping out a large portion of the population. Those who are infected by this fungus, don't actually die but their brains are taken over and they transform into mindless beings, not being aware of what they are doing; basically zombies. Quarantine zones have been set up to protect the civilians who are still healthy, but this limits their freedom. They are not allowed to go outside the city limits, curfew is also in place.

Joel, one the protagonists in this game has been living under these harsh conditions for around twenty years after suffering the loss of his daughter Sarah. Skip forward a bit, and he is given the task of escorting a young girl by the name of Ellie to the Fireflies, a rebel group who are fighting against the militia who have set up these quarantine zones. This takes them on a long, harsh and gruesome journey in which they bond together and become inseparable. 

We fall in love with Ellie and this quickly becomes a dual protagonist game. She has been born into this world of killing, infected and lack of freedom. She does not understand taxes, jobs or anything else that society contained during it's earlier years. To her, it is just a fantasy world. Now Ellie is not innocent, she too has killed but only because she doesn't know any better. Her and Joel's conversations about what the world and society was like before the fungus are one of the most entertaining side conversations to listen too.

The game should last you about fifteen hours on your first playthrough, and throughout those short hours we become invested in Joel's & Ellie's story. Well, sort off. You could call it Our & Ellie's story. 

Joel meets Ellie for the first time, but so do we. The reason why the Last Of Us' story sucks us in so much is that we know Ellie for nearly as long as Joel does. We get to bond with her through Joel's eyes. While in most games you'd get a few characters and we would be told about their past and in general about them through exposition dialogue, we get to see what Ellie was, is and will be from a primary source, herself. There are only short periods of time which skip and we don't see where Joel and Ellie interact. For the majority we first hand get to experience Ellie and embrace her as perhaps our friend, sister or daughter depending on who you are. Joel and Ellie have a sort of daughter-father relationship, and so do we because we bonded with Ellie as long as Joel did. It is because of this we care for her and are extremely worried about the things that happen to her. 

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There has been numerous discussions about the possible sequel of The Last Of Us and what it should be. Some say it should continue the story of Joel and Ellie a few years later from where the first game ended, others think that the story was told and finished, that we should go and learn about somebody new entirely. I think that in order for The Last Of Us '2' to live up to it's expectations is too start the next game literally, where the first game ends after Ellie says "Okay". If they don't it will ruin this relationship that we have with her. Years will have been skipped and so we will suffer the loss of bonding. This will lead to us coming detached from Ellie, not understand what's going on and being forced to have the cliched exposition by dialogue jammed down our throats. It'll become a generic third person adventure game.