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Well like many people, I spent most of yesterday diving into The Last of Us Part 2, a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, and an experience I have been waiting years for. But between plot leaks, ripped cutscenes and controversy about certain characters, I knew a war was brewing, and one has indeed arrived.

While The Last of Us Part 2 has a best-games-of-the-generation level critics score of 95 on Metacritic, it is getting absurdly, obviously bombed in the user score department, where it sits at a 3.4 out of 10 with 24,400 reviews. For context, the entire lifespan of The Last of Us 1 generated just over 9000 user scores. It's been 36 hours for The Last of Us Part 2.

So...what the hell is going on? Why are some people so mad about the game?

After playing it for around 12 hours or so, I can only comment on what appears to be about the first half, if the 25-30 hour reports of total playtime are true. And yet I remain confused. And simultaneously not very confused at all.

As a fan of the original, I am very much liking this one as well. Everything I loved about the first game is present here. These are some of the most beautiful, most detailed environments I've ever seen in a video game. The performance capture and writing is excellent, and the story swings between brutal lows and genuinely sweet highs.

If there's anything to complain about, many of the issues I had with the first game are still present here. I think clickers/infected are a poorly realized enemy type and I can't stand any of those encounters. I think the story gets broken up by overly long exploration and combat sequences, especially when Ellie is alone and there are not interspersed cutscenes to keep things moving.

And yet the issues with the game are nowhere near enough to offset the good so far, so something else is clearly at play here with everyone screaming about how much it sucks and they hate it.

So, what's up?

I have to go into early spoilers here, a bit, because it is more or less impossible to talk about the game without mentioning what is effectively the entire driving force behind the plot. So turn back now if you haven't played at all. But if you've made it through the first 2-3 hours, you know the "trauma" I'm about to dive into.
1) The Death
One impetus for anger in these early reviews is a plot point that I am willing to say that many players have probably reached (I am less convinced these many thousands of people have all reached the end in the first game, so if they experienced the ending, it was just through a leaked cutscene).

I am talking, of course, about Joel's brutal murder at the hands of Abby and her WLF/former Firefly contingent, where he's captured and beaten to death right in front of Ellie.

It is, of course, a shocking moment. It is also not terribly surprising, if you ask me.

Yes, I heard the leaks, but well, well before that ever happened, the very first trailer showcased that Ellie was on the warpath, out to get revenge. From that first moment, it seemed pretty clear to me that it was likely that some group had killed Joel, and even if Joel did appear in some spots later on, I figured those were either flashbacks or "imagined" appearances. I was half right, at least.

I simply disagree with the notion that killing a character you like is automatically a bad story decision. Sure, sometimes stories can go too far with the idea (the absurd bodycounts in Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, etc), and yet here I think it absolutely works as a driving force for the story.

And it's not like Joel isn't in the game! He's in it for the first part, and then we constantly get flashback sequences with Joel and Ellie that are some of the best moments of the game so far. So to see Joel killed and to immediately run out and trash the game seems bafflingly short-sighted to me.
2) The "Agenda"
Let me give you a helpful hint: If your negative review of The Last of Us 2, based on anywhere from zero to 30 hours of playtime, includes the words "agenda, feminism, SJW, woke, pandering or political correctness" you have already lost this argument.

The common refrain I'm already hearing is people saying "it's not about that, it's about the story " and yet there are hundreds of those user reviews that all cite one (or all) of those terms, saying that Naughty Dog is pushing some sort of agenda because...these characters exist in the game?

12 hours in, that's literally all that happens. Ellie is gay. She has a girlfriend who is her traveling companion. In the first half of the game the only commentary at all about any of this other than the mere existence of these characters is Ellie calling a guy a bigot who made a big deal out of her kissing Dina. The guy apologizes. He makes them sandwiches. The end.

It is ridiculous to me that these characters simply existing somehow defines an agenda. If a guy and a girl get together in a cutscene, it's par for the course in any game (or movie, or show). If a girl and a girl do it, it's being shoved in our faces!

Update: A previous version of the article talked about Abby potentially being trans, but it appears there is some confusion about this with many saying that she is not, and it seems I need to get further in the game to address it. But one of the pre-release focuses (and many of the current complaints) at least paint Abby as trans as part of the "agenda" issue, wrongly or otherwise.

People are allowed to dislike the game. And yet 95% of the stated reasons I've seen for people saying the game sucks are from people who have either A) not played it or B) have gotten to the first death and freaked out or C) have their own very, very clear agenda surfacing, which you definitely didn't see when they were playing a close to identical game as Joel.

I'm off to finish the back half of the game to see if anything changes for me, but for now, here we are.

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The Last Of Us Part 2: What's The Problem Here, Exactly?

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Well like many people, I spent most of yesterday diving into The Last of Us Part 2, a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, and an experience I have been waiting years for. But between plot leaks, ripped cutscenes and controversy about certain characters, I knew a war was brewing, and one has indeed arrived.

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By all accounts, The Last of Us Part 2 is a smashing success: The survival horror game has a 94 on review score-collating site Metacritic and has already sold millions of copies. Sony called it the "the fastest-selling first-party PS4 exclusive ever," which would be cause to celebrate ... except for the fact that merely discussing the game has become, within large swaths of the video game community, toxic. It's exhausting.

The dour stage was set before release, when part of the game leaked online. Sony, the game's publisher, said it had identified the people responsible, but not before some of the game's biggest twists had been made public. Upset by some of the story beats revealed in the leak and the game's LGBTQ representation, some bigoted reactionaries began a campaign to spoil the experience for other folks.

"It was one of the worst days of my life when the leak happened," Neil Druckmann, co-director of The Last of Us Part 2, said in a YouTube interview with Kinda Funny.

"A few hours later, [the leak is] everywhere and you're starting to get hate on every social media you're on, and soon that turns into death threats, anti-Semitic remarks, and just craziness I never could have anticipated," he continued, stating that he never thought the game would get this sort of hate. It's still visible on social media, where top replies to nearly anything from Naughty Dog will include responses like "The game is straight garbage." It seems unlikely that these opinions are coming from people who have actually played the game, given that it's impossible to explain how The Last of Us Part 2 could have racked up hundreds of negative user reviews on Metacritic immediately after launch.

