10 Reasons The Last Of Us Is STILL The Best Video Game Of All Time

With a seemingly infinite number of zombie games hitting shelves in the 2010's, Naughty Dog had to alter the formula to make sure their brain child wasn't lost in the pack. To do this, the developer sought inspiration from the real world, and decided that the infection present in the game wasn't a result of a biological catastrophe or comic-book villain's master-plan, but instead a natural infection that affects ants and other insects.

Cordyceps is a parasitic fungi that lives on insects, attacking the host and rendering them lifeless. The Last of Us simply takes this very real natural occurrence and applies it to humanity.

Though the infection cannot (as far as we know) greatly affect humans, the grounded approach to justifying a zombie outbreak grants the story so much more intrigue. No longer are the hordes of zombies just another means to instil a sense of danger, but they're born of natural, very real causes.

In a lot of ways, the infection mimics the setting, as mother nature is making a home where society once resided.

A beautiful, if horrific, metaphor for one of the game's many narrative threads.