Some Thoughts On The Last Of Us Part 2

This was one of the hardest games I’ve ever played, but not for reasons I expected

• Tristan Young @talltristan

FIRST THINGS FIRST: MAJOR SPOILER WARNINGS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME TURN BACK NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED IT

I’m not reviewing The Last Of Us Part 2. There are enough reviews from accredited publications and even more from hot take Internet trolls, of which this game will surely agitate. While I will certainly discuss much of the game in the normative good/bad lexicon that comes with constructive criticism, you don’t need another person telling you to play this or not. I’m certainly not going to assign it a number. Rather the intent is to organize my thoughts and emotions on a game that extracted and interrogated them to a far more challenging extent than I envisioned. When I was finished playing the game I didn’t really know what to do with myself, which has never happened with a game. I believe documenting what my experience was like, and what to me were my most vivid responses will provide more closure than breaking out into random fits of sobbing for the next week would, although I also considered that.  

While I was sure it was going to be heart-wrenching experience, I often joked with friends prior to release how mentally and emotionally prepared I was. My body and soul are ready, I would text in all caps locks, deploying a casual and slightly self-deprecating arrogance. I was absolutely not ready, as I suspect most of us who eagerly followed the development of TLOU2 weren’t. To say that nothing could prepare you for the sheer abstract trauma this game would force you to endure- while potentially accurate- is a bit misleading for several reasons. One is the wilful deception that was part of the game’s marketing campaign; the other is that trauma and pain are just the beginning of the emotions this game will force you to reckon with. Physical pain is comparatively simple when placed along the spectrum of what this game puts you through. We have similarly simplistic understandings of how to heal from such a thing. It’s the exploration of guilt, empathy, hate, and devotion that prove much more salient in this story, and harder to navigate. Most challenging of all is the gapping, cavernous maw we find inside ourselves when the catharsis of closure proves unattainable. 

But first, back to that misdirection of the impressive hype machine behind this game. Some of it is clever, and in service to the betterment of one’s experience in playing the game. Many of the trailers, as they reveal glimpses of the story focus on Ellie, now a young adult living in Jackson Wyoming, falling in love with new comer to the series, Dina. Ellie is still that angry, foul-mouthed punk whose fearlessness is nothing short of mollifying. However after spending the last 4-5 years in the relative safety of the Jackson settlement after relocating there with Joel, she has had less cause to express herself in such terms, and thus is something of an introvert. Enter Dina, who is brash, ostentatious, a gravitational force of attention in a room. They kiss, and are on the path to falling in love. We see Dina often in scenes from which are clearly the prologue, never in the sequences in Seattle that comprise the vast majority of the game. Also in the trailers we see Ellie forced to watch something traumatic, for which she vows revenge. In the announcement trailer she whispers, in one of the most chilling lines you’ll ever hear in a game or elsewhere, “I am going to find, and I am going to kill, every last one of them”. The implication is not hard to grasp. The obvious assumption is that Dina is violently killed and she goes on a quest for revenge with Joel accompanying her in solidarity and support. 

None of this happens. Instead it is Joel who is horrifically murdered. As the prologue reached its climax, and characters on both sides of the coming conflict where placed within their narrative positions, it became increasingly clear that this was not going to go the way I thought it would. Still, I hoped the story would zig or zag, even as the window of opportunity to do so became increasingly small. I thought, even as the game’s ostensible antagonist blew part of Joel’s leg off maybe he could walk around with a limp. Then she bashed his head in with a golf club. Watching Joel die is devastating. Watching Ellie watch Joel die, begging the assailants to stop, is indescribably worse. With that, the game’s story kicks into gear. It is Dina who accompanies Ellie to a war torn Seattle to enact justice on those who did this.