Discussion about the survival horror game was also hampered by unusually restrictive embargo guidelines, which included sentences like "DO NOT include any beat-by-beat descriptions of pivotal narrative or cutscenes moments" and "DO NOT reveal the fate of ANY character or the inciting event." This prevented websites from discussing any specifics of the game's story, which was tricky considering that the game reveals something surprising within its first two hours that impacts the remainder of its 20- to 30-hour journey. Curiously, at least one website, GameSpot, actually published two reviews, one without spoilers and one that dove right into those details. The latter was published after the embargo was fully lifted.

Why go through such lengths, especially when the internet was flooded with half-informed takes and speculation based on what had already leaked? Control. Naughty Dog no longer steered the narrative of The Last of Us Part 2, and this was one way to try and regain control. The studio had already gone to great efforts to maintain a tight grip on what folks knew about the experience. As Kotaku reported, Naughty Dog at one point showed a fake scene during a trailer to make people believe that a character would be more present in the game than they actually were.

The vibe around the game hasn't gotten much better since then. On June 12, Vice published its review of The Last of Us Part 2, in which critic Rob Zacny said that while the game had "memorable moments" that made for great "spectacle," he was less taken with the story and characters. "Nobody ever reconsiders their quest for vengeance," Zacny wrote. "Everyone acts under a kind of vindictive compulsion that goes little remarked and unexamined." Zacny went on to describe the game's message as complacent, full of "oppressive bleakness and violence."

While the vast majority of reviews have lavished The Last of Us Part 2 with all sorts of praise, a handful of outlets - Polygon included - have been slightly more critical of the blockbuster game. According to Zacny, Vice's review prompted a Sony representative to reach out on behalf of Naughty Dog.

"They felt some of the conclusions I reached in my review were unfair and dismissed some meaningful changes or improvements," Zacny told Polygon over Twitter messages.

Zacny clarified that the exchange wasn't "confrontational," but that it was nonetheless "unusual," as the site doesn't typically have big publishers asking in an official capacity why a review reads the way it does. Such things can happen, of course, though often with smaller developers, or from publishers who have spotted a factual error in a piece that they want corrected.

"I was happy to unpack a bit of my reasoning, however, and received a perfectly cordial message in response," Zacny said. Naughty Dog's PR team declined to comment on Polygon's inquiry about its exchange with Vice.

On social media, responses from The Last of Us Part 2's creative team have gotten a bit more personal - and public. Co-director Neil Druckmann has been hopping into discussion about the game to wag his finger at journalists who were making fun of a tasteless post that had compared The Last of Us Part 2 to Schindler's List. Other developers, like God of War's Cory Barlog, closed ranks around Druckmann, going so far as to unfairly position dissenting opinion as an attempt to tear developers down.

Perhaps the defensiveness was unavoidable. When Naughty Dog's leak first surfaced, plenty of game makers went on social media to express their disappointment that gaming outlets reported on it at all. Rather than seeing such reportage as a part of the job - it's news when one of the biggest games of the year has a huge leak months before release - news writers were positioned as betrayers who weren't on the "side" of developers. Now that the game is actually out, that tension between the people involved with the game and members of the press has only become more noticeable.

In late June, reporter (and my former colleague) Jason Schreier tweeted out an innocuous and fairly broad hot take about the length of AAA games, a subject that is often a topic of debate. No specific game was mentioned in the original post, although Schreier did mention The Last of Us Part 2 as an inspiration in a threaded reply. The tweet went viral.

Video games are too long
- Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) June 28, 2020

In response, Troy Baker - the voice actor behind Joel, one of the main characters in both The Last of Usgames - quoted Schreier's tweet alongside a bizarre quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the value of a critic versus that of a creator. "It is not the critic who counts," the quote starts. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat." Hundreds of people then came down on Schreier for daring to say anything at all.

Schreier had already clarified that although The Last of Us Part 2 had been the game that inspired his tweet, his central message wasn't specific or limited to Naughty Dog's game.

"Games are too long because marketers believe they'll only sell bazillions of copies and generate bazillions in revenue for stockholders if they can put 'biggest world ever' on the box," he said, in response to another tweet on the subject. Schreier's offhand critique spoke to some dark truths about the general state of the video game industry. He was referring to the push to make bigger video games as a means of justifying the $60 cost, and how that pads game length. Worse, that endless content push can also lead to crunch and burnout from the people who have to fill these worlds with endless things to do - including game developers at Naughty Dog, according to Schreier's own reporting.

Still, Schreier clarified that his tweet was mostly a joke. "Any take that declares something definitive about 'video games' should not be taken seriously enough to warrant a 400-word Theodore Roosevelt quote," he said to another Twitter user.

That protective shield around The Last of Us Part 2 can be seen any time the creatives or talent behind the game jump into critical conversations about it. It's made talking about the game exhausting. On the one hand, we have bigots trying their hardest to tear the game down for its inclusion of queer characters. On the other hand, we've got the people who actually made the game putting their figurative fists up. On the third hand (go with it), we've got fans and professional critics trying to share their own takes on the game, good and bad and everything in between.

And then there's the game itself, which by proxy of its tense genre and heavy subject matter, is also onerous to trudge through. The Last of Us Part 2 would be arduous to play in any context, but it feels particularly oppressive right now, during an actual pandemic in which we're all trying our best not to lose our minds. You almost can't blame the creative team at Naughty Dog for being Too Online about all of this. They care about their baby, yes, but more crucially, there's little else to do right now. The Last of Us Part 2 was, at one point, positioned as the PlayStation 4's swan song, a grandiose heavy-hitter from Sony's most esteemed studio, set to release before the next generation of video games. Instead, The Last of Us Part 2 leaked ahead of release and exploded into controversy.

