I will keep this one short as we have had enough fawning over The Last of Us this week to last us a lifetime.
I have always played far too much video games in my life. When I first got into my relationship that didn’t really stop out, instead I would try to find games that we could play together. Initially I tried to use COOP titles we could play together but my partner would always get frustrated at the game and quickly shut it off.
I moved onto games I thought looked flashy and cool but these sort of bounced off as well. It wasn’t until the original Last of Us game came out that I finally hit the jackpot and found the perfect game for us to play together.
My wife knows she isn’t very good at video games and to be honest, she doesn’t overly want to be either. Instead what she has found is that she loves to watch story driven games that keep us both hooked from start to finish. The Last of Us’ touching story of a widowed father softening up to a new adoptive daughter (of sorts) had us hooked from beginning to end.
From my perspective I was loving the gameplay and playing through the game with reckless abandon as I had done so many times before, but from the perspective of my wife – it was a touching story driven title that was as fun to watch me get eaten on as it was fun to see the story to completion.
This game paved the way for many (Mostly Naughty Dog) titles over the year which we would play together the same way many other couples would have a movie night, drawn into the storylines with popcorn and chocolate hooked on every beat presented to us.
This is why then that we are both very excited to play the second game in the series. Lots has changed over the past 7 years: we got married, have a beautiful baby daughter (which again, enforces this father-daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie in my mind) and have our own house now. The one constant is that we have eaten up every detail we could get our hands on when it comes to the Naughty Dog franchise.
We plan to spend the whole of Fathers day tomorrow, deep into The Last of Us Part 2, just like we did 7 years ago, before it all changed.