The Last of Us 2: An Emotionally Complex Gaze Into Cruelty
By: Brandon R. Chinn
Tags: Gaming, Critique, The Last Of Us 2, Art, Essay

I rolled credits on The Last of Us 2 last night.

After nearly thirty hours of survival horror mayhem and a lengthy, multifaceted narrative, I can finally make my own informed opinion about one of the biggest, most long awaited video games of this console generation. Video games, especially ones driven by narrative, exist to make the player think — alongside pushing buttons and following prompts. They present ideas parallel to their gameplay that linger long after the final act. As I sat in the darkness of my room and watched the credits fall, the feelings I felt were mixed — and confused.

[Heavy spoilers below, and throughout]

The Ambition of a Sequel

Following the overwhelming success of the Uncharted series, Naughty Dog sought to continue their foray into playable movies with The Last of Us, adding yet another story to the rickety pile of zombie fiction. Instead of forcing us to deal with the mindless undead, the world in The Last of Us is struck by a terrible fungal virus — cordyceps — that nearly end the human race within a matter of years. Those humans left behind live difficult, burdened lives. The government has failed, and it seems the entirety of the human race has turned on one another, becoming feral and bloodthirsty, viewing everyone as an enemy.

The world as painted by the original game is bleak, but the story is centered around hope. The opening act is brutal, and the game never allows the player to blink as atrocities are played across the screen. So when we are introduced to Ellie, a young girl who is seemingly immune to the virus, we find our raison d’être, and the adventure begins for real.

TLOU2 is a game about sadness and pain.

Across a harrowing landscape, hope is pursued. Joel — a former smuggler and father — is given one last important task to take Ellie across the United States and toward the Fireflies, a group of people who might craft a life-saving vaccine from her blood. The first game is rife with dangerous near-misses and beautiful set pieces, and the relationship crafted between Joel and Ellie is complex and heartfelt.

So when we reach the end of the game, the denouement is more than believable. As we see Joel mass-murder a group of hopeful innocents to save Ellie, we allow this complex moral twist because of its deeply human element. The game asks which one of us would not risk doing whatever it takes to save the person we love most in the world, and ends with an open-ended question against the backdrop of Jackson County, Wyoming.

The last seven years have allowed the context and conversation around the final act of The Last of Us to grow, as players discussed the moral implications of Joel’s final actions, and what devastating consequences that sort of selfish act might have. Ellie’s agency is taken from her by Joel, and he garnishes a lie to protect her brittle consciousness from the truth of what happened in the hospital.

Whether or not The Last of Us deserved to exist as a standalone story, a sequel exists.

Ellie and Dina are cute together, and one of the things worth rooting for.

Moral Quandaries

The Last of Us 2 seeks to answer these moral questions for us, about whether or not Joel was right to murder innocent doctors and surgeons in cold blood and rob the world of its only vaccine for an extremely deadly disease. It is a game predicated on vengeance and choice, a game that seeks to show the immensely complex morality and emotional depth of human beings. It is also a game of unflinching voyeuristic violence and depravity, confusing character choices and moral pandering. While the narrative itself is emotionally rich and complex, the game’s uneven pacing, high suspension for disbelief and cruelty have made it divisive.

Leading up to the release of the game, the events around it were nearly as fraught with discord as the game itself. Rumors of sexual harassment at Naughty Dog, the demands of crunch and mistreatment of employees, constant delays and major plot leaks emotionally charged the narrative before the game even hit shelves. Despite the reveal of Ellie’s sexuality in Left Behind, early promotional materials showcasing Ellie intimately involved with another woman stirred the worst parts of gaming circles into a frenzy, with toxic vitriol spouting the next entry of The Last of Us as ‘SJW propaganda.’

While it was easy enough to decry this absurd, disgusting portion of gamers and their close-minded critique of the game, the other allegations that piled up against it made progressive players just as angry. Allegations of sexual harassment and crunch are not only serious, but seemingly far-reaching in the AAA video game development sphere, which has been unfairly dominated by white males for decades. It seemed as though the critiques leveled against narrative experiences over the last few years were taken to heart in the development of The Last of Us 2, which puts a queer woman squarely in the protagonist’s seat.

The Last of Us 2 attempts to present its complex narrative on grounds of fairness, taking the middle route of the human experience by showcasing the messy sides of a conflict. In its attempt to be emotionally unbiased the game often feels pandering and intentionally unfair to its characters.