If we're truly taking the game seriously, nuanced and critical conversations aren't just necessary - they need to happen without fear that you'll be perceived as a bully or enemy. Not all Naughty Dog conversations fall into that trap, of course. I appreciated seeing a Naughty Dog employee say that there are many LGBTQ members on the team, and that not taking them into account threatens to erase them. And I've also loved seeing some workers dish about the extraordinary thought put into everything, like the act of breaking glass.

But, based on my own conversations with fellow critics, many have assumed an air of wariness about The Last of Us Part 2 discourse. It feels as if there are all these larger forces working toward maintaining the status quo when it comes to big-budget games. It's not enough that the game is selling well, and that most reviews are positive; you can't fall out of line with that general consensus, even as a joke, without having to worry about whether or not a publisher will be looking over your shoulder, or if hundreds of fans will blow up your social media. It is not an environment that is conducive to encouraging honest reviews or critical discussion, which is ultimately a disservice to the game itself.

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The Last of Us Part 2 has become a minefield

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While Naughty Dog's horror game The Last of Us Part 2 has released to critical acclaim and great sales, hostility has risen between the studio and journalists reporting on or critiquing the game. It's made discussing the game at all exhausting and toxic.

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A frightening parallel between the content of the video game and the current pandemic of 2020

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It's crunch time in the offices of Naughty Dog, the storied videogame developer in Santa Monica, California. On the morning of February 6, more than 300 artists, designers, and programmers are assembled in a maze of workstations, applying thousands of final micro-touches to a game they have been crafting for nearly six years called The Last of Us Part II. Neil Druckmann, the game's 41-year-old director, inspects the computer-lined trenches with the swept-back hair, frizzled beard, and beleaguered look of Jon Snow during a long battle.

Druckmann's adversaries? Time, his own perfectionism, and the reactions of a bunch of strangers off the street.

Since February 2017, Naughty Dog has been inviting scores of gamers to its offices to test out the active construction site that is the unfinished game. These playtesters, as they're called, consent to being filmed as they move through the game; then they fill out questionnaires and meet in groups to discuss what's working and what isn't. Back in the early stages of playtesting, Naughty Dog was troubleshooting the rough infrastructure of the game: how its world holds up, what people felt drawn to, where they got lost. Now, during this agonizing final stretch of development, Druckmann's team is watching for players' minute responses to the narrative and emotional beats. In the videofeeds piped out of the playtesting room, the dev team logs and annotates every clench of the jaw and widening of the eyes. Druckmann has even taken to spying on the gamers live from his office.

This week, some of the team is focused on a particular sequence that needs attention. The animators are finessing a certain character's performance, while artists adjust the lighting, all in hopes of eliciting different responses from the playtesters on the next go-round. All of it stems from Druckmann's obsession with stretching the narrative dimensions of videogames to offer players more than just fun. "Certain sequences have to be tense. Certain sequences have to feel claustrophobic. Certain sequences have to feel lonely," he says. "I'd just like us to expand the vocabulary."

Back in the early 2000s, gaming pioneer John Carmack told writer David Kushner that "story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." And true enough, knuckle-whitening gameplay and drool-inducing visuals are still typically top priority for the major videogame studios. But for many years Naughty Dog has dedicated its whole pipeline and decisionmaking process to the contrary proposition-that story is everything. Very few games have vindicated that proposition as strongly as Druckmann's hugely successful 2013 opus, The Last of Us.

It was a game in the basic guise of a zombie shooter, but with a plot inspired by Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, a vision of a depopulated planet inspired by the book The World Without Us, and a severity of atmosphere inspired by the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. The story takes place in a world ravaged by a pandemic. A parasitic fungus has made the leap from insects to humans, turning its victims into zombies that sprout fruiting bodies from their heads, an idea Druckmann picked up from a Planet Earth segment about a real insect-zombifying parasite. ( Scientific American commended the game's scientific plausibility.)

You play as the bone-tired, battle-hardened Joel, a middle-aged smuggler not yet over the death of his daughter, who teams up with Ellie, a 14-year-old orphan whose infection-resistant DNA may be humankind's last hope. Twenty years after the outbreak, the duo sets off on a cross-country odyssey, through urban spaces reclaimed by nature, contending with the roaming infected, plus a ruthless military, vicious anarchists, and cold-blooded cannibals.

But there are tender shoots of beauty amid the rubble: the introspective melancholy of the soundtrack by Brokeback Mountain composer Gustavo Santaolalla with its spare, down-tuned guitar; the wonder with which Ellie beholds the remnants of civilization; and, at the center of it, the sense of found family, anchored in the deeply felt motion-capture and vocal performances of the actors who play Joel and Ellie, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson.

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Over its 15 to 20 hours of gameplay, The Last of Us conveys the immensity of cinema, the intimacy of a novel, and the sheer storytelling payload of, let's say, one or two seasons of an HBO series. It leads to an explosive climax that taps into the full power of the interactive medium: In a final violent showdown, Joel has no choice but to damn the world in order to save Ellie. It would be a heart-stopping scene if you were to watch it spool out on TV. But experiencing it while playing the character of Joel yourself? The ending generated Red Wedding-like shock waves, inspired passionate debate, and expanded people's ideas of what videogames are capable of.

Which all means, of course, that the sequel has a huge act to follow-and maybe even a target on its back. The more invested fans become, the greater the chance they will eventually turn against the creators. (See Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Mass Effect, et al.) And Last of Us fans are seriously invested; after all, they haven't just binge-watched the game's characters, they've inhabited them for hour upon hour. There's a TED talk, as well as numerous YouTube videos and Reddit threads with titles like " The Last of Us Changed My Life." An astonishing number of expectant fans are already sporting elaborate Last of Us Part II tattoos.

Druckmann and Naughty Dog, meanwhile, are determined to one-up themselves. The Last of Us Part II is arguably the biggest, most ambitious, most ravenously anticipated game in the notoriously ambitious studio's 36-year history. But for a team that has nudged games closer to the sensibilities of prestige television, the sequel's rollout has itself been subject to some pretty outrageous plot twists.

First came a self-inflicted delay. The sequel was originally due to come out at the end of February, but in fall 2019, the studio pushed the release date back to May. ("The size and scope of this game got the better of us," Druckmann explained in a blog post.) Then came the plague.

