Ellie's voice as the session's texture — the curiosity, the found objects, the attempts to engage with the pre-outbreak world that she was born into the aftermath of. The giraffe picture is her relationship to the world before: it is the evidence of a thing that existed, vivid and specific and not requiring the kind of moral complexity that the people she meets do. The giraffe is simply a giraffe.

The people she has met have been mostly complicated — Joel in his silence, Tess in her pragmatism, Bill in his bitterness. The giraffe is a relief. The game will pay this observation forward in Pittsburgh.