SPOILERS
The game perfectly made a story of 2 very flawed characters which made immoral choices in order to survive. The interaction between Ellie who never had a father and Joel who lost his daughter due to military fire (Damn that opening was intense). Made 2 very flawed but oh so love able characters, in a way this game is a lot more mature than most games. Even though all the humans you brutally murdered, which only tried to survive in a fucked up world you still manage to see Ellie and Joel as like able.
It also shows that if you listened to all the tapes how desperate humanity is for a cure and that a dozen of mutants as Ellie already died for that cure. The world Joel and Ellie live in has become pretty much a hopeless, terrible place until everyone is born with the same mutation as Ellie and till that time surviving is all that matters. No matter how immoral, sometimes people are forced to do terrible things but that doesn't mean they are necessarily bad people like what happened to Jacob. Shooting or murdering a mere child shouldn't be under any circumstance considered even close to moral even not for a cure which needed way more research anyway before retracting any form of large amounts of tissue.
The protagonist in The last of Us isn't evil neither is the antagonist it's all up in the grey, the only people who are evil are those in the village with the upgraded Humvee and the cannibals. The good people are respectably the people who live at the dam, even though they defend that at all cost. Instead of sharing and building up new villages around that dam it has enough power to maintain entire cities, perhaps later on they will. This place is the bacon of hope for humanity while the rest is pretty much an unruled wasteland full of people who lost all their humanity, it shows perfectly what the good and bad sides of humans can become with the right push.
The last of us features in my eyes most realistic wasteland, the desperation and horror which is found all over the game and the beacon of hope which is the settlement at the dam. Make it a very believable and incredibly well acted game which can compete with great movies in therms of depth and maturity which is very rare in games. The plot perfectly fitted the game with the greyish choices Joel needs to make to safe Ellie from a probable worthless death (just look at their laboratory, no way a vaccine can be made let stand mass produced there).
All of that combined in one game made it one of the most immersive experiences of the last gen and has yet to be beaten this gen for sure in my opinion.
Please excuse my (probally) poor grammar
