Do we like them?

Do we like Joel Miller?

A character from The Last of Us (2013)

Our score: 5 out of 10. We'd back him with the people he loves, and we'd keep our distance from everyone else. He's loyal and brave, but he's also brutal, and his choices are hard to defend.

Joel is a Texan living in a walled quarantine zone, twenty years after a Cordyceps outbreak wrecked civilisation. He is a cynical smuggler who trusts almost no one and has learned to survive by being tougher than everyone around him. Behind that, he carries a grief that has never healed. The story begins when he and his partner Tess take a job to smuggle a 14-year-old girl, Ellie, out of the city.

What makes him easy to root for is how he changes. He starts out treating the job as a burden. Over the long road he and Ellie share, he becomes her protector, and eventually something close to a father. He is gruff, funny in a dry way, and fiercely capable when threatened.

What keeps him from a higher score is how far he will go. He is a violent man in a violent world, and his care is narrow. He puts the people he loves ahead of everyone else, and he does not always think about the cost to others. The game is built around asking whether that is love or something more selfish, and we think it's a bit of both.

His biggest choice comes at the end of the first story. He decides that saving Ellie matters more than any chance of saving the world, and he lies to her about it. That is the heart of the debate about him. In The Last of Us Part II, Joel is killed, and his past actions bring consequences for the people he loved.