In the seven years leading up to The Last of Us Part II, the game’s long-awaited sequel, released on Playstation 4 this Friday, imagery like this has begun to spread through pop culture.
It’s a moment of beauty amidst brutality mankind may have been near-wiped out, but nature has carried on. Ellie and Joel stop to caress the animal, looking out over a world rendered unrecognisable. In the distance, other giraffes roam through what used to be an inner-city baseball field, a symbol of how nature has reclaimed urban space in humanity’s absence. Instead, the greatest draw of the 2013 best-seller – lauded as one of the greatest video games of all time – was its quiet story beats, and one quiet story beat in particular.Įllie and Joel, the game’s protagonists, grizzled after an arduous, life-threatening trek in search of a cure to a pandemic that’s wiped out 60% of the planet, are climbing through an abandoned bus depot when they spot it: a wild giraffe grazing on acacia. The Last of Us may have been a zombie horror survival game, about a duo traversing a post-apocalyptic US overrun with cannibalistic creatures, but its most memorable moments weren’t daring escapes from zombie hordes, nor explosive shoot-outs with hostile human survivors.
