Kyle: Before we dive in, we should probably establish our history with The Last of Us universe. The first game was one of the first big Sony exclusives I reviewed for Ars Technica, and it blew me away with its moving narrative, top-notch world-building, and competent survival combat. I was less enamored with some of the wild narrative turns in 2020's Part II, but the sequel still had its share of moments that will stick with me.

Andrew: I have never played the game! Which is why I am here, obviously. I haven't been avoiding it on purpose, it's just that I play maybe half a dozen games a year at this point, and the vast majority of them are either Nintendo-hard 2D action-platformers or games about catching pocketable monsters. Every six months or so, when they release a new remastered version of The Last Of Us, I think, "Maybe this time," but it just hasn't happened.

I have a broad-strokes, Wikipedia-level familiarity with the major plot beats. I also have a few touchpoints for pandemic- or contagion-adjacent apocalypse fiction (top of mind: HBO's Station Eleven show but not the book, Max Brooks' World War Z book but not the movie) that I think are going to serve me well here.

Enlarge / A behind-the-scenes look at some Infected-centric direction.

Kyle: Speaking of plot beats, I was really looking forward to HBO's take on the game's iconic opening.

Andrew: You're talking about the '60s-era talk-show bit, there?

Kyle: No, that part was completely new actually, but I liked how it set things up. Probably useful given how much more "pandemic aware" we all are now compared to 2013, when the game came out. I was referring to the whole outbreak sequence leading up to Sarah's death. While they stretched things out and fleshed out some characters a bit, I was really struck by how familiar some of the key moments were. That's not just dialogue from the games, but even the camera angles and background items were eerily familiar at many points. Even these days, I feel like there aren't too many video game cut scenes that could make the transition to "prestige TV" so intact.