8 Times You Failed To Be The Hero In Video Games

Widely considered to be the codifier of the serious-hairy-dad-game, The Last Of Us on the surface feels like an optimistic (if unspeakably violent) story of a grieving man finally able to find purpose again after taking a young girl under his wing. Look with a slightly more critical eye though, and Joel's arc is significantly darker. What we have truly witnessed is an utterly selfish man who may have brought about the end of the human race.

20 years after losing his daughter at the very beginning of the cordyceps outbreak, Joel is a smuggler and professional misery-guts who is tasked by a militia leader with escorting a young girl, Ellie, across America for an initially unknown purpose. His attitude to her gradually changes from dismissive hostility to fatherly devotion in some of the most emotionally powerful moments ever put to code. Upon learning that Ellie is immune to the virus and the militant group in question plan to harvest her DNA to develop a cure, killing her in the process, Joel betrays them and murders his way through them in order to save her.

Now this is all very understandable, as Joel has been through unimaginable pain in losing one child, only to be faced with essentially losing another whom he has grown to care for. But in doing so, he has put humanity at risk of extinction by keeping the one potential vaccine and cure to himself. He even bare-faced lies to Ellie about this, telling her that there were many like her and the procedures had never worked, when in fact she was the first and only documented case.