Winter is a horrible time in The Last of Us. Its two main characters, Joel and Ellie, having travelled westward across most of a zombie-wracked, apocalyptic version of the continental United States, are stalled in their journey after a fight goes wrong and Joel ends up impaled on about a foot of rebar. Snowflakes begin falling from the sky as Ellie leads him, limping and nearly fainting, to safety, away from the university campus that an hour ago was vibrant with the sunlit reds, yellows, and oranges of fall and is now overcast as the beginning of a winter dusk sets in. Joel’s face is ghostly white. His stomach and lower back are stained with blood. He blacks out and Ellie, a 14-year-old left to care for a grown man twice her size, is forced to drag him away and figure out a way to keep him alive. For the first time in the game’s story, their roles have reversed—their tiny group dynamic of protector and protected flipped the other way around. She’s alone with what she’s learned, left to figure out how to survive a hostile world filled with monsters and monstrous people just as the snow begins to set in.

The Last of Us is a game that touches a lot of different thematic ground, but central to everything it communicates is an interest in how community, the foundation of every society, functions when tested by the harshest possible circumstances. Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and George Romero’s Dead movies, both of which it cribs from extensively, The Last of Us sees the post-apocalypse genre as, more than anything else, a narrative petri dish in which to test the limits of its characters’ social bonds.

The story opens by showing a world that looks like just about any other conservative vision of the end times coming to fruition. An overbearing military, run by whatever scraps of American government still exist, controls the country’s people by keeping them in quarantined zones. Within these areas, black market trade supplements a meagre rationing program, dissenters are gunned down in the streets, and children are sent en masse into army training programs. The only organized opposition they face is an underground network of resistance fighters called the Fireflies, who recruit forces in an attempt to form an alternate society comprised of those who have escaped the grasp of their fascistic leaders. With ferocious, mushroom-headed zombies shambling and croaking in the wilderness just outside the fortified checkpoints, the population terrified of the seemingly unstoppable fungal infection that turns people into mindless creatures, and the city streets stained with the blood of casual and organized violence alike, The Last of Us buys completely into the idea that all semblance of public order is constantly a hair’s breadth from crumbling apart into a vicious, dog-eat-dog nightmare. Venturing outside the cities, even when the zombies aren’t in sight, presents an equally dismal sight. Groups of bandits patrol abandoned neighbourhoods across America, cordoning off city blocks and murdering anyone who opposes them (or has a spare bandage or handful of bullets on their person). Everyone is ruthless. Nobody cares for anyone but those who run in their immediate social circle or who belong to their same ad-hoc or government-formed organizations.

This Wild West view of a society in danger is old hat. The paranoid dreams of right-wing propaganda have been implanted deep into our heads by now, burrowed into our brain tissue through countless vigilante movies, depictions of 1970s New York City-inspired urban chaos, and various media about post-war nuclear-powered apocalyptic scenarios. We take it for granted that a single dangerous free radical, allowed to mutate and spread throughout the body politic, will cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down in the most demented way possible. A natural disaster or sudden economic collapse, according to received wisdom, will soon lead to wild-eyed psychopaths slitting the throats of grandmothers to steal their purses—two siblings throttling each other to get their hands on the last dented can of Spam.

The Last of Us takes this concept for granted, uses it as the foundation of its fictional world, and so, of course, when Ellie is left to take care of herself and Joel in the dead of winter, things must get as nightmarish as the game can imagine. The stretch of plot devoted to winter (The Last of Us is broken up into four acts depicting each season of a single year) begins by showing her hunting rabbit and deer in a snowy forest. Before long, she’s run into a man named David—leader of a group of survivors who she and Joel fought, and almost annihilated, during the last bit of the autumn sequence that ended with him badly injured—and, by making the mistake of temporarily trusting that he’s not out to hurt her, ends up imprisoned at his camp. Ellie is able to escape this situation on her own, but, while she systematically eliminates dozens of armed men on her way to kill David, Joel also recovers well enough to make his way toward her. The two, separately navigating battles that they usually fight alongside one another, end up reunited in a burning building, dozens of corpses littering the resort town David’s crew called home until they all ended up dead.

