Have you been binge-watching HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’? Have you ever wondered how accurate is the ‘Last Of Us’ show to the game? Let’s learn about the show and the ‘Last Of Us’ cast here.
How Accurate Is The ‘Last Of Us’ Show?
From the spore controversy of the ‘Last Of Us’ cast photos and the curious change of era in which the plot takes place to all the scenes and characters that the series has incorporated that do not appear in the video game. These are the main changes that the HBO adaptation has introduced.
Main Differences between the Series and the Video Game
‘The Last of Us’ has all the wickers to become THE SERIES of 2023. Anyone who has played the video game (as a server) knows that its virtues cannot remain limited solely to the gaming environment and that, in one way or another, they should be the heritage of the collective imagination. The script, deeply cinematographic, underpinned by an emotional, heartbreaking story-not at all obvious and narratively sophisticated deserved to leap to the small screen. It has become one of the best series of the year for critics.
Who Appears In The ‘Last Of Us’ Cast

So the ‘Last Of Us’ cast embraces Pedro Pascal, who will premiere another television bombshell on Disney+ in a few months as the third season of ‘The Mandalorian.’ Bella Ramsey, who before appearing in ‘The Last of Us’ already performed in ‘Game of Thrones’. She stars in the adaptation from HBO of the historic Naughty Dog video game based on the post-apocalyptic journey through the United States of Joel and Ellie. Who, in the middle of a pandemic that has decimated the world society from the spread of a fungus called cordyceps that controls motor functions and cerebral of people. They will have to survive hordes of infected devoid of humanity and the terror of a civilization stripped of morality and (re) built on the ruins of a society that “as we know it falls.”
Again, How Accurate Is The ‘Last Of Us’ Show To The Game?
As the nine episodes of the first season are released, and after asking ourselves if we need to play the ‘The Last of Us’ video game before watching the HBO series. We will analyze the main differences between one of the flagships of the latest generation of consoles and the fiction starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey each week.
From the commotion and snooping of the ‘Last Of Us’ cast photos, the fact that one of the identity traits of the first season of ‘The Last of Us’ is how faithful it is in the eyes of the video game (the creator of the story himself, Neil Druckmann, has piloted the project together with the director of ‘Chernobyl,’ Craig Mazin).
- Tess’s death is very different in the series.
Suppose Tess’s last will was to face the video game alone and with her arms in hand. The military forces of PHAEDRA so that Joel and Ellie can escape from the town hall once they discover that she is infected; in the HBO series, the character’s sacrifice, played by Anna Torv, reaches more epic and heroic heights: he blows up the lobby of the town hall to end not with a group of soldiers, but with a horde of infected who have come to the town hall alerted to the presence of the protagonists by the cordyceps connection network present in Boston (and whose operation we explain in the next section). Before dying, Tess receives a (fungal) kiss from one of the infected in what we can already define as one of the most impressive and iconic images in the history of ‘The Last of Us.’ And yes, her death is much better in the series than in the video game.
2.The connection network between infected through cordyceps
The fungus also grows underground. Its fibres are like cables, some several kilometres long. For example, if you step where there are cordyceps, you will wake up dozens of infected elsewhere. And if they know where you are, they will come after you. The concept of the fungus not only as a transmitter of the disease but as a means of geolocation, and the idea of the existence of an interconnected network of cordyceps that spreads through this fungus growing on surfaces and that, by inhibiting the organism of the infected, makes them more sensitive and receptive creatures, alerting them to your position from the moment you come into contact with that cordyceps network.
3.Flour makes us travel outside the United States for the first time.
As already happened with the prologue of the series, and more specifically with that scene of two epidemiologists debating in 1968 about the possibility of a cordyceps infection in humans, the opening scene of the second episode of ‘The Last of Us’ (pure ‘Chernobyl” by Craig Mazin in vein) expands its pre-pandemic universe and focuses on the idea of investigating the phase before the outbreak of the outbreak to continue to provide a scientific basis for the concept of contagion, thus explaining the origin of the infection.

On this occasion, and for the first time since the launch of the video game in 2013, we travelled to another country, to Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, to cross the border of the United States that the video game had not crossed and thus confirm a theory that the creators of the series had previously slipped and that is not explored in the plot of Naughty Dog: the origin of the virus would be found in flour, “the perfect substrate” for the spread of the fungus that causes the infection, according to the Mycology professor who appears in the first minutes of the episode and that confirms that a flour factory in Jakarta could be the primary source of contagion.
4.In the series, they do not go through the leaning building in Boston.
How accurate is the ‘Last Of Us’ show to the game? It would become the Tower of Pisa of post-apocalyptic Boston, the Kio Towers of a martial Madrid harassed by bombs, one of the most iconic postcards from ‘The Last of Us’: that of a partially demolished skyscraper, leaning unnaturally on another building that supports the structure that remains of it after being bombed by FEDRA forces to end any trace of life (and therefore of infected people) in a perimeter sector outside the quarantine zone. Unlike in the HBO adaptation, Joel, Tess, and Ellie cross this location in the video game in the middle of that night storm with which the first episode of the series ends, traveling through the different floors of a building Of offices crowded with infected people and clickers.
5.The time and time arc are different.
First and striking difference: while in the video game, the main plot of ‘The Last of Us’ takes place throughout 2033, in the series, they have chosen to place the story ten years earlier, in 2023, thus coinciding with the year of the premiere of the HBO adaptation and making Ellie and Joel’s post-apocalyptic journey coincide with the present day.
How accurate is the ‘Last Of Us’ show to the game? This, in turn, implies another temporary change: initially, the prologue of the video game in which the pandemic breaks out takes place in 2013 (at the time it coincided with the launch year of the Naughty Dog video game), but in the series the events that We see at the beginning take place in 2003. Apart from the label that places us in that time, the first episode slips in some temporal references, such as the portrait of the then-president of the United States, George W. Bush, that hangs on the school wall: Sarah, Joel’s daughter.
6.The absence of masks and spores
It is one of the most substantial and controversial changes: in the video game, survivors must use a gas mask to avoid getting infected and protect themselves in closed, unlit places from the spores, which appear recurrently throughout the game of the entire plot. But what do the spores consist of? They are a type of suspended particle, the primary form of the cordyceps fungus, that it expels when it grows on walls and other surfaces once it has devoured its carrier, and that, if inhaled, causes immediate infection in a person.
Conclusion:

Throughout the HBO series, we will see some of these iconic images from the video game- a vast (and repulsive) fungus branching out from walls, floors and ceilings like tentacles, expanding from a snapper’s or a puffer’s body. But, unlike in the video game, the ‘Last Of Us’ cast will not have to wear any gas masks to protect themselves from the spores. They can be in contact with them without getting infected.
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