Difficult as this was to take in at first, these were the right narrative decisions to make. Had TLOU2 played out exactly as we assumed it would, it would have been a far inferior story. Dina is a brand new and exciting character. To introduce her only as a vector to inflict pain on our main character and that’s it would have been awfully reductive, as would a tale of companionship that would be similar to the first TLOU being told again. Furthermore to waste the opportunity to explore the relationship between Ellie and Dina in a medium that hasn’t given a lot of voice to the LGBTQ+ community would have been unforgiveable in retrospect. Some of the best moments of the game are the quieter ones between Ellie and Dina. Ellie’s cover of Take On Me by A-ha, that she plays for Dina in that derelict record shop is likely to be the only version of that song I will ever like. When an absolutely shell shocked Ellie returns to Dina after brutally extracting information from someone regarding Joel’s killer, her trauma is palpable. Were Dina not there to gently guide Ellie back from an emotional cliff, she may have been lost to that void. Ellie can see herself teetering on the edge of discovering what this quest will ultimately do to her. “I don’t want to lose you”, she begs. “Good”, Dina replies. It’s my favourite moment in the story.

The team at Naughty Dog used the misdirection of the trailers to unmoor you from your sense of stability and expectations. By expecting, anticipating even, a certain narrative that ends up being wildly different I was effectively primed to be more emotionally vulnerable and defenseless. This is not to imply the story itself is emotionally manipulative- far from it- but that it creates a slight sense of disorientation that dismantles whatever steeled resolve you had been building up to play this game. That being said, the trailers also just flat out lied, showing Joel in scenes that he would end up not being in, what with him being very much dead. This is less defensible on an analytic and perhaps even ethical level. I don’t approve of it in academic terms however I am convinced it was in the service of the aforementioned vulnerability the game wanted to cultivate going into this. I feel like I’m fine with this, even though I think that I shouldn’t be. 

Before going any further into the surprises the story has to offer, this is still a game that you have to play. Luckily, it is a damn good one. The fundamentals of the gameplay are not markedly different than the first one that predates this by a whole console generation, but there are some truly stellar evolutions of the core experience. First and foremost is this game has the best level design of any third person game I’ve ever played and its really not even close. The extent to which you must observe, adapt to, and utilize the environment to successfully navigate enemy encounters is thrilling. You won’t get by with just a cursory glance of your surroundings and then engage, you must be studious, lest you easily become out maneuverered by your opponents and lose the opportunity to do the same to them. Some of the solo fights Ellie had to work though in Day 2 of Seattle were particularly expansive. 

While enemy AI is often a subject of appraisal in video games, I’ve never cared too much either way. This is the first time I was truly impressed. The apparent randomness of their patrols once they are actively searching for you is especially engaging. The dogs used by the Washington Liberation Front- AKA the Wolves- complicate encounters in a number of ways. The communication system of whistles used by the cult like Seraphites- AKA the Scars- is oddly intimidating and I love it. As good as the first TLOU is, I often found myself able to force a rhythm out of the encounters, bending them specifically to play out on my terms; not so this time. Combat was often an unpredictable mixture of strategically planed stealth takedowns, reactionary switch ups in tactics and weapons, and desperate last stands with whatever ammo I had left. You know its bad when you are hastily reloading the shotgun in a corner and you don’t know which direction they are coming from, and I mean that in the best way. 

And what a pleasure doing something as simple as reloading a weapon was. The breadth and fidelity of animations in game are highly convincing. Ellie’s frantic dive into the grass upon sprinting conveys her ad hoc guerrilla tactics perfectly. The silent fury seared into her face as she quietly drives her knife into a person’s throat is frightening and compelling. The tactile precision in which she upgrades her weapons at workbenches is what I can only describe as maintenance porn. Gruesome as it is, the muscular force that is depicted when she essentially tomahawks a skull with a blade or blunt weapon is strikingly vivid. Watching her fingers dance around a six string as you manually adjust the chords through a reasonably intuitive interface is surprisingly cathartic. 

