“IT’S AN OPEN-and-shut case: this is the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.” Big words? Or damning with faint praise? Considering it comes from the creator of HBO’s Emmy-winning Chernobyl, it’s a claim we should probably pay heed to. Craig Mazin is, after all, a man who knows a thing or two about story: his 2019 dramatisation of the infamous nuclear accident has been widely hailed as a TV masterpiece. And when he had his pick of almost any project imaginable as a follow-up, he chose to adapt a PlayStation game.
While Sonic The Hedgehog may have collected gold rings aplenty at the box office, video-game adaptations have not had a storied history, almost always lambasted as cash-ins. The Last Of Us, however, feels different. The game arrived to ecstatic acclaim in 2013 (Empire named it the Best Film Of The Year (That Wasn’t Actually A Film) in our review of that year), not just setting a new benchmark for interactive storytelling, but completely changing the perception of what video games were capable of. It painted a relationship between a grizzled, grieving father and a resentful 14-year-old girl that was so poignant, raw and unerringly believable that the ending hit like an emotional wrecking-ball.