Let Ellie Go, or The Death of Death in Video Games

[This contains heavy spoilers for The Last of Us 1]

If you played The Last of Us, you’ll remember how important the emotional framework between Joel and Ellie was for the storyline. From the very opening you are presented with the bond between a man and his daughter. The importance of it is driven home by the death of the daughter within the first twenty minutes of the game. You realise fairly quickly afterwards that you as Joel, the father, traverse the game haunted by this and continually trying to stop it from happening again.

Through derelict cities, snowy forests and abandoned facilities, you guard this girl that has been forced into your protection. It makes each player death into a rap on the knuckles. You failed and you have to do better. Death and replay is a necessary staple of videogaming. It helps foster the feeling of accomplishment when you do manage to pass that moment that kept besting you.

I vividly remember playing The Last of Us when it first came out. I was gripped. I desperately wanted to get Ellie to the end of the journey. I wanted Joel and Ellie to stay together forever. I wanted to make sure to get Ellie out of the facility and away from the Fireflies at the end. I wouldn’t let her die. I shed a tear more than once in that first playthrough. With the announcement, and E3 trailer for The Last of Us 2, I decided to play the original game again. (I got the remastered version, which I highly recommend by the way. It is beautiful to play, and the addition of a photo mode lets you properly appreciate the landscapes that Naughty Dog so cleverly created.)

Replaying tLoU brought all the old emotions flooding back. I felt for Joel and Ellie, I felt for Marlene and Tess and Tommy. If anything, I gained a new connection with the more sideline characters by playing the game again. Everyone is just trying to get by the best they can, and that is hard. Real hard. Every time I failed a firefight, or got taken down by a clicker, I just wanted to get back in and do better. EXCEPT the very last encounter.

Playing through again, a few years later, the ending took on a new resonance for me. Ellie will die to save the planet. That is what Marlene and the Fireflies are saying in no uncertain terms. Joel, and you, think that this is fucking donkeyballs. You fight your way through the building, killing the only people set on finding a cure for the plague, and escaping with Ellie in your arms. A perfect ending to a blockbuster narrative. I want to propose a different ending.

Joel obviously couldn’t just give in to Marlene. That would feel like a kick in the face after the torture you as the player have been through to get to this point. The disappointment of Joel just walking away would be too much to bear. (Plus Naughty Dog would never get their sequel after that.) However, having played through again, I think that maybe the ‘right’ ending fits somewhere in the middle of the original and that giving-in. Only it would have to break a fundamental law of the game — of all games. Picture this: Ellie is on the table. Joel shoots the surgeons, the guard and Marlene. He grabs Ellie and he runs. But he (inevitably) gets shot on his escape, and dies. You can’t come back. That’s it. You don’t get to choose whether Ellie dies or not, and the world is saved.

The conflict between the emotional reaction to Ellie being killed, and the logic to letting her be harvested to potentially save the human race, is an easy one to square away, but really there should only be one answer. You have killed dozens of people along the way, so death of the individual shouldn’t be an issue. If you can help save civilisation, shouldn’t you do it? Hell no! You love Ellie and you want to save her. In terms of gameplay, it also wouldn’t work because every time you’ve died so far, you have gotten back up to try it all again. If all of a sudden the game just ended, legions of gamers would throw their controllers down in fury. Maybe I’m taking a jab at the architecture of gameplay in tLoU. While it is engaging and enthralling, it is not a ‘fun’ game. It’s gruelling. So, following in this design, maybe the ending shouldn’t be fun either.

I can only think of one instance where that has happened, and in that game — Halo: Reach — they pretty much tell you from the get-go that you are not going to make it.

In that game you are essentially leading up to your own death. It’s built into the storyline, and so you accept it as the ending. Without that narrative foreshadowing (it’s not foreshadowing in Halo: Reach, they literally tell you) a permadeath would be a drastic change in the whole world of the game. You can’t change the rules. The Last of Us is based on, and heavily dependent, on its rules. So, how do you reconcile a narrative line that should go in one direction, and a ludic line that has to continue in another.

Fundamentally, The Last of Us was made to continue, both within the narrative of the characters, and in the life of Naughty Dog. It takes fifteen hours and change to play through, all the while building emotional connections to characters that you are both guiding and embodying. The ending we’re given is the only ‘fair’ one after such an emotionally exhausting journey. It makes sense. After hours of just surviving, we have to allow Joel and Ellie to catch a break.