Adaptations of books serve an obvious purpose: They make substantial something you’d previously only imagined. The joy of watching Game of Thrones as a reader was seeing the dragons rendered, or hearing the “The Rains of Castamere” for the first time—even if you knew the song was heralding the atrocities of the Red Wedding.
A video-game adaptation doesn’t have the same raison d’être. Arguably very few have improved upon their source material. Visuals from the medium’s leading studios, like Naughty Dog, rival the best visual effects in television and film. Many critics would argue not only that Naughty Dog’s Indiana Jones–esque Uncharted adventure games looked far better than last year’s film adaptation starring Tom Holland, but also that the emotional resonance of the story was lost in translation.
Neil Druckmann, the co-president of Naughty Dog, offered faint praise for that particular movie, over which he had little creative control. He has been which debuted Jan. 15. The premise may sound familiar: A fungal infection transforms most of earth’s population into zombies. Twenty years later, a smuggler named Joel, who lost his daughter early in the pandemic, begrudgingly agrees to play bodyguard to 14-year-old Ellie, who may hold the key to a cure. He ushers her across a postapocalyptic landscape inhabited by tribes of hungry humans and the eerily gorgeous, mushroom-headed undead.
