In The Last of Us, Naughty Dog takes a few risks and does a lot of things really well. The monsters, the infected, have all of the characteristics of zombies that make them scary and entertaining yet they don't feel like every other zombie you've mutilated in a game before. The humans have some of the most natural dialogue to be found in a blockbuster game and their conversations let us know them in great detail. The decaying world is similarly detailed and for once in this generation a developer of a major release has decided to make ammo a bit of a rarity to set the proper tone. Yet for all it does right, The Last of Us doesn't feel like a complete success. These triumphs can feel disappointing once you realize that they could have been in a better game.
I suppose it's best to start with the world. Like the rest of nature, a fungus has adapted. However, this adaptation makes the fungus infect humans and it most often spreads from the bites of those it has infected. It's not initially made clear exactly how this fungus managed to do it (an early newspaper suggests a massive agriculture contamination and I've never trusted mushrooms), but soon the vast majority of the country is a no-man's-land and the few army controlled quarantine zones aren't much better as they run on martial law. Still, the quarantine zones are better than nothing as the areas outside their walls are overrun with hunters preying on passersby and infected looking to spread the fungus. The military has made communities dominated by harsh laws (no venturing beyond town walls) and potential corruption while the rest of mankind are reduced to cavemen in tiny tribes, foraging for resources and tools they can't recreate.
As you might expect, the communities aren't completely secured. The player controls Joel, a man who gets by on smuggling. At a passing glance, he seems to only care about survival. He'll break any law if it means getting by and he's seen enough to know that he can't hesitate to kill a threat. Nearly all the activities you perform as Joel revolve around survival. You do, of course, fight hunters and the infected but ammo is scarce so survival means picking off some enemies with stealth, avoiding others, and making the shots you do fire count. Survival also means scrounging through rubble for supplies and piecing them together for health restoratives and makeshift weapons. Controlling Joel is harnessing his incredible focus on constantly moving forward, step by step and body by body.
Yet his most precious cargo is neither food nor weapon. She is a teenage girl named Ellie. She is immune to the infection and must be the key to finding a cure. In a situation that reminded me of War of the Worlds, nature has found the cure that humans could not. After witnessing crumbled city buildings smothered by foliage, this seems plausible. Ellie herself is entranced by nature; She looks on in wonder at a wooded path and stops to stare at fireflies that Joel will likely brush past. She likes pulpy science-fiction comic books too.
Why would such a survival oriented person like Joel bother to take on a burden like this? I'm not suggesting that there is a plot hole here. Cut-scenes make it clear that there isn't. They tell the player that while Joel doesn't care about humanity, he cares about a few very specific humans. They also tell the player that he has a fear of facing the loss of somebody precious to him and helping Ellie get away is also helping him get away. The cut-scenes make this very clear. The problem is that the third person shooting and survival horror elements, solid as they are, hardly have any room to show that there are people Joel cares about. Ellie, who Joel will soon care about a lot, is hardly ever thought of during gameplay. She might sass a bit, but she'll follow without any action from the player and masterfully stay out of the way. She never takes damage so she never needs to be patched up after battle and she finds her own ammo. The player controls Joel and does everything to keep him safe, but nearly all the interaction with Ellie is left to cut-scenes. The writing is there but it should have been supported more by the gameplay.
It's a shame that so much care has went into writing Joel as a believable version of the murder machine protagonist of blockbuster shooters with an added wrinkle of humanity only to not see quite as much care go into the design. However, The Last of Us is still very much a success. There's a stoic power in steadying your aim as the infected shamble at Joel like grotesque marionettes only to quickly move on to a quiet moment of reflection as the Rocky Mountains tower over skyscrapers. It's a beautiful mess.