Joel Miller was not a good person. The question asked at the end of The Last of Us, if reflected on objectively, is atrocious. It’s the Trolley Problem, a binary thought experiment played out against heavy emotions. Was it wrong for Joel to mass murder a group of saviors and innocents and rob Ellie of her own agency in order to satisfy his emotionally-stunted selfishness? It’s a question that was murky by rights of the first game alone — we were shown a Joel of eventual compassion and heroism, though the events between the death of his daughter and the smuggling of Ellie paint a person depraved and lost, one who committed acts of astounding evil to survive.

The world of the Last of Us skews cynical on its own, and as the backdrop allows our characters’ own cynicism and brutality to exist on suspension of disbelief. It is a common theme in fiction to point at humanity as naturally evil, as animals just waiting to slaughter and devour one another, a brittle society held up only by the confines of a capitalist structure. We don’t know exactly how things went down after the rise of the infection, only that 60% of humanity died and the remaining were coerced and brutalized into obedience by a militarized government called FEDRA. The resistance — a loose cell of citizens called the Fireflies — are seen as opportunistic outliers.

There is no cure, there is no saving humanity and to try is not only foolish, it’s stupid.

Joel is made to answer for his choices more than once in TLOU2.

Something To Hope For

What is so important about the narrative of the first game is that it gives us a glimmer of hope. When it comes to grimdark narratives, ones that are notoriously cruel and banal, a glimmer of hope is the commanding device that keeps the audience engaged. The structural failure of shows like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones was that their grimdark narratives skewed too far toward the cruel, giving supernatural power and prowess to the evil characters and showing anyone with hope or a moral compass as weak, fragile, and deserving of death. While the The Last of Us has a narrative filled with plenty of character deaths and soul-crushing moments, it gives us hope throughout, even through to the final act. This is what complicates the open-ended question during the final scene, and makes players argue about the choice Joel made.

The Last of Us 2 decided to build its narrative not on hope or the pursuit of a better world, but on the blood-swathed landscape of vengeance, and the pain and misery that retribution creates for everyone involved.

What is immediately uncomfortable about The Last of Us 2 — and a point argued long before the release of the game — was in showing the invalidation of vengeance, that a person pursuing retribution in blood lust is in the wrong no matter their motivations. The Last of Us 2 seeks to muddy the narrative by having the player experience the story as both Ellie — armed with the knowledge of what Joel did in the first game — and Abby — the daughter of one of the surgeons that Joel murdered, and also Joel’s murderer.

The set pieces and imagery are gorgeous and push the PS4 to its limits.

The game sets us up for an adventure rife with emotional conflict from the start. Ellie and Joel are living comfortable, quiet lives in Jackson with Joel’s brother Tommy. While things are rocky between Ellie and Joel, they are making the most of the time they have. Neither of them seem interested in pursuing the Fireflies any longer, and the thought of Ellie as a cure has been eroded by daily routine and the brief happiness of a steady life.

This brief snapshot of domestic joy is brutalized when a stranger comes to town. Early on in the game the player is tasked to play as this stranger, Abby, as she infiltrates Jackson for some unknown purpose. As the narrative goes in it is apparent that Abby is no random stranger, and her purpose is deadly and unalterable. As she is attacked by infected in her pursuit of the man that killed her father years ago, she is saved by that same man and his brother. With no visible change of heart, Abby leads her quarry back to the group she’s brought with her to invade Jackson.

What follows is one of the most brutal, heart-wrenching scenes in any video game.

The fallout of Joel’s grisly murder at the hands of Abby is immediate. The sadness is palpable. As a player, I felt less for Joel’s death and more for Ellie’s pain. While Joel changed across the experiences of his life, we were shown the despicable acts of Joel firsthand. By the account of any other narrative Joel would be cast as the villain, and Abby’s pain would be understandable. She crossed hundreds of miles in the pursuit of the man who killed her father, the terrorist that slaughtered the Fireflies.

Ellie is left alive — not by the designs of Abby and the group, but because of a good-hearted glimmer of one of the men with her, Owen.

The adventure begins. Not in the pursuit of hope, not to change the world or to make anything better, but to murder the person responsible for Joel’s brutal death. The vengeance narrative feels earned from the start, the sweat-slicked palms of the player ready to inflict maximum pain on Abby. As I directed Ellie through the gorgeous, immaculately detailed set pieces of the Pacific Northwest and Seattle, I was directed toward Joel’s killer in binary: she was responsible for his death, and so she must die.