These are somewhat passive and granular observations on what it’s like to actually operate within this world, but the mechanical evolutions are just as satisfying. Most rewarding is the care taken to expand the spectrum of stealth and more explicit forms of combat in equal measure. Crafting IEDs and tricking unsuspecting goons into their path is astonishing in its savagery. The patterns of viscera and splatter look disturbingly close to impressionist art, even to the point where I was borderline impressed with my work. Yet the makeshift plastic bottle silencer applied to a pistol is just as satisfying if you can use it within the proper contexts. On a tangential note, is wild how much TLOU2 recreates the skill set of Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4. I never thought a disgruntled teenager with chip on her shoulder would be the spiritual successor to Solid Snake or Big Boss, but here we are. 

One of the unsung heroes of the first TLOU’s suite of options was the encounter/checkpoint restart system. As the battles have grown larger in scale and more labyrinthine, this returning option is even more appreciated. While the game places no value judgment in terms of rewards or metrics on your success and failures at your attempts to be as undetected as possible, plenty of players just prefer it, myself included. I find it very rewarding to navigate at least part of an encounter quietly, exerting the upper hand it gives me over my opponents. However even with the listen mode, and a frankly obnoxiously intense sound indicator it’s just very easy to get discovered, at least in an new encounter. Restarting at the beginning of an encounter or situational checkpoint without having to clumsily die is extremely user friendly. The game may not encourage such anal-retentive play styles, but it’s more than happy to accommodate them.

 It’s funny how my attempts at conducting myself discretely, with a concern for Ellie’s physical health being paramount, waned considerably in the second half of the game. It’s once you clear the mid point everything changes. Everything gets more complicated, and so much harder. You have to start playing as Abby, the person that murdered Joel. At first it seems like it will just be for a flashback, as an appendix of such experience separate the days spent in Seattle as Ellie. But then it keeps going. It’s all interesting enough, if slightly superfluous at first. While I enjoyed my time with Abby initially, it eventually dawned on me, as it no doubt did at one point or another for everyone who has played it, that this was no brief sojourn. I was going to be stuck playing as Abby for nearly as long as I was with Ellie. It’s not that I dislike Abby, I do like her. I understand what the game’s objective is here, to erode the binary understanding of good and evil or protagonist and antagonist. Still, it made me feel uncomfortable. 

That discomfort manifested in how I played as her. I paid less attention and care to successfully or gracefully navigating my way through enemy encounters. Ellie is smaller and just a bit faster than Abby, making her more ideal for stealth. Things seemed just a touch less intuitive with Abby. I didn’t care how I got through the gameplay scenarios with Abby for the most part, as long as I got through them. Eventually that sense of discomfort metastasized into something more recognizable: guilt. Guilt that I wasn’t with Ellie anymore, that my efforts weren’t being put towards her goal with which I was mentally and spiritually aligned. Guilt that I may be beginning to not just empathize with Abby and her plight, bet even associate with her. It felt like a profound betrayal to Ellie, one I was not comfortable committing but had no choice but to do so. It made me feel just a little sick. It didn’t matter who I thought was in the moral right. Neither of them was, both of them were. But I was here for Ellie.

This unease builds to a nauseating crescendo upon reaching the culmination of Ellie and Abby’s three days in hell when they face off. Due to the atypical and refreshingly contemplative pacing of the game, it was hard to tell if we are actually at the end of the game when they clash in Seattle; it was certainly reasonable to wonder if this was the finale. Being forced to play this sequence as Abby, and fight against Ellie felt as fundamentally wrong as anything I’ve ever been asked to do in a game. I almost put the controller down, questioning if I wanted to continue. Plenty of games have presented me with seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the merits of them being technically hard. I’ve never encountered a situation where I just didn’t know if I had it in me to do it. I hope I never do again. What Joel did to Abby’s family was wrong, if desperately impulsive, and maybe he got what he deserved. Abby went through a journey of moral discovery bruising enough for her to earn some kind of peace with her newfound companion. But I don’t care. Ellie is one of my favourite characters ever, and the foundation of those sentiments were built through her relationship with Joel. Abby robbed Ellie of that relationship. I was going through this misery simulator with her and for her. Every time I was suppose to strike Ellie I hesitated, often resulting in failure and the death of Abby, “my character”. I was fine with this, the credits can roll I thought. But I had to continue; I had to succeed on the terms dictated by the current context. It was undoubtedly my least enjoyable experience in the game, which paradoxically enough implies the fruition of its objectives. 

