A powerful yet flawed artistic triumph

Before we launch into this review, a brief note. Video games are made by people, and blockbusters like The Last of Us Part II only happen after years of work by a veritable army. It’s a challenging process that sometimes creates unhealthy working environments. The need to finish something on a deadline that can be so unpredictable that it sometimes leads to significant amounts of enforced overtime – a situation known as “development crunch.”

More often than not, this occurs when studio mismanagement crashes against the unbending business realities of releasing a major game. Unfortunately, The Last of Us Part II developer Naughty Dog has faced reports in recent months alleging, via anonymous sources inside the studio, that there’s been an unhealthy march to the game’s June 19 release.

We think it’s important for you to understand the human cost that goes into creating a game on this scale, and we’d encourage you to read Kotaku’s revealing look behind the scenes at Naughty Dog. The Last of Us Part II is a tremendous effort, but the years that went into making it took a heavy toll on some of those who did that work.

This review contains major spoilers for The Last of Us Part II. 

The Last of Us Part II is Joel’s world; Ellie’s just living in it.

Yes, Ellie replaces her former traveling partner as the playable star of Naughty Dog’s much-anticipated sequel. In fact, we don’t spend a whole lot of time with Joel at all. But beneath the surface, this is really a story about his failure, and how the catastrophic rippling of that failure led to a pile of unnecessary deaths and broken lives.

If the only thing you want to know is whether or not The Last of Us Part II is successful as a piece of art, as a creation that elicits a strong emotional response, then the answer is yes. Absolutely. I was horrified and disgusted for much of my 30-odd hours playing. More than once, I just didn’t want to keep playing.

That’s not a knock on the game, either. It’s very effective at making an impact. But to paraphrase an old saying, the chittering mushroom zombie that wants to end you is in the details.

A tale of two protagonists

You only spend about half the game playing as Ellie. The rest of that time, you’re walking (and running and creeping) in the shoes of a total newcomer, Abby. We don’t know much about Abby at first. She’s impressively ripped. She’s obviously a born survivor. She’s also responsible for brutally murdering Joel in the opening hours of the story. And so, Abby is initially cast as a villain. She’s the motivation for Ellie’s vengeance quest.

It’s not that simple, though. Abby had her own, deeply personal reasons for doing what she did. We learn as much when, halfway through the game, a hard U-turn winds back the clock three full days and we’re suddenly in control of the woman Ellie had been trying to kill. It feels like the start of a new game, and in many ways it is.

It’s here we get to see the other side of Abby, the one who serves faithfully in a local militia, who has friends and lovers and a rich inner life of her own. We come to realize that what felt in those early hours like a brutal murder was actually a righteous act of personal release. We sympathize with Abby, and through her actions are made to understand that she’s not actually a bad person.

Throughout the game, both women are constantly haunted by memories of their past. The Last of Us Part II is riddled with extended flashback sequences that reveal more about what each of them has been through, and how choices made by them and others – most significantly, Joel – shaped their lives.

This is really a story about Joel’s failure, and the catastrophic rippling of that failure.

It’s a nice idea in theory, letting us live in each character’s past during what was often a happier time in their lives. We’re meant to connect with their humanity in these moments, and at times it works as intended. But many of the flashbacks stretch on for too long, killing the momentum of the present-day plot and confusing a narrative arc that is already built around multiple perspectives.

Part of the problem, too, is the ambiguity around Joel and his relationship with Ellie, and the way it undermines our understanding of her as a character. Back at the end of the first game, Joel told Ellie he had saved her from making what he described as an unnecessary sacrifice. She believed she was the only one with a natural immunity to a world-ending pandemic, and Joel told her no. There were others, he said, and fatal attempts to produce a vaccine had all failed before. So when he killed an occupied hospital full of people to save her, it was to prevent her meaningless death.

That was a lie. Ellie is the only one with immunity as far as we’ve ever been told. But The Last of Us Part II constantly skirts around the question of whether or not she ever found out about the deception. It’s treated as this big mystery until the late stages of the game, presumably to put a finer point on the magnitude of Joel’s failure. All it really does, though, is muddy our understanding of Ellie’s inner truth.

That lie was just a symptom. Joel lost the opportunity to raise his flesh-and-blood child at the dawn of the apocalyptic outbreak, when a violent act committed by a scared and confused human left his daughter dead. He saw in Ellie, perhaps subconsciously, a second chance. And he fucked it up. He was selfish. He robbed Ellie of her agency in the biggest choice a person could ever have to make. He took lives in the process.

Ellie’s awareness of the lie, or lack thereof, is crucial to understanding her development as a character. With or without the lie, Joel was a father figure to her. She picked up his fierce sense of loyalty, but also his lack of trust in the surrounding world. He was shattered by those early days of the apocalypse, when his wife and child died. 

The scars that trauma left were then handed down to Ellie. It shaped her into the person we meet now. And honestly, that person isn’t so great. But who is Ellie without Joel? The sins of the father are passed on to the child. Even in death, he robs her of her agency. Keeping the fate of Joel’s lie a secret from us even as we occupy Ellie’s perspective means the why?! of her actions remains elusive and unclear until the end. 

And then what of Abby? She was unwillingly pulled into Joel’s destructive orbit and negatively influenced by that proximity. Was her murder of Joel justifiable? Maybe. But she’s not like Ellie. As we come to know her better, Abby almost seems like someone who could break out of that cycle. The collision between these two personalities is what defines this story, even if the margins that flesh them out aren’t always filled in as clearly as they could be.

