When The Last of Us begins, it pretends to be a video game about a teenager in Texas named Sarah, the kind of girl who wears rock T-shirts and loves her daddy and is impossible to find as a playable character in nearly every game ever made.

This being a video game, we already know it’s not really about Sarah. She’s not pictured on the box, for one thing. And yet, for a few fleeting minutes, I really did think I was going to play something different, a game that would transport me into the life of someone very unlike me, using what Austin Grossman in his new novel, “You,” calls the medium’s “physical link into the world of the fictional.”

Then, as so often happens in video games, Sarah was gone.

The Last of Us, a new post-apocalyptic zombie drama for the PlayStation 3, was hailed, with some justification, from the stage at a Sony event before this week’s E3 trade show in Los Angeles, as the most critically acclaimed video game of the past two years. It does some things better than any other game I’ve played. But I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters.

You can see why people really like the game. The animation is nearly photorealistic. The characters’ eyes are full of life and emotion, with none of the vacancy gamers so often confront. Their eyes give Joel and Ellie, the two characters that the player spends the most time with, a weight and a reality that surpass all other video game characters.