Part of the reason it’s all so hard relates back to that inescapable sense of guilt. In this sense however it is the guilt you share with Ellie, for the lost time and the lost chance of reconciliation between her and Joel. Their relationship is broken when she learns finally what Joel did for her in the climax of the first game. I’m not here to litigate if she responded the right way when she cut Joel out her life. No one can determine that, not even Ellie or Joel. But the relief and the hope that comes with it when Ellie admits to Joel that she wants them both to find a way back into each other’s lives is profound. Abby robs them of this journey they were about to take together. But they wouldn’t have had to at all had they found a different path forward years earlier. Ellie hates Abby for what she did to Joel, yes; but she is no doubt struggling with her own actions towards Joel put into stark relief by Abby’s actions ensuring there would be no undoing them. Ellie’s rage towards Abby is an expression of her own guilt over the time she and Joel had lost. 

To Abby’s credit, once you accept the reality that you are playing as her for the next 10-12 hours, her story is quite interesting. The disillusionment that takes her friend Owen and eventually her regarding the aimless conflict between their Washington Liberation Front and the The Seraphites is really compelling. While I didn’t know where it was going at first, her befriending of two apostate cultists, Lev and Yara, is excellent. I feel rather ignorant for not understanding right away that Lev had been cast out for being transgender. At first he simply says he was persecuted for cutting his hair, although he does explain with an ambiguous apprehension that makes a lot of sense now. I didn’t think much of it other than that cults are weird. It’s only after a confrontation with several vengeful Seraphites in which they used Lev’s given name, Lilly, against him in a derogatory sense did I understand the stakes. Much like the representation of Ellie and Dina’s romance, I was excited to see a video game, especially one of such calibre and budget (and therefore with less institutional freedom to take risks), tackle the social politics of such topics. As a cis-gender person I can’t really say to what extent they were successful, but I admire the attempt. I look forward hearing what people with more personal experiences in this regard have to say about this sub plot. 

I can imagine it will be challenging for people of different demographics to play certain sequences in this game. There is violence against women, transgender persecution, bigoted slang against gay people. I get the sense that this game subjects people to these traumas in a dissociated sense, not because of their identity. This is the apocalypse and bad things will happen to everyone regardless of who they are. In that sense the game is something of an equal opportunity misery simulator (although not in all cases, such as the aforementioned bigoted rhetoric), which maybe from a certain twisted perspective is progressive. Again, this is an assessment for members of the LBGTQ+ to make, not someone like me. I think we could all at least agree that there is something endearing about the idea that Ellie absolutely could and would fuck up anyone that messed with her on such terms. 

TLOU2 wants you to look at Ellie and Abby with a comparative gaze. Are they running along parallel trajectories, and thus neither is morally inferior or superior? Are they something of a ying and yang combo, their experiences being an inverse of each other but part of a whole? Are they both stuck in a cycle of reciprocal and escalating violence of their own making, an ever-darkening downward spiral? It could be a combination of all of these and more, but I found some of my observations to be striking. As we spend time with Abby in Seattle more and more of her friends have grave misgivings about the heinous things they did to Joel. They all wanted him dead for killing Abby’s father in the first game, but their retribution was sadistic. “We tortured him”, Owen confesses and condemns part way through. Abby’s frustration with Owen’s faltering solidarity implies she knows he is right. It’s extremely telling that when she has that dream where she finds herself back in the hospital where Joel killed her father to save Ellie, her memories remix to include Yara and Lev, the two Seraphites that saved her life a few hours prior, who’s safety is unknown. It obviously compels her to track them down and protect them. Abby is doing something morally righteous to atone for her past sins.             