The detail of Seattle is unbelievable.

Justified Violence

The Last of Us 2 is a remarkably violent game. Character deaths are complete with the pulpy meat of a leg removed by a shotgun blast or a skull caved in by a lead pipe. Enemies writhe around on the ground before dying, screaming in agony as other characters shout for them by name. Despite the base gameplay being that of a shooter, the game wants you to immediately feel remorse. These people Ellie is killing are not directly responsible for Joel’s death, and yet there is no resistance in the mass-slaughter of them across Seattle.

The Washington Liberation Front — WLF, or ‘Wolves’ — have taken over Seattle in their war with FEDRA, the government agency that failed to stop the infected or corral the populace. The Wolves are locked in a second war as Ellie enters the ruined landscape of Seattle, a war with a violent religious cult they name ‘Scars’ for the way they brutalize their own faces. These Scars — or Seraphites — are locked in a land war with the Wolves, though both sides have muddied intentions that are lost in their unending brutality. Ellie is able to use these distractions at her advantage as she and Dina search Seattle for both Tommy and Abby, avoiding infected along the way.

Before I could get my hands on a copy of The Last of Us 2, I watched as the reviews rolled in. Gaming journal after gaming journal lauded it as a masterpiece of both medium and genre, a technical and personal achievement in the landmark video game Hall of Fame. Fan reviews were mixed, and not only by the muddied waters of incel gamers and fans angry at the leaked footage of Joel’s death and the queer representation. The reviews were mixed over the game’s narrative and its presentation, a long look into the brutality of humankind and the darkness that any single person is capable of.

There has long been a trend in grimdark fiction — especially zombie fiction — of using the monster and pandemic as only a backdrop to tell human stories about moral choice, human failure and natural cynicism. The Last of Us 2 takes this in stride, presenting a world where even the ‘good guys’ are capable of atrocious acts of violence, brutality and cruelty. The narrative — while emotionally complex — does feel almost unerringly cruel, giving so much agency to pain and violence that they feel more real than any single character within the 30 hour long narrative.

This concept of the natural evil of humans has been explored over and over again in fiction, so to see such a huge budget title tackle this issue is both interesting and fraught with issues. The largest issue with The Last of Us 2 is that it doesn’t add anything meaningful to this narrative. Instead it points the spotlight on the player and seems to relish in the idea that no single person is good, that the player is somehow complicit in the narrative.

A Reason To Live

Across my play of The Last of Us 2 I couldn’t help but continuously compare it to Death Stranding, a game that serves as its striking polar opposite in almost every fashion. One of the loudest critiques of AAA games for years has been their violence. Not that we all don’t enjoy some fictional violence time and again, but it is extraordinarily rare for a big budget game to sell numbers without the fatal squeeze of a trigger. Death Stranding challenged this notion by not only making human death impossible for much of the narrative, but by putting enormous consequences behind the choice to kill a person when the time finally came. Death Stranding, a game of similarly complex emotional narrative that also existed along the backdrop of a global pandemic, went the route of unerring optimism. What if, at the end of time, humans don’t seek out their own eradication but instead work together, for the most part, to fix the planet together?

The Last of Us 2 does not allow a single moment of this thought. The narrative is laser focused on the ills of humanity, on vengeance, on blood lust and pain. The closer Ellie gets to Abby, the more people she kills. The Last of Us 2 takes years and years of murder simulators and attempts to condense it into a critique of the player, making the endless murder fun and interesting. Instead of allowing us to murder faceless drones on our quest for treasure — as in the Uncharted series — The Last of Us 2 works overtime to make the player feel like a monster, despite the agency of the narrative existing completely outside of the player’s hands.

Ellie demands that Joel come clean with her, no matter what it does to their relationship.

This is the first, and most immediate, issue with the narrative design of the game. While it is difficult to engage in the inescapable brutality that Ellie wades through in her quest for vengeance, this is the only actual agency awarded the player in the game, and there are no other options. While in other stealth-based games like Metal Gear Solid or Deus Ex the player is given the option for non-lethal take downs, The Last of Us 2 presents its voyeuristic violence almost gleefully. Deaths are messy and bloody. The screams of the dying echo through gorgeous, rain-drenched set pieces. In order for the story to progress, the player must wade through blood, killing everyone from aimlessly patrolling WLF soldiers to dogs.