At the time of my visit to Naughty Dog in early February, floor stands of Purell hand sanitizer dotted the office; the World Health Organization had just declared a "public health emergency of international concern" over a novel coronavirus that emerged out of Wuhan, China.

In short, the rollout of a videogame set in the aftermath of a fictional pandemic was about to be thrown into disarray by a real one-and also, for good measure, by a group of hackers, an army of trolls, a sea of restive fans, and the storm of resentments and transformations that have roiled gaming for nearly a decade.

Neil Druckmann was born in Israel in 1978, and he spent countless hours of his childhood on the family computer, learning English partly by playing text-based adventure games like King's Quest and Space Quest while consulting a Hebrew-English dictionary. Every night, the family would watch the news together: "Local conflicts, terrorism, threats of war and retribution," he says. "It was ubiquitous."

Partly to escape that tense atmosphere, Druckmann's family moved to the US when he was 10. His awe at seeing his new home for the first time, he says, was part of what inspired Ellie's reaction to seeing the ruins of great American cities in The Last of Us.

Druckmann, who still retains traces of an accent, was a precocious reader and wannabe animator, but his parents steered him away from pursuing an education in the arts. Instead, he studied criminology at Florida State University, thinking he could be an FBI agent who wrote novels on the side. He took a programming class as an elective, though, and something clicked. "Wait," he recalls thinking, " this is how people make videogames!" A natural coder, he switched his major to computer science and eventually picked up a master's in entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon.

In 2004, he took a summer internship with Naughty Dog and never left. After a grueling year and a half of programming, he talked his way into the creative departments, working as a writer and designer on the action-adventure title Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. He took on an even larger role in the sequel, still straddling writing and design. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves boasted epic set pieces that unspooled, in the parlance of the industry, "on the stick"-as the player played-instead of in passive cinematic cut scenes. It was a thrilling exercise in how to intermesh story and interactivity-in what he and his cocreators called "the active cinematic experience."

Inspired, Druckmann began attending writing seminars. He inhaled a copy of Robert McKee's screenwriters' bible, Story, which would become a yearly read. By the time he'd gained enough clout in the studio to pitch a new game, he was hooked on a concept: Could you represent the growing bond and shifting dynamics between two contrasting characters through gameplay, and do it in a way that mirrors the connection between the player and the characters? That idea became the main kernel of inspiration for The Last of Us.

In an early version of The Last of Us, then titled "Mankind," only women were susceptible to the parasitic fungal infection that brings down civilization. In that version, Ellie was the only female believed to be immune. But that concept, Druckmann said in a 2013 speech, was a terrific failure. "The reason it failed is because it was a misogynistic idea," he confessed. "A lot of the female workers at Naughty Dog came up and said, 'I don't like this idea. I understand what you're trying to do-it is ultimately a story about the love of a girl-but the way it's coming off is you're having a bunch of women turn into monsters and you're shooting them in the face."

Druckmann reworked the plot. Then he became a father. Having an infant daughter quickly charged him with the awe and terror of caring for a child. It also deepened his growing conviction that videogames had to do better at representing female characters-beginning with his own.

This "awakening," as Druckmann calls it, further cemented his desire to turn Ellie into the most fully realized, nonsexualized female protagonist in videogames-an ambition that met with no small amount of resistance from other quarters in the gaming community. Early focus groups reacted poorly to Ellie, and later, marketing gurus advised against featuring her on the box art. Druckmann stood his ground.

By any measure, he was vindicated: The Last of Us sold 1.3 million units in its first week and went on to reach a total of more than 17 million, making it one of the highest selling PlayStation games ever. Among its many accolades, The Last of Us won Game of the Year at the annual awards presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, gaming's take on the Oscars.

So Druckmann and Naughty Dog kept pushing the envelope. In 2014 they released Left Behind, an expansion pack for The Last of Us -a kind of minigame that takes place, in part, before Joel and Ellie meet. This time, gamers played not as Joel but as a teenaged Ellie, and during the game, Ellie kisses her female best friend. One gaming critic called it "the first example of intimacy in a videogame that's meant anything."

Then in 2018, Ellie came fully out of the closet. At that year's E3 Expo, the game industry's marquee annual event, Naughty Dog unveiled a scene from The Last of Us Part II, with Ellie sharing a dance, and a kiss, with a new female character named Dina.

"I remember being in the room when that trailer was first shown," says Keza MacDonald, The Guardian's videogames editor, who is queer, "and thinking, you know, a few short years ago I was sitting here with my head in my hands because the latest Assassin's Creed had four playable men and no women, because female characters were 'too hard to animate.' And this year Sony is leading its E3 conference with a game starring a gay woman. Maybe everything isn't terrible."

At Naughty Dog, says Druckmann, the goal of deepening narratives in videogames has wedded itself naturally to the studio's commitment to represent diversity in game characters-which in turn has attracted new talent. To help him cowrite The Last of Us Part II, in 2016 Druckmann brought in a television and film screenwriter named Halley Gross. "Our goal is absolutely to create the most multifaceted characters you've seen in games," says Gross, who spent 13 months working on the first season of HBO's Westworld. By comparison, she has spent three and a half years writing The Last of Us Part II. And she and Druckmann have drawn extensively from the rest of the team, Gross reports; queer staffers have helped in the writing of queer characters, adding dimension and complexity: "I think we're doing right by the LGBTQ+ community, who have often been drawn with a broader brush."

Not long after the release of Left Behind in 2014, the Gamergate controversy erupted, turning questions of representation and gender in videogames into some of the most toxic issues in American cultural discourse. Today there are plenty of gamers who proclaim that political correctness has ruined videogames, or to quote the title of a discussion of the issue on a gaming forum, "liberal politics infected Naughty Dog."

But it is these players' loyalty to The Last of Us that fills them with such distrust of its creator. " TLoU is my favorite game of all time," one fan tweeted at Druckmann "Please try to keep your personal politics out of Part 2. Thank you very much."

