Review: The Last of Us Part II Is a Gory and Complex Feat of Empathetic Storytelling

The game displays a thorough, haunted understanding of what cruelty for cruelty’s sake can do to the soul.

The Last of Us Part II
Photo: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.

The moment that Naughty Dog announced a sequel to The Last of Us, we knew a day of reckoning was coming. No matter how one felt about Joel, the grizzled protagonist of the 2013 game, it was inevitable that his actions—saving 14-year-old Ellie’s life at the expense of the human race—would have consequences. And the first and most expected of those consequences occurs not even an hour into The Last of Us Part II, when, four years after the events of the first game, a small militia manages to snatch Joel, and his surrogate daughter, after coming to his rescue, watches him meet a particularly grisly end.

Yes, of course, Ellie goes after Joel’s killers, a hunt that leads her—along with her ride-or-die girlfriend, Dina—to Seattle, where the militia is embroiled in a bloody civil war with an urban-agrarian pseudo-Christian cult known as the Seraphites. And all the while, the Cordyceps epidemic continues to roil, making new, hideous, screeching monsters by the day, and in even more horrifying, hard-to-kill forms than before. And, of course, the underlying message of the whole thing, belabored by so many zombie stories before this one, is that humans are the real monsters, and that it takes a certain innate viciousness to survive in a world of monsters.

Which isn’t to say that The Last of Us Part II gets too high and mighty about the ugly, gratuitous nature of revenge. If it was, the game’s violence wouldn’t be necessary, justified, or cathartic—and killing here is often all three of those things at once. This is a game that asks players to accept the multitudes of its heroes, its villains, and every other poor, suffering soul that Ellie and Dina encounter throughout their journey, about what it means to be another monster among monsters, and what purpose that grotesquery serves.

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That, though, is still a hard ask for a game like this. As in the original, you sneak, scavenge, shoot, stab, and bludgeon your way through the world, and The Last of Us Part II is home to some of the most ferocious acts of sinewy, effective, and affecting violence in a video game, and they’re made all the more lurid and visceral by being rendered in unparalleled detail that’s consistent with the rest of the story. That’s even more egregious given that the story could have been just as effective without the game’s utter realism being an imperative by any means necessary, especially given the despicable, and well-documented, human cost of achieving that level of detail. And just like most of Naughty Dog’s forays into cinematic action games, what goes on in the cutscenes is only tenuously connected with everything going on in the rest of the campaign.

As a gameplay experience, The Last of Us Part II brings just the right amount of that Uncharted-like intensity into its every set piece. You’re still best served by sneaking around enemies instead of facing them directly, but unlike the first game, you’re also not utterly doomed by choosing to face them head-on. Being prepared and armed to the teeth is the real deciding factor here, and the player is given much more freedom to figure out how to best accomplish that. Do you take out your enemies with a shiv or a switchblade? Do you have the materials for a makeshift silencer? Are you so overloaded with ammo that you can afford to get loud? Or do you just make a mad dash for an exit, praying that the door isn’t blocked? Once you have set your goal, the overall approach to achieving it is up to you, and that’s a massive and welcome improvement over the first game.

The Last of Us Part II
Ellie and Dina in a scene from The Last of Us Part II. © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Most of the gameplay takes place in a semi-open world that recalls that of Naughty Dog’s underrated Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. The starting and end points of any given area are largely set in stone, but you can wander the ruins of Seattle across a wide expanse, and there’s an impressive number of fully rendered and true-to-life locations that you’re free to explore. Entire neighborhoods feel like real, once-lived-in places, frozen in time, derelict and overgrown. An abandoned music store isn’t just a depository for ammo and health items, with a few records strewn around, but a place that felt as if it was desperately looted during an apocalypse and now has been overtaken by vines and serves as a sanctuary for those who should need it.

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The closest that the gameplay comes to elegantly and seamlessly pairing with the overarching story occurs in such places, where Ellie and Dina feel safe enough to sing to each other, or talk about old movies, comic books they’ve found, their families, and the like. Respite and genuine engagement with the game’s morality is also offered up by the periodic flashbacks, which fill in the gaps of time in between our leaving Ellie behind in 2013 and our glimpsing the wiry, flint-eyed killer she became. These sections are all playable, and range from beautiful moments of wonder and curiosity, even laugh-out-loud humor, to devastating flashes of revelation, to the game’s biggest and most meaningful curveball, when the entire climax is put on hold while players step into the shoes of the girl, Abby, who killed Joel and is now Ellie’s ultimate target.