There is only one single requirement to unlock the narrative in The Last of Us 2: kill everything relentlessly and creatively.

While I can’t help but wonder how much more fun and interesting the game would have been if it had tasked the player with killing more inspired designs of infected, this is not the game that was created. What ruins the concept of vengeance and blood lust, and removes agency and fault from the player completely, is the way the story is crafted. Yes, I am the one pulling the trigger as I take down an unsuspecting woman who is talking to her partner on a rooftop, but I am not the one making the decisions during the storyline or cutscenes, except for when the game feels as though I should be the one to press square in order to progress the violence and move on to the next scene. After a while the cruelty began to numb me, and I started to feel less and less for the characters. My motivation for the game was curiosity, not narrative reward.

High Budget Concept

The Last of Us 2 is an undeniable achievement in video games. It is filled with set pieces and locales that feel decadent in their execution, the game oozing with intricately design realism. As someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest their entire life, the attention to detail in Seattle’s design was almost overwhelming. Every single scene, location and room in the game is crafted to absurd detail. Places you see in fleeting opening scenes and flashbacks are gorgeous. Everything in the game feels alive. While the craftsmanship of the game is impressive beyond reason, it makes the reports of crunch labor at Naughty Dog feel even worse. Decadence seems to be the most apt way to put it — the only way to craft a game that looks and plays like The Last of Us 2 is to expend an absurd amount of money, time and labor into your video game.

What results is an adventure that feels compelling even when lost by the pacing or emotional direction of the story. The rain-drenched set pieces of Seattle are beautiful and haunting. Traveling through ruined grocery stores and indie book shops of Capitol Hill to the underground dungeons of abandoned hospitals and up into the heights of repurposed skyscrapers, the adventure is soaring and grand. I found myself stopping more than once to use Photo Mode and simply take in the grandeur of each scene, a testament to both the creative ability of human beings and the disgusting rigors of capitalist labor.

Every character feels real, which is why their place in the story often hurts.

While I was supposed to be feeling some kind of way about the characters and their plights, I became distracted more than once by the thought of the overworked employees at Naughty Dog, the nameless laborers who worked hard to secure a singular vision directed by a man of recent accolade. Neil Druckmann came under fire quite a few times — both during the design of Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2 — and Naughty Dog’s NDAs will probably keep us forever in the dark about the actual working conditions at the company or Druckmann’s working personality. From his Twitter bio citing himself as ‘an abuser of characters,’ his constant dodging of questions about sexual harassment at Naughty Dog, his nearly Kojima-like desire to be praised as a singular creator and his problematic inspirations (The Last of Us 2 was supposedly inspired by a real-life lynching), Druckmann is an openly problematic writer and director in gaming, and his philosophy as a writer is entrenched in complex morality and arrogantly centered in not pleasing anyone.

Druckmann avoided the path of expectation entirely by crafting a narrative that often feels flimsy, ham-fisted and intentionally cruel. The takeaway for many people, myself included, is that The Last of Us 2’s attempt at being neutral in its critique of a cycle of violence is that the game itself became nothing more than torture porn — a voyeuristic tour through unflinching brutality, gore and misery that often takes aim squarely at its most vulnerable characters.

No One Is Good

One imperative issue with how we view fiction and storytelling in the West is how we automatically assign the label of ‘hero’ to any protagonist in a story without any additional information. This could be because of our own narcissistic individualism, the self-importance of the everyday American that is predicated and reinforced by greedy capitalist systems and instant gratification. While it is obvious that Joel was no hero in The Last of Us, despite being the protagonist, The Last of Us 2 muddies this concept further by making several of Ellie’s actions indefensible — and then taking her away from us entirely as we play the second half of the game as Joel’s murderer.

The game’s narrative works overtime to (almost pedantically) hammer through that maybe Ellie’s vengeance is wrong, despite its justifications, and then exploits her actions through a lens of barbaric cruelty similar to Joel’s own. After 13 or so hours of Ellie waging war on the Wolves in her pursuit of Abby, she murders countless people, dismisses Jesse’s demand that they go after Tommy, nearly ruins her relationship with Dina — and then murders the man that kept her alive during Joel’s brutal death, along with his pregnant partner.

