Perspective in the Opening Moments of The Last of Us

Perspective in the Opening Moments of “The Last of Us”

Written by Samuel Gronseth

There are a few specific moments in The Last of Us that had a particularly powerful impact on most people who played it. One of these, of course, is the very first few minutes of the game.

This is mostly due to excellent execution. After all, on its face the opening of the game is fairly standard. It establishes a good relationship between father and daughter, then the outbreak happens, and in the rush to get away safely the daughter is killed, the father is sad, and the scene is set for a story of Joel finding a surrogate daughter in Ellie years later. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation; there’s nothing wrong with doing something standard and doing it well, which this opening certainly does.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to dismiss its power years later; the theme of protagonists protecting or avenging a loved one has always been common in this medium, but since the early aughts (home to such classics as The Last of Us and Telltale’s The Walking Dead) the gaming landscape has been saturated with the specific subcategory of self-serious games about sad dads protecting or avenging their children.

This means that describing this sequence now, in which a man tries to protect his daughter at the onset of the zombie apocalypse but ultimately fails, may sound stereotypical, if not kind of empty. At the very least, the basic concept wasn’t very original before games started employing it en masse, and it’s even less so now that they have. Inevitably, early examples of a once-powerful narrative device become less and less impactful as more stories employ them, which tempts one to view this sequence less charitably in hindsight.

But not all the impact of this scene is lost to time. The craft behind the game’s opening is still admirable and effective, making it impacting for reasons well beyond the simple surprise or tragedy of the scenario. So let’s take a look and see how it was crafted to be as impactful as it was.

The first scene is a standard cutscene, establishing the positive relationship between Joel and his daughter Sarah, as well as the watch she gives him as a gift (which will serve as a permanent reminder of her death and a symbol of Joel’s brokenness throughout the game). But then the game does something subtle, but rather inspired; the next morning Sarah wakes up to a distressed phone call from her uncle Tommy, and the game gives us control of her. Sarah is not the protagonist of the game; she won’t even survive to the title screen. But the game starts the player out in her shoes. The reason why will be clear in a bit.

The player’s first task is to explore the house. Technically, all they need to do is go downstairs toward the sliding glass door in the study, but Naughty Dog knew full well the player would likely explore first, and used optional content to set the scene for what was coming. Most notably, the door to Joel’s room is cracked open with light coming from it, and while he’s not inside, the TV is tuned to a news story that cuts short by an explosion, which can be seen out the window in the distance.

This event changes the tone of the scene significantly; Sarah goes from sleepy and confused to alert and concerned, and the difference is palpable. It’s unsurprising that this particular studio pulls off this mood change so well, considering their famous attention to detail. Part of it is in the voice acting; Sarah’s calls for her dad immediately gain a shade of fear and worry, where before they were mostly just sleepy.

But more impressive is the way the character is animated. Up until this point, Sarah’s movements are loose and tired. She toddles around the house, wobbling side to side with every step, occasionally lifting a lazy arm to wipe sleep out of her eyes. She walks like… well, someone who was woken up in the middle of the night and isn’t fully alert yet. The player can feel this simply by how their character is moving, which is fairly standard for video games at this point but still excellently done.

But immediately after the explosions, that changes. Sarah’s eyes dart around with alertness, she walks as though she’s ready to sprint away at the drop of a hat, and her arms are held up, around herself, instead of flopping lazily at her sides.

This may seem fairly basic, but it’s something often taken for granted in how games are visually designed. All this exists to establish a tone and sell the reality of what the player is seeing; the more realistically Sarah acts, rather than moving robotically and acting the same throughout the whole sequence, the more the player can believe in the reality of what they’re seeing on screen. But this is also an interactive cue; the player has an inherent connection to the person they’re controlling, and the more they believe in the reality of this scene, the more it affects the way they feel its feelings and play through its events. The more effectively the game communicates the feelings of its player character, the more effectively those feelings get through to the player, which then affects how they perceive the character and play the scene out.

What follows continues on this theme of building tension and establishing the growing emergency. Multiple cop cars zoom past the house, lights on and sirens blazing. Joel’s smartphone is left in the kitchen with eight missed calls and panicked texts from Tommy. Things eventually come to a head when Joel comes in from the backyard in a panic and gets his gun out, saying there’s something wrong with their neighbors. Only once someone slams against the glass door does the game take control away from the player, switching to a cinematic cutscene to show Joel shooting their neighbor in self-defense.

Crucially, the actual shooting is shown from behind Sarah; it’s a non-interactive sequence, but it’s using the framing of its third-person gameplay perspective for the moment of violence, as Sarah is hiding behind her father. This is a subtle way the game plays with interactive perspective, a running theme we’ll return to later.

After a desperate, hushed pep talk, Joel leads Sarah out front where Tommy has parked his car, and ushers her into the backseat. This is where the player is handed control again, though somewhat on rails since Sarah isn’t the one driving the car. As Tommy drives for the highway, little vignettes play out; a family hurriedly throwing their things into an SUV, a car smashed into a tree on the side of the road, the burning home of Joel and Tommy’s friend Louis. The player can look around anywhere they want, with Sarah smoothly scooting around the car to look with them.

The most memorable moment from this sequence is when a family is walking on the side of the road, and Joel tells Tommy to keep moving rather than help them. The father even waves and yells for help, but Tommy dutifully drives by. Tommy sadly remarks that they have a kid, to which Joel shoots back, “So do we.” But as they leave this family behind, Sarah dejectedly muses that they should have helped them.

