IF YOU LIKED · TV SHOW
If you liked The Last of Us
Seven picks for after The Last of Us, from the original game and The Walking Dead game to Children of Men, Logan, The Road and Station Eleven.
The Last of Us is an apocalypse story where the infected are rarely the point. The point is Joel and Ellie, a grieving man and a girl he never wanted to care about, and the people they meet who are trying to keep something human going. Its most celebrated episode, about Bill and Frank, has barely any infected in it at all.
So the best picks to follow it are stories about bonds that form under pressure, about what survival is for, and about choices that do not have a right answer. One of them, of course, is the game the show came from.
WHAT WE MATCHED ON
Three things The Last of Us does well
- A protector and a childA reluctant guardian, a young person worth protecting, and a long road.
- What survival is forAfter the collapse, people trying to keep love, art or decency alive.
- Choices with no right answerEndings that make you argue about whether the hero was right.
THE PICKS
7 things to try next
Across movies, TV shows, games, books. Each pick says which of the three it matches, what it does differently, and one thing to know before you start. Save any of them to a list, no account needed.
01 / Video game · 2013
The Last of Us
Matches: A protector and a child
The game the series adapts: Joel and Ellie cross a ruined America, and you play the fights, the quiet moments and the final choice.
The show follows the game closely, but playing it is different. You are the one making Joel's choices in combat and the one who has to carry out its ending. Its quiet stretches, like the giraffes, are as celebrated as anything in the show. The 2022 remake, The Last of Us Part I, is the easiest way to play it today.
It is violent and tense, with long combat sections the show leaves out.
02 / Video game · 2012
The Walking Dead
Matches: A protector and a child
A man on his way to prison finds a little girl alone in a zombie outbreak and decides to look after her, with choices that shape how she grows up.
Telltale's game came out a year before The Last of Us and tells a strikingly similar story. Lee and Clementine are one of gaming's great pairings, and because you choose what Lee says and does, you feel responsible for who Clementine becomes.
It is mostly conversation and choices with little gameplay; the art and engine show their age.
03 / Movie · 2006 · Alfonso Cuarón
Children of Men
Matches: A protector and a child
In a world where no child has been born for eighteen years, a burned-out man agrees to escort a pregnant young woman to safety.
Children of Men has The Last of Us's core: a man who has stopped caring, given someone who might save the world, and a trek past the people still fighting over its ruins. Its long single-take sequences make the danger feel uncomfortably real.
Bleak, and its violence can be shocking because of how it is filmed.
04 / Movie · 2017 · James Mangold
Logan
Matches: A protector and a child
An aging, exhausted Wolverine is forced to drive a young mutant girl across the country while they are hunted.
Logan is a superhero film that plays like The Last of Us: a broken man, a fierce girl who reminds him of what he lost, and a road trip through a hostile country. You do not need to know the other X-Men films.
Very violent; it is rated R for good reason.
05 / Movie · 2018 · John Krasinski
A Quiet Place
Matches: What survival is for
A family survives in a world overrun by creatures that hunt by sound, communicating in sign language and never making a noise.
A Quiet Place shares The Last of Us's focus on family under threat and its use of silence for tension. It is short and very scary, and the family's love holds it together.
The premise has some logic holes if you think about it too hard.
06 / Book · 2006 · Cormac McCarthy
The Road
Matches: What survival is for
A father and son walk south through a burned, ashen America, carrying everything they own and trying to remain good people.
The Road is the purest version of the bond between a protector and a child in an apocalypse. It is also about what it means to "carry the fire", which is The Last of Us's question about what survival is for. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
Short but harrowing. McCarthy's sparse style uses no quotation marks.
07 / TV show · 2021
Station Eleven
Matches: What survival is for
Twenty years after a pandemic, a traveling troupe performs Shakespeare for scattered settlements, holding onto art as a reason to live.
Station Eleven is the hopeful counterpart to The Last of Us. It shares the show's best idea, that people need more than survival, and builds a whole series around it. Its motto, "survival is insufficient", could describe the Bill and Frank episode.
It jumps between timelines and takes a couple of episodes to show where it is going.
Where to start
If you have never played it, the game is the essential next step. For one evening, watch Children of Men. For something gentler, Station Eleven.
Whatever you pick, give it a fair start: the first half hour of a film, two episodes of a show, the opening chapters of a book or the first hour of a game. Then decide.
How we chose
Prepared by OmniTrackr and reviewed by the site owner before publishing. We started from what makes The Last of Us work for the people who love it, then looked for titles that share at least one of those qualities, deliberately across formats, because a game or a book can carry the same feeling in a different way. Facts were checked against public sources; the comparisons and caveats are editorial opinion.
These picks are not rankings, sponsored placements or anyone's private ratings. Running times, episode counts and availability vary by edition and region. Links go to OmniTrackr title pages, not shops.
First published October 16, 2026. Checked October 16, 2026. Suggest a pick or send a correction · Editorial standards · Pick for me