As the game focuses the lens on Ellie as a ruthless, morally indignant savage, it immediately cuts away for the next 13 hours in an attempt to humanize Abby, and showcase the game’s morally complex narrative by attempting to have the player empathize with the person that brutally murdered Joel.

Abby’s role in the story changes more than once across the narrative.

Exhaustion sets in even before Abby’s lengthy segment begins. The Last of Us 2 attempts to shake up the play cycle of ‘kill, gather resource, move box’ by shoehorning in open areas and having the player experience flashbacks with Joel and Tommy through playable segments. For every brutal, violent action Ellie makes we are treated with a flashback of her happiest moments with Joel, back before she learned the truth, back when she was just a kid that wanted to be a kid. With the removal of her agency and Joel’s actions — as we learn via flashbacks that are scattered throughout the narrative — Ellie doesn’t view her continued existence as something meaningful. She tells Joel that the purpose of her life was back in that hospital, further giving us context into the way Ellie views both the world, and herself.

Abby was also robbed. While in the first game we are shown only faceless, nameless surgeons being gunned down by Joel in his single-minded pursuit to save Ellie, The Last of Us 2 gives identity and importance to one of the surgeons, who turns out to be Abby’s father. We see through her flashbacks that she was a proud member of the Fireflies, where she and Owen — the man responsible for sparing Ellie — believe in a future that’s both bright and possible. The impossible comes true. A cordycep-immune host is found. There is hope again. The Fireflies were right. Humanity can be saved.

That is until a brutal serial killer not only wipes out the few surgeons and doctors remaining, but most of the Fireflies as well. A murderous psychopath that absconds with humanity’s only home and vanishes into the wilderness of Wyoming.

Abby’s narrative takes place within the same three days as Ellie’s, the two of them moving around Seattle with different agendas but not meeting until their denouement at the end of Day 3. While Ellie’s story is squarely on the shoulders of vengeance, Abby’s is a tale of hope and rescue, mirroring instead Joel and Ellie’s journey from the first game as she eventually comes across a couple of kids that she reluctantly saves. Abandoning the other Wolves — who have made it their purpose in life to eradicate the cultish Seraphites — Abby takes off after Owen, who has seemingly defected after killing a member of the WLF.

The arc of Abby’s story exists to show the full scope of a narrative, to play both sides, to have Ellie presented as the defender of a villain while also showing that someone we perceived as an inarguable villain to be of great human character and heart. Abby saves children, she fights against the corruption of the other Wolves, she protects her friends, she undergoes both moral and philosophical changes as she strays from the cycle of violence that she took part in, a cycle of violence began by Joel years ago, continued by Abby, and executed by Ellie. It is this cycle of violence and pursuit of vengeance that brings an overwhelming amount of innocents into the spiral, creating nothing but death and mayhem.

Similar to The Walking Dead, The Last of Us 2 makes it quite apparent that no single character in the narrative is safe, not even our protagonists. Through its unflinching gaze we watch as character after character is gunned down, each person brought in to satisfy the story of vengeance and retribution killed because of the actions of Abby and Ellie. With each torturous scene and character death I was certain I could not be further shocked by the unerring violence and brutality, only to find that my expectations could never be matched by the narrative’s desire to shock.

Vengeance or Forgiveness

The culmination of violence is in the final meeting of Ellie and Abby within the theater — a meeting that turns out to not be final at all. After a furious gunfight and battle seen from both perspectives, the curtain falls and draws back again to present us with a seemingly hopeful epilogue. This epilogue, this happy snapshot of Dina and Ellie’s domestic bliss, only filled me with continued anxiety as I waited for the final hammer to fall and shatter their brief stint at happiness, something that is rarely afforded queer couples in popular media.

And, of course, the hammer does come down, and what should be the earned epilogue for the violent story is only a brief respite in a shockingly brutal ending that draws on two hours longer than it should.

TLOU2 allows the characters a small glimpse at happiness before it’s torn away.

Abby and Lev escaped, and Tommy ruined his own life in despair. As he comes to the farmhouse to see Dina and Ellie, he confirms that his marriage is on the ropes and he has been spending the last few months continuing to pursue information about Abby. He gives the location to Ellie, who refuses to partake in the violence any longer. There’s no longer a reason for it. They escaped with their lives. That should be enough.

And yet Tommy pulls Ellie back in with a single, cowardly challenge.

