Let’s talk about the dogs in ‘The Last of Us Part II’

I have a thing with games that involve committing violent acts against dogs: I don’t play them.

This isn’t even just about games. It took me six years and a global pandemic before I sat down and watched John Wick. So you can imagine the shock and horror I felt when I sat down to review The Last of Us Part II and discovered that dogs can pop up among your human enemies.

I made it through one encounter and then abandoned the game completely for an entire weekend while I wrestled with whether or not I could finish. In the end, I did, with no regrets. There’s a lot to be said abut the overall experience in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us sequel — more, in fact, than I’m permitted to talk about before the game is out on June 19. So I’m just focusing on the dogs for now.

For anything else that can be said about it, The Last of Us Part II is very successful as a piece of art eliciting an emotional response. Its bleak story simmers for hours in feelings of anger, sadness, and revulsion, and I felt every moment: Every slide of a blade across someone’s neck (and there are so many), every harried shout of an enemy grieving for whichever fallen comrade I’d just snuffed out.

It’s an exhausting game to play. The violence is so abundant and gratuitously graphic that I eventually just felt a cold numbness. I knew I needed to finish. I knew that doing that meant hours and hours more of incredibly intimate, up-close acts of violence. Keeping that wall up is draining, and it crumbled every time I was face-to-face with a dog.

Your human enemies respond believably when their furry friends are killed just a few feet away.

I’d flinch at their pained yelps. I’d flash the camera past their inert corpses as quickly as possible. I felt in my heart the vocal anguish of their caretakers. This is an actual thing in The Last of Us Part II: Your human enemies respond believably when their allies are gunned down or brutally stabbed just a few feet away. They call out for their fallen friends, and it seems to energize their efforts to kill you.

The game that you play in The Last of Us Part II is expertly made, no doubt. It builds on the original in important ways. The spaces you explore are larger and more strategically varied, whether you prefer stealth or open combat. The foes you face are smarter and, in the case of the humans, more fully realized as thinking, feeling beings. And the basic mechanics of it all just work better: When you do have to scrap, you feel like you’re in full control (if often badly outnumbered).

Of course, all of those advances together meant it was going to be a hellish and uncomfortable time whenever dogs appeared on the scene. I think that’s the whole idea of adding them to the sequel. The Last of Us Part II is constantly challenging you to feel something in the context of its grim, post-apocalyptic world. Dogs happen to be a personal pain point of mine, but they’re hardly the only pain point in the game.

Whatever it is that gets to you, the game forces you to confront it again and again. It pushes on your pain from different angles. It even, at various points, asks you to see things from the opposite perspective and understand the relationships and bonds you’re ripping apart when you snuff out someone’s life. It isn’t always successful, but it’s a powerful piece of work when the point lands, as it did for me with the dogs.

I’ll talk more about how the game goes about doing that when our full review publishes at launch. For now, all I have to offer are some tips for dealing with the dog death. I know there are lots of people out there who are concerned about these things, so hopefully this advice will help prepare those of you who are dead-set on playing.

The first and most important thing to understand is that at some point, you’re going to have to kill a dog in this game. It’s an unavoidable plot point. And I’ll be honest: The scene where it happens is fucking brutal. You’ll have to mash a button to get through it, but you can safely avert your eyes if you can’t bear to watch.

You also might want to try turning down the volume at that point. The moment in question follows a cutscene, and The Last of Us Part II allows you to pause cutscenes at any point. You’ll have enough warning to know what’s about to happen. So if you really don’t want to listen to a dog in its death throes, just stop the action for a moment and hit mute.

I’m not 100 percent certain, but I’m fairly sure the rest of the game’s dogs can be safely skipped. It’s not an easy thing to manage, since you’ll need to rely on stealth during those segments, and the dogs, which can sniff you out, exist to break your stealth. But it’s possible, and there are things you can do to tilt the odds in your favor.

If you want to keep things challenging, try running anytime you’re spotted. Getting away is a perfectly valid strategy in most situations. Just commit to playing a stealth-only game when the dogs show up and reload the latest checkpoint (which won’t cost you too much time, thanks to an aggressive autosave feature) if you’re caught and cornered.

Finally, if all else fails, you should just embrace easy mode. The Last of Us Part II has a master difficulty setting, but it also lets you go in and tweak the individual difficulty for a variety of categories: Player, Enemies, Allies, Stealth, and Resources. It’s pretty cool stuff in the way it gives players of varying skill levels a huge amount of direct control over how the game challenges them.

If the dogs are too much, just dial the Stealth and Enemies settings all the way down to their lowest point. It’ll make your quiet creeping that much less noticeable to your foes, and also ease the challenge of getting away if you do happen to be spotted. The only penalty you’ll face for tweaking the difficulty is having to start over with whatever encounter you’re working on.

That’s my advice. As long as you’re cool with the whole dog-murder-as-plot-point thing — and it’s totally fine if you’re not! — it’s entirely possible to get through The Last of Us Part II while minimizing the pain you inflict on our virtual furry friends.