I played The Last of Us for the first time in 2022

polygon.com:

I’ve managed to go nearly 10 years without encountering The Last of Usspoilers. How did this happen? For one, I wasn’t covering the video game industry in 2013 — I worked early mornings kneading bread and creaming butter for cookies in a bakery, then fiddling with keys to get into strangers’ houses to walk their dogs. I played console video games on an aging Xbox 360 and StarCraft2 on my Mac laptop. I hadn’t had a PlayStation console since the PlayStation 2, which had long been retired to my parents’ garage, and wouldn’t have one of my own until the PlayStation 5 — save for a brief period where I borrowed a PlayStation 4 from a friend to play Death Stranding.

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This is all to say that I had no physical way to play The Last of Us, and, against all odds, I somehow avoided spoilers, too. And now, I have a PlayStation 5 taking up way too much space in my living room, and I can finally say that I’ve played The Last of Us. And yeah, it’s still a fucking good game.

It feels trite to summarize The Last of Us Part 1, given its significance and ubiquity, but I’ll do it for the sake of anyone else who doesn’t know the setup by now: The Last of Us is set in a postapocalyptic world where humans have been infected by the Cordyceps fungus — a parasitic fungi that infects the brain and turns infected humans into violent, mutated monsters. The main plot begins 20 years following the