The final few hours of The Last of Us 2 are a shocking narrative twist in a game of countless shocking narrative twists. The game doubles down on its own violence by drawing out the cruelty even further, abandoning both the happiness of Ellie and Dina at the farmhouse and the hopeful pursuit of the Fireflies by Abby and Lev by having the two protagonists engage in one final disturbing act. Ellie charges toward California in pursuit of Abby once more, where Abby is certain she’s found the happiness she’s craved her entire life. Instead she is captured by a bandit gang called the Rattlers, a profane and unspeakably evil group donning police gear and engaging in atrocious acts of cruelty.

The Rattlers seem to exist as a point of ‘see, things can always be worse’ in the downward spiral of grimdark human nature. They are a group that enslaves people for their own amusement, infecting them and chaining up the infected for fun, torturing the prisoners and worse. The group seems to gleefully partake in acts of extreme cruelty, and any prisoners that attempt to escape are sent to the pillars, a broken segment of Santa Barbara beachfront where they are tied to wooden beams and left to die under exposure of the elements.

Ellie finds a ruined, broken Abby. She cuts her down so that Abby can take Lev and a boat and leave everything behind.

Except, Ellie isn’t done. She came for Abby for a reason.

Ellie drops her weapons — all but her knife — and demands Abby fight her. Abby refuses. It’s no longer worth it. After their experiences in Seattle and Santa Barbara the only thing that Abby wants is to escape to the Firefly refuge with Lev and attempt a new life. Ellie, still filled with vengeance, pushes Abby to fight by holding a knife to Lev’s neck. What follows is a messy brawl, the game’s true denouement a slug fest between two characters continuously at odds with what they want, stuck in a cycle of violence, pain, and death.

In one final flashback we see Joel’s real final moments. Not his arguments with Ellie, not his failures or his misery, but his proud declaration that if he could go back to the hospital he would do it all over again. Ellie accuses him of taking her life from her — her meaning — but promises Joel that she will attempt forgiveness.

As Abby and Lev vanish into the fog aboard their small boat, Ellie is left to sit in the water: broken, anguished, done. While interpretations of this final scene vary wildly — and probably always will — it seems that Ellie gave up on her vengeance not out of some attempt to honor Joel, but to end the cycle of violence he began and allow Abby her own chance at retribution. If we are meant to believe that Ellie finally understands the preciousness of human life, it’s uncertain. Only that the cost of revenge is too high.

Posing Questions, Saying Nothing

The story is messy and bleak. The way it handles its queer characters (namely the inclusion of a homophobic scene, the loss of a happy ending for Dina and Ellie, and the entire questionable narrative of Lev, Yara, their mother and the Seraphites) will no doubt leave a sour taste in the mouths of many. The Last of Us 2 presents so many brutal narratives in unflinching detail, but doesn’t offer much in the way of resolution for any of them beyond death and cruelty.

The narrative’s trans character, Lev, suffers under the weight of the religious cult he was born in.

While the story is arresting, I cannot help but wonder how much better the game would have been had they spaced the flashbacks differently, cut some of the longer segments for time or staggered the days between Ellie and Abby. And, even after the lengthy time spent as Abby, the game’s desire to take a centrist perspective on those who have wronged you never feels profound. It does not make any major narrative changes in our discussion of the grimdark narrative or the cruelty of humans, instead at most adding more to the evidence of why this sort of story has become overwhelmingly exhausting.

The game wants us to care deeply for the characters. The flashbacks we are given paint a tenderness to the relationship of Ellie and Joel. They give almost overwhelming context to Abby’s pain. The inherent issue with the game is not in its examination of the human condition, but that it refuses to take any kind of side in the presentation of its own argument.

While I enjoyed much of The Last of Us 2, I feel that many of the writing decisions were based more on subverting player expectation than telling a decent, coherent narrative. There were so many opportunities through the game where the narrative seemed to gleefully move away from expectation only to add weight to its own truncated explanation of moral choice. Too often it felt as though the game were talking down to the audience at an instead of allowing the player to reach their own conclusions about violence and morality.

The Last of Us 2, despite everything, sold 4 million copies in one week. It’s a hit game and lauded as a masterpiece. It’s controversial, and will be talked about for years. It will come to be a cornerstone in several arguments about AAA game development and narrative, as it already has. For a game so lengthy, detailed and meticulously designed, I only wish it had more to say. After the credits fell, the only thing left to me was emotional exhaustion — and the continued inspiration to add more to the world than half-hearted expositions of cruelty.