“I don’t know what happened. I was supposed to take her to the Fireflies and walk away.”

The trouble with this statement is that Joel knows exactly what happened. In an abandoned home, he worries over cleaning the fretboard of a guitar. Through gloomy half-light, he tells the story: “She needed her immunity to mean something. I told her… her immunity meant nothing.” This, comes to Joel’s conclusion, love. He chose her, one little girl (Ellie) over the entire world, in a direct echo of twenty years prior when the world decided that his own daughter, Sarah, meant nothing.

Sarah’s death shaped Joel’s entire character in the first game. He carried it with him, and as he learned from and finally grew from his trauma, it became a drive not to lose anyone he loved like that again. Joel killed the doctors that were holding Ellie and intending to cut the Cordyceps infection out of her brain. Then, he fled with her back to Jackson, where by the time of The Last Of Us Part II, they have been living for five years.

This opening scene is both a recap and a warning. Joel’s actions, and what he did in giving Ellie no choice in the matter, hang as a shadow over the entire game. They drive Ellie as she struggles with similar choices, weighing up lives and the cost involved. The story of Part II is not an overly complex one, with minimal dialogue that is light on exposition, brought home largely with nuance. 

It’s hard to talk about the story, specifically to review it, without going into real spoiler territory. Even if you’ve seen the leaks, you haven’t seen the whole game. Even with the leaks it is just not possible, given that it takes place over 30 hours. The story is simple, but the scope of it is huge, with lavish and detailed settings. 

Even so, there are some ideas that pop up once, only to never pop up again, and some sections of the story feel oddly empty or under-developed. I was given the impression that there are large sections of the game that ended up on the cutting room floor, either for pacing or quality reasons. With the long development time and several delays, it paints a picture of a game that got away from the developers and had to be brought back down to its original scope.

As for that scope, Naughty Dog has described it as being a game about cycles of violence, and to an extent, I think that’s pretty on the money. However, I think that in truth, The Last Of Us Part II is about what happens in between those cycles. 

Decisive moments of violence, inflicted against both sympathetic, unsympathetic, arguably deserving or undeserving characters are just that: moments. It is before and after that shapes everything. For Ellie, she can’t seem to stop herself. She makes bad, frightened, ugly choices informed by those moments and by her desires. She wants peace, but it can’t come unless she feels like she can close a chapter by way of slamming a door.

The same can be said for Abby, who when we see her, is constantly grappling with the same feelings. The game belongs to these two women, each stuck in an ouroboros of tragedy, tangled up with each other along the way. Dead family, dead lovers, dead friends. The question at the heart of it is simple. When is enough enough? When will you be done? What can soothe your soul? What makes your life worth something?

Questions and narratives about the usefulness of revenge aren’t new, but The Last Of Us Part II sells it in measures of both silence and bombast. It does it in much the same way the first game did. If we’re honest, there’s nothing unique about Joel’s story, about being a man who turns to violence after loss. A tale of revenge is also nothing new. To their credit, Naughty Dog understands that it’s not the story you’re telling, but how you tell it.

It helps, of course, that the detail in this game is so insane that describing it as “thorough” would actually be kind of insulting. It’s a world that feels rich and alive. I can’t even think of any areas where I thought that the detail wasn’t up to par. That’s to say nothing of the breathtaking motion capture, animations that are more real than before, without hindering the fluidity of gameplay too much. Although, if i’m honest, walking or attempting to run backwards looks goofy. It looks goofy in real life, so it stands to reason that it would look goofy in video games too, but it still looks kind of how it did in the first game, like a moonwalk with none of the style.

Minute expressions and glances take on a weight that I haven’t seen before in games. It lends a credibility to the understated dialogue in the game. So much can be said with just a look. So much credit must necessarily be given to the motion capture performances, and then to the developers who tirelessly translated that to the game itself. Gorgeous sunsets and lashing storms set tones of acceptance and fury, with settings being used as a narrative device to a much greater extent than in the first game.

I did find myself having a few moments, here and there, though where I had a few questions. Was all this detail worth the reports of crunch that have come out of Naughty Dog, long stretches of time where people felt obliged to work excessive hours? The answer is probably not. I don’t think the game would be any worse off if it was less detailed. It wouldn’t hurt the experience if the glass in a display shattered less perfectly, or if I couldn’t shoot someone in the throat and see that rendered in perfect form. I wouldn’t miss not being able to see every muscle in a horse’s body move under sleek fur, even though I really enjoyed that particular slice of detail.