Compared with the first game, perhaps the simplest thing to say about The Last of Us Part II is that it is bigger: It has more characters, more room to explore, more to do. Your allies and opponents are smarter. Even the haptic-triggering signals delivered to the DualShock controller in your hands have been more carefully calibrated. The setting, for much of the time, is Seattle, four years after the events of the first game. There are ferns and firs growing in the streets of Pioneer Square, and a river of floodwater runs alongside the ivy-covered concrete guideway of the monorail. Naughty Dog artists traveled to the city, capturing photorealistic textures, topography, the precise quality of the overcast city's ambient lighting. Seattleites will be able to visit the debris-ridden remains of downtown coffee shops.

Ellie, after being playable for just a couple of riveting sections in the first game, takes center stage this time. Now 19, her appearance is more detailed and more closely resembles Ashley Johnson, with facial performance-capture tech used for the first time in the franchise. The artists worked hard to get her clothes to wrinkle authentically, while one sound designer invented a system that tracks Ellie's exertion level and plays respiratory audio effects to match. Animators even labored over such blink-and-miss-it details as, well, blinking-the mere opening and closing of eyelids feels more fleshy and organic. "Real life is the bar," says the game's codirector Kurt Margenau. In comparison, he says wryly, " The Last of Us was a baby game for babies."

During my visit, everyone at Naughty Dog vigilantly guarded details of the game's plot. What's clear is that Part II follows Ellie on a personal quest for vengeance, while a war rages between two rival militia factions called the Washington Liberation Front and the Seraphites. The game's cycles of violence faintly mirror those in the part of the world where Druckmann was born, along with the factions and divisions in the US today. "This one was much more inspired by real-world events," Druckmann says.

The idea is to complicate the player's feeling of inherent righteousness. "Justice is so much about perspective," Druckmann says; the sequel is built to challenge your sense of "the morality of the character you're inhabiting."

"Our hope is that players who might not have related to someone like Ellie will find a part of her that is familiar," Gross says. "You're walking in her shoes, you're empathizing with her."

Compared with the usual videogame depictions of meaningless and over-the-top violence, there's a terrible weight to the bloodshed in The Last of Us Part II. Go on, take out another anonymous baddie with a rifle or nail bomb or flamethrower or brick-and then feel your satisfaction curdle when his buddies cry out his name in shock and grief. Even the dogs in The Last of Us Part II -which sniff out your scent trail and attack when they find you-are some of the most intelligent, realistic dogs in videogames ever. In Naughty Dog's offices, playtesters have been horrified to find themselves committing acts of canine carnage. Yelps and whimpers and whines ring out, not all of them from the dogs. "It makes players feel dirty, and that's part of the point," Druckmann explains.

The game also goes to the trouble of realistically grappling with trauma, according to Gross, who says that she drew on her own experience with post-traumatic stress. "Joel and Ellie are complex people who've done really rough things," she adds. "We have to honor not just that but the trauma in their world."

Ideally, despite these bleak, heavy elements, players will be so caught up in the story they're unable to put the controller down. "We want you to try to empathize with that character, understand what they're doing, and say, 'OK, I'm going to role-play,' " Druckmann says, "'I'm going to try to think the way this character thinks.'"

But Druckmann understands from his hours of watching playtesters that not everyone appreciates that. In fact, he says, some players hate the game. And he knows it will be the same for certain fans of The Last of Us out in the wild. "Some of them are not going to like this game, and not like where it goes, and not like what it says or the fate of characters that they love," Druckmann notes. But he believes developers like him must learn to tolerate more discomfort: "I'd rather have people passionately hate it than just be like, 'Yeah, it was OK.' "

It's nearly 7 pm when I leave the studio that day in February. Much of the team is still at work, and dinner is being laid out. "The game is a living, breathing thing that's still evolving and growing and changing," Gross tells me, bringing to mind an interminable videogame boss battle-or a virus. But the game isn't all that's changing. That day, just over 300 miles away, a San Jose resident dies, in what would later be considered the first diagnosed Covid-19 fatality on US soil.

On one level, the faint connective threads between the news and the world of The Last of Us are simply eerie. "We did a lot of research about pandemics and outbreaks," Druckmann says, referring back to the days when he and his team were developing the first game. "Now we're witnessing superficial similarities that are surreal. Art imitating life imitating art." (A couple of fake Twitter accounts, created to promote The Last of Us in 2013, make for discomfiting reading today: "If you must travel outside," tweeted @SpringsHospital, "we recommend wearing a face mask.")

A few weeks after my visit, even before the government required it, Naughty Dog started shifting its team to working from home. "If we end up missing a production date, so be it," Druckmann declares.

But in the actual event, it isn't the creative process that holds things up: In early April, Naughty Dog announces that the game's release will be postponed indefinitely. In an interview, Druckmann indicates that it was due to concerns about coronavirus-related disruptions in international distribution. Gamers' impatience-the release date had been postponed once already-begins to mutate into indignation. On social media, anger and invective start flowing.

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On Monday, April 27, Naughty Dog announces that the game will in fact be released on June 19, news that ought to turn fans' mood around. But the bigger news that day is that hackers have leaked a trove of potential plot spoilers and gameplay footage to YouTube.

The leak opens the floodgates of vitriol from the gaming community even wider. As Druckmann had predicted, there are plenty of people who don't care for the game's apparent politics or where the story seems to go-even though they lack the full context of the narrative that Naughty Dog's obsessives have been stitching together for six years. Druckmann is bombarded with anti-Semitic slurs, death threats, and messages informing him he has ruined the franchise; one YouTube personality posts a video arguing that The Last of Us Part II "could damage gaming for years," which quickly racks up hundreds of thousands of views.

The term "release date" has rarely seemed so doubly apt, suggesting the devs' liberation from what has become a strange extended nightmare. For Druckmann, at least, the Last of Us saga continues: In March, HBO announced that it will be adapting the game into a series, with Druckmann writing and executive producing alongside Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin.

But in the meantime, the game's creators get by on optimism: Maybe, just maybe, the narrative and empathic power of a game like The Last of Us Part II can move even its skeptics. "Our hope is that players who might not have previously related to someone like Ellie will find a part of her that is familiar," Gross says. "You're walking in her shoes, you're empathizing with her struggles and dreams."

