HBO's The Last of Us is where the movie mimics the games - but not too much

I consider The Last of Us series (Parts I and II) to be my favorite video game series of all time. And so I watched as a hawk any deviation from the game's story when I watched HBO's TV series The Last of Us.

When Joel and Tess started shooting the Infected (zombie-like characters) in a museum, I kept thinking they should do some headshots. Wouldn't they know a headshot would bring down the And when we met Joel (played by Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey), the video game was so ingrained in my mind that I had the felt like they were nothing like the "real" Joel and Ellie I've known since the first game of 2013.

I may have veered in the vein of criticism that it didn't do the video game justice. Why didn't they show the scene where Joel and fellow trafficker Tess (Anna Torv) put on gas masks to protect themselves from viral spores? Why didn't they show the fight where they hunt down Robert the rogue smuggler?

Ellie and Joel from the 2013 video game The Last of Us.

But I remembered that the series is an adaptation. Now that I've watched six of the episodes as a reviewer, I'm calming down. The show isn't a repeat of the game, and it's meant to reach a wider audience with the richly detailed world and gripping storytelling of Naughty Dog's video game. This isn't just another version of The Walking Dead, Resident Evil, or Night of the Living Dead.

The TV show isn't about the tactics you use to save yourself ammo in a video game by trying to get a quick kill with a headshot. Violence is meant to express the brutality of the world after a pandemic. It shows how the world has become so deadly that the sole purpose of everyday life is to survive. The goal is not to describe every firefight in the video game or achieve a higher goal. This is to show how relationships and characters change in the attempt to live another day in the world.

Neil Druckmann, co-creator of The Last of Us, worked on the HBO project as showrunner to ensure it didn't turn into another bad game-to-movie adaptation. He said in an interview with The New York Times: "The most important thing was to keep the soul, what it was about: those relationships." He worked on it with fellow showrunner Craig Mazin, who helped make Chernobyl another great HBO show.

Neil Druckmann, recently promoted to co-president of Naughty Dog, accepts Game of the Year at The Game Awards for The Last of Us Part II.

Indeed, this show is a...