Ellie is something of the opposite, motivated by love and devotion to descend into morally questionable revenge. Unless it’s guilt that motivates her, caused by her estrangement from Joel for which she is at least partly responsible for perpetuating, if not instigating. It’s up to each person to decide where Ellie lies on that spectrum and thus how similar she and Abby are. When Ellie kills Mel, Abby’s frenemy, she recoils in disgust upon learning after the fact that Mel was pregnant. The horror of such a revelation is essentially enough to make Ellie give up, if reluctantly, her quest for Abby. In contrast, after Abby and Ellie have beaten the hell out each other, Abby is about to slit an incapacitated Dina’s throat. When Ellie begs her to stop, telling her that Dina too is pregnant, Abby ominously responds, “good”. It’s only Lev’s intervention that stops her. One could infer that this makes Abby a shade more reprehensible than Ellie, but consider altering the sequences of events. If Abby had accidently killed Dina first, would Ellie have restrained herself, given the option, when confronting Mel? We’ll never know. 

Even their respective journeys, while vastly different, are thematically tethered in many ways beyond the obvious violent cycles of hate. I found it especially interesting how at the same point in day three, they are both having some vivid Heart Of Darkness/Apocalypse Now moments. Ellie’s boat journey through the ruins of a Seattle during a relentless storm mirror the ghostly infiltration into Cambodia. Abby and Lev’s desperate flee from the Seraphite commune as it burns around them in a fog of war and chaos is highly evocative of the quagmire that Vietnam became, and some of the night time sequences in the Coppola film. As Ellie descends upon the island aquarium where she believes Abby to be, mustering all her fury and paranoia, the fever dream mental decline of Martin Sheen becomes reminiscent. When Abby and Lev escape the burning remains of the Seraphite home, overlooking the wreckage as it disappears into the horizon from their boat, its hard not to be reminded of Marlon Brando’s hushed whisper, the horror.

Regardless of the obvious mirroring of the two characters I still felt more tethered to Ellie, it’s worth exploring why. Ellie and the player are joined in the sense that they both can’t let go of something. For her it is the death of Joel, for the player it is the commitment and devotion to her life story, which at the time of the character swap is left on something of a cliff-hanger. Hers is a story that many have held dear for years and are unable to walk away from without some kind of finality. For Abby it is the opposite; she wants nothing more than to move on from what she has done, from the catalyst that sets this story into motion. She always wants to get away from things, from the Fireflies, from reckoning with what she did to Joel, from the WLF, from Seattle. In that sense I feel more thematically linked, not just emotionally, to Ellie than I ever could be to Abby. 

TLOU2 is a survival horror game, it’s supposed to be scary. It often is- remember the Rat King (it’s called the Rat King, apparently)!? Yet the Infected, in all of their gruesome glory, pale in comparison to what happens after Abby and Ellie face each other. If one is to distil terror and fear into a simple, primal sensation, nothing is more terrifying then the ostensible epilogue where it seems like the game could end at any time. The domestic bliss that Ellie, Dina, and their baby JJ have found in each other is wonderfully fulfilling, but I just wasn’t ready to move on from what happened. Any moment seemed like it could be the last. Still shots are lingered on, rousing string music akin to a theme amp up; blackout transitions are stretched out into ambiguous lengths, implying the credits could be upon us. The shot of Ellie and JJ sitting on the tractor, her humming her potato song to him as the sun sets on their farm could easily be the most gorgeous closing shot of any game ever- if Ellie’s story was done. But it wasn’t. There’s something that seems deeply cruel about the idea of the final moments in the game proper being experienced from Abby’s perspective, even if no one died. Ellie, despite her desire to be, was not done with this and I was not done with Ellie. If the story is to end, it needs to be on her terms, of her own volition. I’m thankful the game obliged. 

