Fun facts about The Last of Us game

This article is dedicated to a very good friend of mine. And you reading this know who you are. She has asked me to write a post with fun facts about The Last of Us, and so here we go!

1. Message on eye chart

Towards the end of the game, when Joel runs through Firefly Hospital to rescue Ellie, several eye cards can be seen at one point of the level. One of these eye charts has a rather interesting message, which goes like this: “run you’re nearly there, don’t quit.” It’s almost like the game is trying to keep you from losing hope as you go through the hospital to save Ellie.

2. Ending and beginning reversed

Many gamers have theorised that the beginning and end of the game are structured similarly, albeit in reverse order. In the prologue, Joel and his daughter Sarah flee their home, using the car to escape the infected and survey the damage before it crashes. To flee, Joel carries Sarah. In the end, Joel carries an unconscious Ellie (reminiscent of how he carried Sarah), shooting Marlene while placing Ellie in a car to get away from the Fireflies.

3. Surnames

For a game that relies heavily on its characters, it’s rather odd – and somewhat impressive – that none of the characters have a last name. With the exception of Riley Abel (who appears in the Left Behind DLC), no secondary character’s last name is revealed during the game. However, if you bought the Japanese version of the game, you already have the answer to this question. In the Japanese manual of the game, Joel’s last name is listed as ‘Miller’ while Ellie’s is ‘Williams’.

4. Recreation Clementine’s house

There’s a house in The Last of Us with a pool and a treehouse in the backyard. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the house is eerily similar to Clementine’s house at the beginning of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.

Source image

5. Ellie’s easter egg dialogue

There’s no doubt that Ellie is the queen of sass in the game. There are a number of dialogue options you can have with her, and some of them can be missed by the player if they don’t do certain things in the game. When Joel does nothing for too long, Ellie starts making funny jokes and comments about his frustrating immobility. The same goes if you start firing randomly in a non-combat situation – Ellie will respond sarcastically to the futility of your useless action.

6. Cordyceps brain infection

In The Last of Us, the airborne spores of Cordyceps are the cause of the zombie epidemic that ravaged America. The concept of parasitic fungi growing out of a person’s head and the body was a novel idea, but not an original one – after all, the same phenomenon is common in the real world, albeit in insects. The Cordyceps fungi are a parasitic organism that grows mainly on insects and takes over their bodily functions before being completely killed. Neil Druckmann has stated in an interview that the inspiration for the unique virus came from an episode of the BBC documentary ‘Planet Earth’ where an infected ant was killed by the Cordyceps fungi.

7. Tess as a villain

Tess was a strong, reliable, and lovable companion who accompanied Joel from the start of the game and helped him guide Ellie to the Fireflies. After being ambushed by the military, Tess decides to sacrifice her life to give Joel and Ellie some time to escape. However, during the early stages of development, Tess was intended to play a very different role. In the early draft of the game’s plot, Tess was intended to be the game’s main antagonist, having been betrayed by Joel before the events of the game. The two would meet in a one-on-one showdown, and Tess would become Ellie’s first kill to save Joel. The development team scrapped this later in development, as they felt the game’s plot morphed into the quintessential Hollywood revenge story.

8. Infected elephant

Apparently, there was a sequence in the game where Joel would be chased by an infected elephant.

Source image: Naughty Dog

Love, Skye Lewis/Deem ❤

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