Indeed, I'm told of at least one playtester who came away from Part II saying, "I think I have to change my beliefs." Druckmann's hours watching all those videofeeds of people playing his unfinished game revealed its raw emotional power. "I saw one girl get to this sequence that took us a long time to get to land. And she's bawling. I'm watching her, and I'm starting to cry because she's crying, and I'm like, all these years of work for a couple-of-minutes sequence," he says. "It's all for this-just to be able to get this person to feel this experience."

On May 4, Druckmann posted a video to Naughty Dog's Instagram page announcing that his team had finally finished the game and had handed it off to be pressed and distributed. "No matter what you've seen or heard or read, nothing compares to playing this thing from beginning to end," he says. "It's a videogame. You've got to play it."
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DARRYN KING (@DarrynKing) wrote about the making of Gemini Man in issue 27.10.
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'The Last of Us Part II' and Its Crisis-Strewn Path to Release

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It's crunch time in the offices of Naughty Dog, the storied videogame developer in Santa Monica, California. On the morning of February 6, more than 300 artists, designers, and programmers are assembled in a maze of workstations, applying thousands of final micro-touches to a game they have been crafting for nearly six years called The Last of Us Part II .

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"The Last of Us Part II" has sold more than four million copies since its worldwide launch on June 19, making it the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive ever.

The first "The Last of Us" sold more than 20 million copies on PS3 and PS4, and fans have been anticipating the sequel for seven years.

"The Last of Us Part II" builds upon the brutal gameplay and emotional storytelling that made the first game iconic and pushes the PlayStation 4 to its technical limits.

The result is one of the PS4's best games, released just months before the PlayStation 5 is scheduled to arrive.

For more gaming recommendations, be sure to check out our continually updated roundup of the best PS4 deals.

Sony has confirmed that developer Naughty Dog's "The Last of Us Part II" is the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive ever, with more than four million copies sold worldwide. The sales surpassed the record held by "Uncharted 4," Naughty Dog's first PS4 release back in 2016.

"The Last of Us" burned its way into the memories of millions of gamers in 2013 with a gripping father-daughter story set more than a decade after a zombie apocalypse. Critics heralded the game as an ideal blend between scripted narrative, gorgeous environments, and brutal survival horror gameplay. The game sold more than 20 million copies on PS3 and PS4, and has been optioned for an HBO original series.

Hardcore "The Last of Us" fans have spent years wondering if any sequel could be a worthy continuation. Seven years later, "The Last of Us Part II" is one of the last major PlayStation 4 releases and a definitive title for the world's most popular video game console.

"The Last of Us Part II" hits the same high notes that made its predecessor iconic - unmatched visuals, savage combat, rich environments, and an emotionally engaging story. The game also achieves the difficult task of bringing closure to the first game's morally ambiguous conclusion.

"The Last of Us Part II" picks up four years after the first game's shocking ending.

The story of "The Last of Us" begins and ends with Ellie, a teenage girl with a rare immunity to the fungus turning humanity into zombies. Picking up four years after the first game, a violent turn of events near Ellie's home sends her to the ruins of Seattle looking for revenge.

Players who are new to the series will immediately be caught up on the events of "The Last of Us" at the start of the new game, and "The Last of Us Part II" uses a series of flashbacks to further explore the four-year gap between the two games as you progress.

Exploring the environment is just as important as fighting, and "The Last of Us Part II" will give you plenty of downtime.

"The Last of Us Part II" is a survival game at its core, so Ellie has limited resources and is constantly scavenging the area for weapons and items to replenish her stock.

Navigating through the city's collapsed structures are a challenge, requiring strategic jumps and short puzzle sequences to progress. Players are rewarded for exploring hard-to-reach areas with extra items and collectibles that add small anecdotes to the story.

Though you'll encounter a few unexpected scares, "The Last of Us Part II" does a good job of separating the action from the more casual exploration, giving you time to unwind and appreciate the game's amazing environments and haunting atmosphere.

With limited resources, Ellie has to fight harder to survive than most video game heroes.

The fast-paced gunplay of shooters, like "Call of Duty," often makes players look superhuman, but combat in "The Last of Us Part II" intentionally leaves players vulnerable with punishing one-hit kills and limited weapons. Instead, the game encourages you to build a strategy to survive each enemy encounter.

As Ellie tracks her targets, players can employ stealth tactics and craft items to avoid hostile survivors and eliminate the constantly mutating zombies that infest abandoned buildings. Players decide when and how to engage their enemies, and sometimes you can even trick the zombies into attacking humans for you.

The story introduces different partners who join Ellie's adventure, and they'll help you out in fights, too.

You'll occasionally be joined by computer-controlled partners for story reasons, and without spoiling too much, Ellie isn't the only playable character in "The Last of Us Part II."

Conversations with your companions (and stray conversations between enemies) bring a ton of personality to the characters and cut through the loneliness of exploring the post-apocalyptic world.

"The Last of Us Part II" is one of the most impressive looking PlayStation 4 games ever released.

"The Last of Us" made the most of the PlayStation 3 hardware at the end of its lifespan, pushing the boundaries of video game graphics in 2013. Similarly, the graphics of "The Last of Us Part II" reach levels of detail and stability that are largely unmatched on the PlayStation 4.

The game's characters and landscapes are photorealistic and complex, and emotional moments are seamlessly animated during cutscenes using advanced facial motion capture. "The Last of Us Part II" also manages to keep a stable frame rate during intense action scenes, avoiding a common pitfall for blockbuster releases on the standard PlayStation 4 hardware.

With the potential for a PlayStation 5 visual upgrade when Sony's new console launches later this Fall, "The Last of Us Part II" could end up being one of the best looking games for years to come.

The violence is incredibly detailed, which may be a turn-off.

Whether it's a cutscene or a regular enemy encounter, "The Last of Us Part II" displays violence with gross detail. While the game doesn't glorify killing in the same manner as titles like "DOOM" or "Mortal Kombat," the realistic nature of the violence will certainly be disturbing to some.