This is, on paper, an establishing moment for Joel. We’ve already seen that he’s capable of mortal violence, but that was in self-defense; we now see also that he prioritizes the safety of his daughter over the safety of others, even if it means leaving people to their likely deaths (and even if the person he’s protecting would prefer he have more of a conscience). In practice, this moment gains something from the game’s choice of interactive perspective, which we’ll get to in a moment.

The game keeps the player in Sarah’s perspective until a car crashes into them and the screen blacks out. Only then, when Joel wakes up upside down in the burning car, does the game switch perspectives to the game’s primary protagonist.

What follows returns to a fairly normal set of events; the player controls Joel as he rescues Sarah from the car, runs from the infected, and makes it to safety only to be confronted by a soldier with orders to shoot everyone, even if they don’t seem infected. Tommy shows up to kill the soldier, but not before he gets a few shots off, and Sarah dies in Joel’s arms.

The death scene itself is an effective gut-punch and a famously effective start to what will be an emotional ride of a story, but what I want to focus on is the buildup. This scene wouldn’t be nearly as effective if it hadn’t set the player up to care about these people and their plight, and it’s actually pretty impressive how the game accomplished this.

Some of it is fairly standard storytelling; Joel and Sarah have good chemistry, and the opening scenes strongly establish how good their relationship is. The absence of a mother indicates a level of dependency between them as well, since they’re all each other has of their immediate family. The fact that Sarah is killed by a soldier rather than one of the infected sets the scene for the game’s cynicism toward government handling of the pandemic. But the game’s use of player perspective is the real key to making this work (as you may have picked up on by all the “we’ll get to this later” remarks throughout this article).

Perspective matters in all mediums, but in video games the player feels a rather direct and inherent connection to the character they’re controlling. There’s a reason why we so often refer to the events of a video game as things “we” did, even if we had no control over the narrative outcome of the situation; our direct control makes us feel like an active participant in the things that happen on screen. So what is accomplished by portraying the opening sequence from Sarah’s point of view, rather than Joel’s?

Well, let’s consider what this would have looked like from Joel’s perspective. We don’t know how he was woken up or exactly what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting in his study, but we can surmise the basic experience; the player would control Joel as he investigates something worrying, comes across his neighbor, and realizes this neighbor is acting strangely and violently. The player then rushes back to the house and talks to Sarah while Joel prepares his gun, then the player takes control of the situation and shoots Joel’s neighbor. Then, after loading Sarah into Tommy’s truck, the player looks around much like in the existing sequence, but from Joel’s perspective in the front seat rather than Sarah’s.

In this vision, Joel is in control. He’s in a scary and unknown situation, but he’s the one with agency. He discovers the infected neighbor, he rushes home to safety and gets his gun, he assures his daughter it’s alright, he sits alongside the driver and tells him what to do. As disturbing and out-of-control as this situation is, the player’s position from Joel’s perspective is generally one of control.

Sarah, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. She wakes up unsure what’s happening. She sees things escalating but has no idea exactly why it’s happening. When Joel shows up, she hides behind him while he defends her, and when she’s put in the car she’s left with no influence on the events around her at all, watching helplessly while the world falls apart and her father and uncle work to protect her from it.

The difference here is fairly obvious, in terms of the game’s tone. One puts the player in a position of relative power (if still rather uncertain), while the other puts the player in a position of helplessness. But while that’s crucial to the game’s tone, it’s not actually the most important effect of this opening sequence’s interactive design; not only is the player in a position of helplessness as Sarah, but the one protecting her (and thus, the player) is Joel.

This is part of the biggest trick up The Last of Us’ sleeve when it comes to interactive storytelling: the use of shifting perspective to change our outlook in pivotal moments and create an uncomfortable dissonance between Joel and the player. That second part doesn’t really manifest until later in the game, but the first part is a defining feature of the game’s opening moments.

It’s easy enough for the game to put the player in the position of the protector and say, “This is your daughter, you care about her, now keep her safe.” But they chose instead to design a firsthand experience of what it’s like to depend on Joel for safety. For most of this opening, the player is a passive observer of a world going mad, and the only thing standing between them and that madness is Joel. The player has to look up to him, as Sarah does, to see him as someone who will do his best to keep them safe because they can’t do it themselves.

That perspective only changes in time for a futile attempt to protect Sarah, and the tragedy of the moment is rooted not only in Joel’s failure to protect her, but the player’s personal identification with the character who’s now dying in their arms. The player may not be directly responsible for any of this—this is a scripted event that can’t be changed without breaking the game—but they’re still the one in control when it happens. They go from looking to Joel to protect them, to personifying him when he fails. Deeply feeling the need to be protected, then deeply feeling the failure to protect.

There’s no doubt that Sarah’s death is the most emotional moment of this sequence, and perhaps even the most overtly emotional moment of the whole game (despite the more subtle, conflicted emotions of the ending potentially outranking it for sheer emotional volume and power). But that emotion is owed in large part to the buildup, and Naughty Dog’s decision to play with perspective in the way they did. And that kind of interactive storytelling is what really makes this opening as memorable and impactful as it is.

SAMUEL GRONSETH is the creator, writer, and host of the popular YouTube channel, “Games as Lit. 101.” https://www.youtube.com/user/gamesasliterature