Actually, you could definitely improve the game if you remove the absurdly long workbench animations. I played the game through with a friend and I distinctly recall the way my frustration with the workbenches grew the further I went through the game. I don’t want to watch Ellie take apart a gun for the nth time, Naughty Dog, I just want to see if I have enough parts to get the 6x scope!

It was so bad that I started theorizing if speed runners might just opt to never upgrade their guns when you can easily shave minutes off your entire playthrough by just not doing that. In a game that racks up the tension by making the player incredibly aware of their surroundings and how safe or not safe they are, it felt silly that so much time was taken at the workbenches. Once or twice the game makes you pay for assuming workbenches are safe, but after that, Ellie goes right back to sluggishly moving along. It’s weirdly exhausting and un-enjoyable.

On the whole, mechanics and gameplay are a surprisingly huge upgrade over the first game. I didn’t know how much room for improvement there really was, but new or altered weaponry makes for a fresh take. It is really smooth gameplay too. It handles well, is finely tuned, and resources are spread out in such a way that you have to really think about how to approach each encounter.

The pills skill upgrade system, which was relatively limited in the first game, has seen an overhaul for this game. Now it diversifies the way that you play more than before. By picking up various combat manuals, you can get new skills, and pills are more or less plentiful depending on the difficulty level, allowing you to upgrade a decent amount of things. 

The skills vary between each branch. Extra health, better sneaking, less weapon sway, things like that. This made the game feel closer to an RPG in some ways, and honestly, there’s definitely a part of me that wishes we had more control over the narrative. There are scenarios where I would have loved to choose not to kill someone, for example, or to have the choice to kill them.

There’s new verticality to the game that I never even saw the full extent of. You can climb onto most objects, ledges, cars, and boxes. Whilst writing this review I found a video where someone leapt from the top of a truck onto an enemy and dug her knife in, executing an aerial takedown that the game never even tells you is possible. There’s a fun aspect of “can I pull this off?” to combat and exploration, and it seems that more often than not, the answer is “yes, thank you for trying!”

There’s more horizontality to the game, too, now that you are able to go prone in long grass to obscure yourself from enemies. This seemed to be the least refined aspect, though. Enemies kept walking up to me in the grass and somehow never seeing me even as I poked my head out to headshot them with my silenced pistol. It does, however, enable you to crawl under things now, which lead to more than one quick hide away from enemies. I was surprised by how much relief I felt when I managed to worm my way into a wooden crawl space and be obscured from patrolling guards.

Speaking of the enemy AI, it’s fine, I guess. It’s still too easily tricked into thinking you’re just gone or not there anymore. I spent an entire combat section camping in a tower and only one enemy came looking for me directly. The rest of them kept forgetting I was there. With the detail that went into the world around us, I was expecting enemies to pull nefarious tactics like throwing a molotov into the area they last saw me, or something like that. Instead, they sort of tried to shoot me a few times, then gave up.

The zombies are tougher in this game, and I experienced a weird kind of dissonance over it. I hated fighting the zombies. It’s not that it wasn’t fun, but it was much more of a resource-eating challenge to fight the zombies than it was to fight humans. It felt less rewarding to kill these ignorant, hungry, in-pain things. It felt like I had been effectively dropped into the world in the most realistic way you can imagine. I wanted to avoid the infected entirely. 

Thankfully, the game has a flexible playstyle that means you pretty much can sneak past most encounters, if you want to. Once a fight starts with the infected it’s much harder to quell it than it is with humans though. They have much sharper hearing and are usually hungry and stuff, but it is possible with patience and quick maneuvering. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the accessibility of the game. On the first boot-up, the game walks you through some set up. These are the basic options that can be tweaked off the bat to make the game more accessible, but after that, the options menu presents you with around sixty accessibility options. This includes options such as full text-to-speech, high-contrast modes and highly customization subtitles for people with visual requirements. There are also modifiers for people with motor disabilities that include the ability to remap the controls entirely.