A giant leap forward

For all the story’s missteps, The Last of Us Part II is a triumphant video game sequel. In every way, it offers thoughtful and satisfyingly complex expansions of the ideas laid out in the previous game. It’s a bigger world, and one brimming with more detail. But it’s also a visibly better game at nearly every turn.

The foundation is still a mix of stealthy creeping mixed with out loud, gruesome combat. The world is a deadly place for Ellie and Abby both, and the more you can remain unseen, the better your chances for survival. That survival also depends once again on resources: You need bullets for your guns, rags and alcohol for your first aid kits, and all manner of other detritus that can be repurposed into useful tools. Eventually, if you choose the right upgrades, you can even craft your own bullets and other tools of self-defense.

The play spaces where your creeping and combat unfold are also much larger than they were, giving you a wider array of strategic options. The Last of Us and its sequel both embrace the idea of turning gameplay challenges into a sort of make-your-own-solution sandbox. You have a space to explore, some number of foes populating it, and whatever tools you’ve gathered or crafted. 

The creative ways you play within that framework is the game. By making the spaces larger and injecting both them and the enemy lineup with more variety – there are now dogs that can sniff you out and tank-like mushroom zombies that spew poison gas, among other threats – The Last of Us Part II immediately offers richer gameplay.

There’s also an attention to detail that confidently crosses all borders to make the overall experience more unsettling. The human foes you take on, and there are many, aren’t just nameless mobs. If you kill a person or even a dog who’s part of a larger group, you’ll hear a grief-stricken voice shout out their name and see your foes adopt a more aggressive stance; it’s not like Ellie has the market cornered on revenge, after all.

For all the story’s missteps, The Last of Us Part II is a triumphant video game sequel.

Your human and mushroom zombie enemies both are also capable of coordinated behavior, such as when two people push in from separate directions to flank you or when mushroom zombies disperse and regroup as you press an attack. Having that added pressure in combat has the effect of making a retreat, always a viable option in The Last of Us, even more appealing. Part II feels like a more challenging game, but importantly, it’s in ways that press you to embrace the variety inherent in each encounter’s sandbox.

Ellie and Abby are both competent when it’s time to throw down, but they play a little differently. Ellie, who’s younger and armed with an indestructible pocket knife, is lighter on her feet and deadlier when attacking with stealth on her side. She can dodge around lunges with ease and counter with quick slashes.

Abby is a weightlifting hobbyist and more of a bruiser. She’s also got combat training, and is generally more effective against the larger, tougher foes. Stealth is more of a challenge for Abby, especially against certain enemies. The the dreaded Clicker mushroom zombies, which attack with a one-hit kill, are easily dispatched by Ellie when she’s in stealth. For Abby, however, you need to unlock a certain upgrade and have the resources on hand to make a limited-use shiv.

The two characters are similar enough that it’s not a total shock when you’re suddenly forced to start the game over as Abby. But they do play differently, and Naughty Dog smartly built their separate-but-parallel journeys to cater to, and test, their respective strengths and weaknesses.

On top of all that, The Last of Us Part II is just a stunningly beautiful game. From the flooded streets of downtown Seattle to the lush, overgrown greenery of woods that have encroached upon civilization, you’ll frequently find yourself stopping to just stare at the surrounding world. 

The tiny details matter just as much. You’ll stumble across entire stories written into the debris of crumbling buildings. Scattered notes you pick up can fill in the blanks to explain why you found a decaying skeleton clutching a gun in a random corner. The Last of Us already did this well, but Part II takes it further, thanks in large part to your widening knowledge of the world and the people living within it.

I only wish Naughty Dog had done more to open things up. There’s one early section of the game that drops Ellie and her traveling companion Dina into a large area with an open-ended set of objectives. It’s a cool glimpse of how a third Last of Us game might further evolve, but nothing that comes after really matches it. It’s a nifty stretch of game, but one that, in terms of pacing, feels strangely out of sync with everything that comes after it.

Tying it all together

The hardest thing about The Last of Us Part II isn’t the gameplay challenge. That’s actually very manageable, thanks to a wide range of difficulty settings that let you tweak not just overall toughness, but also the specific level of challenge tied to combat, stealth, resource gathering, and more.

No, the true wall that most players will have to climb here is figuring out how to enjoy an experience that is miserable, oppressive, and gratuitously cruel by design. The high level of visual fidelity that makes the world so expressive also means you’re coming face to face with gruesome, emotionally charged deaths regularly and repeatedly. It’s downright uncomfortable.

Even if you favor stealth, there’s still a story that brings out the worst sides of our humanity, putting you in situations where you’ll need to kill simply to avoid a Game Over screen. It’s never pleasant. In fact, The Last of Us Part II goes out of its way to make it emphatically unpleasant. Every slice of a blade across someone’s neck or pained whimper from a dying dog haunts you. It gets under your skin and visions of it linger even after you’re done playing.

I never did fully scale that wall and land in a place where Ellie and Abby’s pain-filled journeys beckoned me to play more. Extended breaks were necessary after each session, just so I could recharge. I’m also personally disappointed in Naughty Dog’s treatment of Ellie, and the choice to make her journey, and really her development as a person, more about Joel’s failure than it is about her ability to grow beyond his toxic influence. Maybe it’s because, deep down, I just want to see a better vision for this virtual world than the misery-filled one we’re all living in now. 

In the end, the bleak world view is a creative choice that Naughty Dog made. I may not agree, and living through those 30 hours was more painful and arduous than I could have imagined. But for all its tangible flaws and generally pessimistic view of the human condition, The Last of Us Part II is an artistic triumph that has the power to move those of us who have the stomach to consume it.

The Last of Us Part II is available June 19 on PS4.