Bullets and bricks cause visible damage on enemies, and Ellie's death animations showcase the distinct differences between being shot, burned, eaten, or otherwise killed. While the brutality of those deaths contributes to the game's survivalist themes, "The Last of Us Part II" clearly wants us to question "how much is too much?"

Accessibility options in "The Last of Us Part II" allow you to customize the difficulty.

Like most single player games, "The Last of Us Part II" has multiple difficulty settings ranging from casual to extremely hard, but Naughty Dog went to great lengths to give players an accessibility menu that lets them adjust a number of minor settings that impact the game's difficulty.

For example, if you don't like the game's "realistic" weapon sway making it harder to aim, you can disable camera sway under accessibility options, or you can make it so that enemies won't see you while you're laying flat on the ground. More impactful accessibility options, like high contrast mode, can help people who are legally blind complete the game by labeling items, enemies, and other objects with distinct colors, like yellow, blue, and red.

If you can handle the game's overall violence and a handful of jump scares, "The Last of Us Part II" can be tweaked to whatever difficulty you prefer. It's an awesome amount of control that makes the game easier to customize and less frustrating overall.

If you can stomach the violence, "The Last of Us Part II" is must-buy for the PlayStation 4.

Like its predecessor, the "The Last of Us Part II" is a once-in-a-generation game that reflects the peak of the PlayStation 4's technical power and some of the most thoughtful storytelling in the video game industry.

Though the experience doesn't feel quite as unique the second time around, "The Last of Us Part II" surpasses the incredibly high bar set by the first game when it comes to overall gameplay and presentation, and the game's impressive use of parallel storytelling keeps things suspenseful throughout a campaign that can last up to 30 hours.

"The Last of Us Part II" is available now, but only on PlayStation 4.

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With 'The Last of Us Part II,' Sony has delivered a gaming masterpiece to end the PlayStation 4 era

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"The Last of Us Part II" has sold more than four million copies since its worldwide launch on June 19, making it the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive ever. The first "The Last of Us" sold more than 20 million copies on PS3 and PS4, and fans have been anticipating the sequel for seven years.

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An honest negative review

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'The Last Of Us Part II' is a masterpiece of game design, and a total disaster when it comes to ... [+]
Screenshot: Erik Kain

There is much to admire in Naughty Dog's ultra-dark revenge video game The Last Of Us Part II. And there is much to critique. The devs who poured their blood, sweat and tears into the game deserve praise for its technical achievements. The writers who mangled the story deserve the lumps that follow.

Despite its gore and violence, The Last Of Us Part II is a beautiful game, with renditions of post-apocalyptic Seattle and Santa Barbara that are simply staggering in detail and scope. The sights and sounds of this game are lush and lovely, gruesome and harrowing. In terms of presentation, The Last Of Us Part II is easily one of the best of the generation.

Meanwhile, the acting is-without exception-phenomenal throughout. Ashley Johnson as Ellie turns in another fantastic performance, with a great deal more of the spotlight this time around. Troy Baker's Joel has a much smaller role, but he's as good as ever. And man, both these two are just insanely talented. Watch this live performance of Wayfaring Stranger they put on:

Laura Bailey, who plays the third main character in the game, Abby, is also excellent. Sure, her character is fairly loathsome, but Bailey is great.

Alas, while the game is gorgeous to look at and listen to, and the acting is as good as any I've ever encountered in a video game, it falls apart when it comes to both gameplay and story.

The first game didn't have much going for it in the gameplay department, either-neither game is particularly strong as an action/shooter, and each forces players to spend far too much time tediously picking up odds and ends in order to craft bombs and med-kits, and ammo for your routinely empty firearms. ( There's a setting that makes this somewhat less tedious in the sequel). When it comes to gameplay, both games are fine. Just fine. Not great, not terrible. Just fine.

But the first game's lackluster gameplay was more than made up for by a compelling story filled with complex characters in a gritty, intriguing post-apocalyptic world. It didn't hurt that it also had one of the best endings in video games, period.

It was an ending that deserved to be just that-the end of Joel and Ellie's story, unresolved and bittersweet. Brittle and precarious and powerful all at once. A happy ending in many ways, but an unsettling one, too.

Joel's was a lie told out of love, but it was still a lie. He kept that secret for the same reason he rescued Ellie from the Fireflies. Because he couldn't stand to lose his daughter. Not again.

That same lie kicks off the events in The Last Of Us Part II, but it quickly runs roughshod over everything we loved about the first game, trampling even our high opinions of the protagonists in the process. What follows is a too-pretentious-by-half story of nonsensical revenge and relentless violence. It masquerades at depth and meaning but fails to deliver either.

Better to leave us hanging than take us down this wallowing, nihilistic path of despair and misery porn. Unless you get off on that sort of thing, of course.

An Unnecessary Sequel

Unfortunately, The Last Of Us Part II only follows in the original's footsteps in the most generic ways. Chronologically, it comes after the first game and it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic America. In every other sense, it may as well be a completely new franchise. At least then it wouldn't have so badly damaged the characters we came to know and care so much about in the original.

In the original, Ellie is a teenage girl who is the only person immune to the strange virus that's caused this spore-based zombie apocalypse. Unlike every single other human, bites and spores don't turn her into a monster. We don't know why.

Joel, who lost his own daughter tragically at the outset of the apocalypse, is tasked with bringing Ellie to the Firefly scientists where they hope to use her to find a cure. The Fireflies are freedom fighters. They're here to help. Or so we're led to believe.

Along the way, throughout the course of the game, Ellie and Joel become like family. It's not an easy road, but they manage it together and in many ways Ellie becomes the daughter Joel lost, dragging him out of his long malaise and giving him something to believe in and to fight for. She's spunky and funny and tough, and she awakens a new sense of purpose in the burned out, grizzled survivor.

In the end, when Joel and Ellie finally find the Fireflies, it turns out that the group isn't all they were cracked out to be. The doctors are unethical murderers who decide that it's just fine to sacrifice the one living person who is actually immune to the disease in order to create a vaccine (a completely absurd, anti-scientific, anti-medicine decision that exposes the Fireflies for the atrocious bastards they really are).

