As details of the game start to slowly emerge, my desire to play “The Last of Us” and know everything is quickly and exponentially rising. It’s a conundrum. But from what I do know, “The Last of Us” is slowly becoming my most anticipated game of 2012.

That is, if it comes out in 2012. Naughty Dog revealed the game will either debut very late in 2012 or, heaven forbid, early 2013. Either way, the game is slowly making its way onto the radar, and I’m going to hope that it shows its beautiful face in 2012 so my article still seems relevant. After all, the game had been in development for two years prior to the original announcement of its existence.

Anyway, this game is obscuring my sights from anything else that is going on in the gaming industry, but not without good reason. The idea behind the game and Naughty Dog’s attention to characters and story are making this the number one title I recommend readers purchase.

I love zombie games. It is true, however, that the genre has been growing a bit stale with the recent rush of releases. In “The Last of Us,” Naughty Dog takes a much-needed new approach to the so-called zombie “virus.”

A BBC video about ants infected by fungus caught the eye of someone in Naughty Dog, and this is how the idea for the concept came about. In the BBC video, a parasitic jungle fungus called Cordyceps infects ants through the air. The Cordyceps eventually crushes all of the ant’s internal organs with its growing roots and stem, and then slowly emerges from its carcass looking like an alien antenna.

Cordyceps isn’t limited to ants. In fact, there is a specific kind of Cordyceps for a variety of insects. The more numerous a species, the more likely the Cordyceps fungus will attack it. Nature is physically preventing one species from taking control. So a game about nature fighting back, eh? How this will translate to humans, only Naughty Dog can tell.

As is typical of Naughty Dog, the game will have a heavy reliance on characters and story. This means the game will not simply be another zombie hack-and-slash, where all you know is that there are zombies, you are immune to the virus and you must kill them.

An exclusive video is posted on the Game Informer website in which the director and creative director of “The Last of Us” talk about the story of the game as well as the environment. Here’s how the setting and the characters play into the emerging details of the plot:

The story takes place 20 years after the Cordyceps fungus jumped to humans and decimated the population. After the fungus hit, the government set up quarantines to prevent the virus from spreading. The shape of the quarantines 20 years later is rough, but the state of the planet is worse. Naughty Dog’s world gained inspiration from “The World Without Us,” a book that describes how nature would start to reclaim the world if we weren’t constantly pushing it back (without humans, New York subways would flood in two days!). Naughty Dog hopes this world creates a sense of intrigue and, through that, exploration.

The main protagonist, Joel, is 40-something, and experienced the fungus as it spread, but Ellie is only 14 and knows nothing except the inside (and sometimes outside — kids will be kids) of the last remaining quarantine center. Joel is a man whose morals have been ground down to nothing through tough times, and when he is tasked with another illegal mission — escorting Ellie out of the quarantine, the reason for which Naughty Dog is unable to tell — it blows up in his face. Joel and Ellie become locked out of the quarantine with a bounty on their heads. Joel vows to hold onto Ellie until he can get her somewhere safe, and that is the game’s beginning motivation. As a Naughty Dog game, however, who knows what direction it will take.

Naughty Dog, in my mind, is one of the premier developers of our time. They brought me the games that made me fall in love with gaming (let it be known that series is “Jak and Daxter”). They also brought me the beautifully crafted story of Nathan Drake in “Uncharted” that set the standard for how the PlayStation 3 technology should be utilized. Really, I’m just saying that Naughty Dog knows how to make games, so “The Last of Us” shouldn’t disappoint.