Superficially, The Last of Us’ winter evokes the season through wonderfully evocative audiovisual effects. Footprints are left to mark temporary paths on streets blanketed in snow; a cold wind whistles through the entryways of abandoned homes and stores, their doors and windows ripped off or falling apart from neglect; a blizzard kicks up a powdery white mist that lowers every characters’ field of view to the point that they stumble into one another, scrambling to shoot, stab, or bludgeon a way out of the situation in surprise. On a deeper level, the game’s winter section is meant to highlight how desperate the people filling its already desperate world become when the environment itself grows harsher. David’s group has made its headquarters in an old lodge. The central dining room is decorated with banners that, adhering to videogame graffiti tradition, bluntly declare sentiments like: “When we are in need he shall provide!” and another spookily religious prayer thanking “those that made it possible” for “the meal we are about to eat.” When Ellie comes to after first being abducted, she finds her captors butchering a dead body that they’ll later eat. That David insinuates he plans to rape her as he has other young women in the past furthers the ghoulish excesses of the group’s character to a point approaching mustache-twirling caricature.       

All of this is meant to show what community looks like at the end of the world. Firefly groups, like the one Joel’s brother belongs to, may work together to establish outposts that provide mutual protection, but out in the rest of the world, the Davids are triumphant. He uses the language of religion—a goofily on-the-nose play on the eucharist constructing a devotional model built on literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of his group’s nourishment-providing victims—as a glue to hold his people together. It’s a fair enough but over the top critique of faith-based bonds curdling communities formed on belief. As a sophomoric perversion of church-based communities, combined with David’s over-the-top evil, it also shows the depths of The Last of Us’ cynicism toward the very idea of human cooperation and society.

The final moments of the game are rightfully pointed to as a despairing message that sums up its entire story. In them, Joel, has bonded with Ellie to the extent that she’s become a surrogate daughter—one who’s managed to, at least in part, fill the hole left in him after his own child’s violent death during The Last of Us’ prologue. Learning that synthesizing a cure for the infection ravaging the world requires Ellie’s death at the hands of research doctors, he instead rampages through a hospital complex, slaughtering everyone in his way until he “rescues” an unconscious Ellie. The last scene shows the two of them continuing their journey a short time later. Joel says he took her away because the scientists weren’t able to use her to create a cure, after all, but Ellie knows he hasn’t told her the truth. Credits roll on a note of new suspicion between them, even their two-person community now soured by the kind of mistrust the game sees as central to any kind of social dynamics.

This sort of pessimism, depending on the day, can be a natural enough way to view the world. But it also feels short-sighted and confused by other bits of the story that suggest a more optimistic outlook. During Joel’s illness, Ellie cares for him despite the fact that doing so actively puts her in danger. She’s shown to be more than capable of looking after herself at this point, but a basic empathy—the kind that’s typically viewed as a natural weakness in post-apocalyptic stories—drives her more than cold-hearted logic. It’s also winter when Ellie, in the game’s Left Behind expansion, remembers the death of her girlfriend Riley and her own initial infection. A series of flashbacks, framed around Ellie scavenging a mall for medical supplies to stabilize Joel, show her and Riley hanging out in an abandoned mall, making plans to run away together rather than join the military or Fireflies, and ultimately attacked and bitten by zombies. They understand the bites are a death sentence but even then, just as Ellie nurses Joel in the present day, knowing he’s likely to die from his wounds, she and Riley decide to stay together as the infection sets in. They want to appreciate what time they have left with each other, even if that only amounts to a few minutes because, in the end, it’s being together that matters most to them both.

Ellie’s past and present, both set against the backdrop of the coldest season, are used to argue for the essential fact that humanity, despite every reason not to do so, cling to one another in ways that defy the sort of survivalist mindset that informs the rest of The Last of Us’ worldview. She exposes herself to undue threats in order to bargain for antibiotics when she first runs into David, knowing that sticking her neck out is the only way to save her friend; in Left Behind, she risks death to scour a mall for the bandages and sutures necessary to close his wounds; these events make her think back to the last moment of Riley’s life where, rather than end their own lives after being infected, the two decide to hold onto one another even as death races through their bloodstreams.  

Ellie is the hero of The Last of Us—the character we’re meant to empathize with as Joel is revealed more and more to be an ultimately selfish, emotionally-mangled killer, too far gone to have any place in the rebuilding of society. While his betrayal in the story’s final moments present the most serious argument for the game’s general cynicism, in the brutality of its winter, the player is also shown a different, no less important view of humanity. Ellie, the character who has the best hope of meeting The Last of Us’ world on its own terms while working within that context to make its future brighter, is determined to cling to those she loves. In the winter, huddled together those important people, she represents an optimistic streak that shines across the narrative as bright as a signal fire.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.