When Ellie does track down Abby that second and final time, it’s hard to understand exactly what I wanted to happen. I don’t think I wanted Abby to die. I was mildly disappointed in Ellie, as the flashes of Joel’s death blitzed her senses, when she warned Abby she couldn’t let her leave. The resignation in her voice signals Ellie didn’t want to do this, but couldn’t move on unless she did. While I wanted her to have closure, I didn’t want Ellie to fight Abby again; I didn’t want Abby to die. More specifically I should say I didn’t want Ellie to have to go through killing her. Ellie had been inexorably consumed by hate to the point where she couldn’t be a devoted partner to Dina while her score with Abby was unresolved. I didn’t want to see Ellie have to sacrifice anymore of her being to the hatred that she no longer felt connected to beyond a primal, infectious level. Ellie makes many mistakes in this story, as do most characters; I feel very comfortable, and relieved to say letting Abby live was the right choice, although wow did she ever wait until the last second to realize this. After the relentless and stalking imagery of Joel’s death bringing them both to the brink, it was the memory of him as he lived that brought them both back. I didn’t realize that I was holding my breath right there with Abby up until Ellie let her go from under the water. 

I wish Ellie and Abby had said something more to each other after Ellie let her go. The two of them both bore the weight and scars of reciprocal violence of their own making. They had been defined by hate and suffering for far too long. They needed to find a way to take a step towards healing and forgiveness, and they were both uniquely equipped to do that for each other. It seems like they both wanted to, but neither of them had it in them to take the first step. Just as during Ellie’s memory of her surrogate father the day before she lost him, Joel didn’t quite have the emotional constitution to tell Ellie that of course her life matters, even if she didn’t think so. Ellie and Abby are too exhausted to go emotionally any further than they already had, and we never got a chance to see Joel and Ellie fully reconcile. But in both cases, we know they had finally set upon that path. I wanted that full unadulterated catharsis, but you have to be ok with art not giving you exactly what you think you want, and understand the moral triumph in Ellie simply wanting to try: to forgive Joel, and to forgive Abby. I wish they all said more to each other but I can live with them doing the best they could.  

As we reach the final moments of the story, Ellie, having returned to her farm but seeing Dina has left, picks up the guitar one last time. She lost two fingers in her final confrontation with Abby, forever incapable of playing the guitar as she once could. This was the instrument that forged her relationship Joel, how she expressed her love for Dina, and a symbol of her plans for the future with her son. She has lost her physical connection to a cornerstone of her psyche. As the enormity of what she lost to hate dawns on her, she looks calmly determined. She has lost enough, but understands that she has more to gain; a life of meaning that both she and Joel fought so hard for her to have. Ellie wanders off into parts unknown, presumably to return to Jackson to reunite with Dina and JJ. At least that would be what I think is happening. I think I need it to be. 

I’ve put together a companion playlist to listen to after you are finished with The Last Of Us Part 2.  Beyond the obvious, rustic folk vibes the game exudes, I wanted to find tracks that relate to its themes of devotion, grief, violence, pain, LBGTQ+ representation, love, and ultimately contentment. I tried to arrange the tracks into a sequential order that would correlate with certain narrative, emotional, and thematic beats in the game as they happened. I imagine listening to Flower by Jehnny Beth as the WLF discovers early on just how dangerous Ellie and Dina can be. As Ellie pushes herself physically and mentally further than she should at the hospital, and bares the trauma for it I imagine a track like Violence by Andy Stott. I think the raw and incisive passion of Björk’s Notget captures Ellie’s borderline suicidal decent into aquarium island. The mixture of intrigue and disorientation when you first play as Abby half way through the game reminds me of Earthquake by Deerhunter. When Abby and Lev survey the destruction of the Seraphite commune, the quiet disillusionment and cynicism of Left Speaker Blown by Liars comes to mind. I also wanted to get some pacific north west vibes in there where I could. The final two track on the list I feel are fitting odes to Ellie & Joel, and Ellie & Dina, respectively. You can listen to the playlist on Apple Music, Spotify, or right here.