All this comes with another gorgeous, emotive soundtrack from Gustavo Santaolalla, and combat sequences composed by Mac Quayle, who is better known for his Mr Robot soundtrack. The two tones work together wonderfully, and overall, the sound design for this game is tight and intense. Another reason to avoid the infected as much as possible is so that you don’t have to spend your entire night hearing a Clicker’s rattles or a Shambler’s groans on loop in your brain.

It’s appropriate, given the amount of time you spend in fight-or-flight mode. Which brings me to what I feel has been a contentious topic since the release of the game: the violence in it. I have to disagree with the notion that the violence is particularly bad. It’s on par with the first game, with room for a few extra graphic cutscene deaths. 

Perhaps it’s down to the way things are rendered in sharp relief. As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible to shoot someone in the throat and watch blood bubble out of the mess. Bodies, when exploded, leave behind some pretty spectacular goo. Dogs will yelp and scream when you kill them, but this didn’t stop me from immediately going for them first when I was taking enemies out. Overall, there were few moments where I struggled with the violence.

When I did, it was not down to the level of it. Rather, it was who the violence was inflicted against and in what manner. When it came to depictions of violence against non-white characters, I felt the game fell down more than once, with deaths that crossed the line from violent to gratuitous.

I want to stress that when you fill your games with diverse characters, as Naughty Dog have, those diverse characters are going to die. That’s not a problem: what matters is the way in which they die, and the balance for those who survive. There has to be an even playing field, where all characters are equally at risk. I had hoped that Part II had learned from the first game where the same mistakes of poor balance were made. 

Instead, it just… didn’t learn. One lengthy encounter involves hunting down a black woman to torture and kill her. Whilst it wasn’t necessarily any more violent than any other cutscene-based death, where all the intimate story kills are found; it just didn’t sit right with me. It made me feel nauseous, actually. This feeling was repeated, though never quite so viciously, in later sequences. The framing of things in this game was just not done with as much care and attention as was given to, say, Ellie’s guitar mini-game.

I have my share of criticisms around this game. Aside from everything I’ve already mentioned, there’s a few unnecessary moments. The storyline of the trans character, Lev, is a deeply sad one, and much of that sadness did revolve around his trans identity. By contrast, Ellie’s story was so not about the fact that she’s a lesbian, even though her girlfriend is by her side for the majority of the game. Why couldn’t they find a way to write a trans story in the same fuss-free way?

Other issues I have are that the game is relentlessly depressing and emotionally draining. There’s some, but not nearly enough, comedy to break up the dark moments, and whenever Ellie was without a companion you felt their absence dearly. Ellie is quiet. She doesn’t really talk to herself much. I was overwhelmingly tired by the time I got to the end of my playthrough, and I know I had begun to rush certain sections instead of carefully scouring them because of that.

Yet, I defy the idea that The Last Of Us Part II is misery porn. Sometimes a story is a tragedy, but the game doesn’t necessarily wallow in the muck of that with any particular glee. There are sad, horrible things that happen, and the game chooses not to linger directly on them, but instead skirts around them. It’s not in an avoidant way, either. When Ellie does grieve the things she has lost in front of us, it’s with a force of feeling that takes over her entire body. Keeping those moments sparse keeps the characters human and prevents them from becoming depressing caricatures.

Although not directly related to the game itself, I roll my eyes at the marketing. The game is best played if you can put away all that “we want you to have no fun at all” nonsense that Naughty Dog was pushing before release. I didn’t feel bad about myself just because the enemies had names they’d call out to each other. Instead I enjoyed the dimension it added. In spite of an emotionally exhausting storyline, the gameplay itself is fun. Puzzling your way past enemies and routing the most methodical way to kill or avoid them is a delight. Hot take: I know I said this already, but kill the dogs first. They’re only going to ruin your day. 

This game is beautiful, this game is desolate. This game is intricately detailed and yet deeply flawed. The story is something I liked, but I can see why for others, it might not have resonated. If that sounds conflicting, all I can think is that it seems appropriate for people to be conflicted about this game. Ultimately, I say this. Play it for yourself. It’s worth the time, if you can go in with an open mind. It might just surprise you.

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The Last Of Us Part II

$59.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Stunning graphics detail
• A story made unique by the sum of its parts
• Gay main character
• Tonally consistent

Cons

• Excessive animations
• Janky, easily fooled AI
• Some uncomfortable framing of nonwhite characters