One might feel an understandable sense of consternation when this shift in perspective happens in the game, as Ellie’s story is already too long for its own good by the time it reaches its logical climax. But Abby, who’s built like a shot putter and commandingly voiced by Laura Bailey, is a beautifully imposing and undeniably captivating presence. But more than this, Abby’s story represents a crucial narrative shift for The Last of Us Part II, not in the sense that it humanizes the enemies that Ellie has been taking out up to this point, but for the way it allows the game’s actual theme to reveal itself. You start the campaign thinking that the story is about revenge, when it’s really one about mercy, of the meaning of sacrifice and letting go.

We learn about Abby’s connection to Joel early on during this shift in perspective, but much of her story is set in the aftermath of his murder, once Abby has returned to her Seattle militia, the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), whose members are also known as Wolves, and life goes on as usual. But that changes when her ex-boyfriend, a fellow soldier named Owen (Patrick Fugit), goes missing, and Abby goes AWOL in order to find him. And that journey leads her to Lev and Yara, siblings and former members of the Seraphites.

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The closest that The Last of Us Part II gets to true villains are the Seraphites, and yet they aren’t seen as just outright evil. Hard and fast details about why this hyper-conservative order is the way it is are thin on the ground, but we know not to have too much empathy for them when you find out they’ve sentenced Lev to die for the “crime” of being transgender. The second one of these people deadnames the poor kid before trying to shoot him with a crossbow, Abby’s story very quickly becomes a roaring, bloody act of defiance solely to allow Lev and Yara—and, by extension, herself—the opportunity to live a life free of these horrors. You may feel conflict about how many Wolves need to die so Ellie can get her revenge. But you feel much, much less of that the more you realize how much the Seraphites hold Lev in contempt for just existing.

The Last of Us Part II
Lev in a scene from The Last of Us Part II. © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Even then, there’s a lot of blood spilled on the way to freedom, culminating on Abby’s side in one of the most breathtaking, anxiety-inducing action set pieces ever executed in a video game: a breakneck ride through a burning village that feels like the barbarous hate-child of Atlanta burning in Gone with the Wind and the single-shot warzone in Children of Men. Once again, there’s a faint sense in these scenes of the even stronger experience that could have been, of a story being truly told through gameplay, not cutscenes. A sequence where Lev has to coax Abby through her fear of heights to cross a man-made bridge between skyscrapers is maybe the second most tense sequence in the game, and there’s not a single Seraphite or Infected to kill in it. It’s hard not to see the frequent shootout sections as a crutch preventing the developers from thinking of sequences that are more like this one, places to give the player something more to do than engage in stealth action.

That’s despite the fact that the game is certainly aiming for more with the cinematics, and how it paints Abby and Ellie on opposite sides of a gory existential crisis, one where Ellie is blindly screaming and clawing for a life that has purpose, and Abby actually finding it. Where The Last of Us Part II leads both of them is quite haunting, a place where uneasy, wrenching questions are answered, such as at what point do we determine the cost of hate, chaos, death, and vengeance to be more or less than the cost of simply stopping?

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The risk that came with making a sequel to The Last of Us was the possibility of rendering the great ambiguous ending of that game null and void. To their absolute credit, the developers at Naughty Dog have crafted a story here that walks right into that fire, and wrestles with the implications and consequences of Joel’s lie in full. It’s hard not to trace every human failure in The Last of Us Part II back to that lie, and the strongest, most special moments here are examples of unmistakably human grace transcending that self-interest, even when the game is at its darkest. It’s in Ellie seeking comfort in her girlfriend’s arms to calm her shaking hands, Lev slowly discarding the shackles of his old-time religion, but sharing the parts of it that mattered with a frightened friend. It’s in forgiveness and acceptance, in all its various, excruciating forms.

These moments are myriad throughout this sequel, and they’re so unlike what you find in a game operating on the AAA level. The Last of Us Part II is still sending a very awkward message about how much mercy truly matters when so many of the campaign’s most complex, graceful moments are out of the player’s control, but the vast majority of its moments of cruelty—thrilling and righteous though they can often be—aren’t. That’s a failure of the creative space the game inhabits as a big, expansive blockbuster more than a failure of the game itself. But most importantly, it’s a problem only because The Last of Us Part II is a game that displays such a thorough, haunted understanding of what cruelty for cruelty’s sake can do to the human soul.

This game was reviewed using a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.

Score: 
 Developer: Naughty Dog  Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: June 24, 2020  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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