Joel decides that sacrificing a young girl to save humanity is absolute crap and rescues her instead, killing some of the guards and doctors in the process. He does what every father would do in this situation-and what every ethical human being ought to do.

There is only one correct answer to the question "How many lives would you sacrifice to save humanity?"

Your own. Only your own. It's one thing to take life in order to save someone; it's another to sacrifice an innocent in the hopes that you'll save someone. So Joel takes lives in order to save an innocent. It's unfortunate that he is forced to kill, but he couldn't stand by and let it happen, either. He had no other ethical choice.

Even if-and it's a very, very big if-her death would have resulted in a vaccine, allowing it to happen would be cruel and immoral. And a doctor, above anybody else, should realize this. Certainly in our own fraught times we should understand just how tricky coming up with a vaccine is-and killing the one specimen that may hold the answer is not only cruel and immoral, it's magnificently stupid.

Joel lies to Ellie about it after the fact, telling her that it didn't work, she wasn't the answer. And off they go, riding into the sunset.

It's the perfect ending. In my headcanon, I'm just going to pretend it's the only ending.

When Naughty Dog announced a sequel, creative director Neil Druckmann revealed that it would be a game about hate. The first was a game about love, the second hate. Like the tattooed fingers of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.

One might wonder at this point, why you'd really even have to separate the two. Light is the left hand of darkness; love is the left hand of hatred. The first game had its fair share of hatred, after all. Unfortunately, the sequel really doesn't bother much with love. When it does, it's at its very best, but those moments are few and far between.

The first big problem with The Last Of Us Part II's story is that there is very little about it that justifies its existence. It picks up a few years later, though there are flashbacks of the intervening years scattered about the game. We learn quickly where Ellie and Joel currently stand in their relationship. While the story itself is told in bits and pieces, jumping to different timelines, the basic premise is this:

Ellie has discovered that Joel lied to her and she's mad about it. She's mad that Joel didn't let the Fireflies kill her in order to create a vaccine. She's still mad at him when Abby, the daughter of the chief Firefly doctor, tracks down Joel and brutally murders him, exacting a ridiculously brutal revenge for her father's murder. And right here, right in this one short paragraph, there is so much wrong that my head hurts even typing it out.

First of all, the game seems to want us to think that Ellie is right and justified in her anger and that Joel is in the wrong. Not just about lying but about him saving her in the first place. The game suggests, in so many different ways, that Joel's actions were selfish and wrong. There is an implicit sense, throughout the story, and especially in the way it attempts to empathize with both its angsty emo female leads, that we should accept that Joel was wrong. That his actions were somehow immoral.

But Joel was not wrong. The doctors who decided to throw out their entire ethical and moral codes by sacrificing a young girl in the off-chance that they might come up with a cure were wrong. Ellie is wrong to suggest that a person who loves and cares for her should simply stand by and watch as she's murdered. That's preposterous. Any parent knows this. Any parent would do the same thing as Joel. And any doctor worth a damn would never harbor such intentions, no matter how many zebras they save from barbed wire.

But in The Last Of Us Part 2, the doctor who decides to kill Ellie is portrayed as a good man who helps escaped zoo animals and loves his daughter. And his daughter, Abby, is somehow portrayed as justified in her brutal killing of Joel, and setup as an "equal" to Ellie in the game, given just as much (if not more) screen time by the time the credits role.

I'll get this out of the way right here: Abby's revenge plot was deeply stupid from the start. At first, I didn't even realize that this was the avenging daughter of the Firefly doctor because of how thin that rationalization would be. She doesn't just kill Joel (who saved her life moments earlier, by the way) she makes him suffer. She wants it done slowly. And she does it with the support of a bunch of other people who, throughout the course of the game, are humanized and presented as sympathetic characters rather than the despicable monsters they are. (Later, Abby shows Ellie mercy despite her having killed several of those friends, which is kind of weird given the lengths she went to kill Joel . . .)

It's one thing to get revenge because you watch your surrogate father beaten to death with a golf club, bloody and crumpled on the floor. It's another to get revenge because someone killed your own murderous father while rescuing an innocent girl who he was about to kill.

I mean, really? I get that you'd be upset that somebody killed your dad, but when the reasoning is "he was saving his daughter from certain death" that sort of takes the wind out of those vengeance sails, doesn't it? Maybe if not for Abby, then for her compatriots who might, given a moment to think about it, consider Joel's actions self-defense. And sure, you might want revenge, or you might shoot the guy if you run into him and act in a moment of pique, but tracking him down and then making him suffer while beating him to death with a golf club when you're fully aware he did it to save his daughter? Give me a break.

I'm just trying to puzzle out what kind of person goes this far out of their way to get bloody vengeance like this. A pretty evil person. Abby is evil right from the start. But the game and its creators don't want you to think that. They want you to spend half the game empathizing with Abby. The other half of the game they want you to lose whatever respect you had for Ellie.

The Last Of Us Part II already makes it clear from the outset that we should have very little respect for Joel and his past choices. Then, instead of creating a sympathetic antagonist in Abby, they make her about as evil as possible and then ask us to see things from her point of view. It doesn't work. The real victim of all of this is Ellie, however. I used to like Ellie quite a bit, but not by the time I finished this game.

So the whole game gets off to a rough start. It doesn't get better from here.

Ellie and Abby are the two playable characters in The Last Of Us Part II. You play as Joel for a few minutes before he's bludgeoned to death. In many ways, he's the lucky one. At least we get to remember him as the caring father who saved Ellie and stuck by her through thick and thin. The game can try to convince us that he was in the wrong, but we know better. Joel is spared the next agonizing 25 to 30 hours, minus some flashbacks which are its finest moments (and a good template for what this game could have, and probably should have, been).

Ellie's "death" is much more tragic, because the game proceeds to ruin her character in every subsequent scene, thoroughly destroying any semblance of who she once was and turning her into a relentlessly selfish, murderous jerk. All because somebody thought that a story about a cycle of revenge would be more interesting than a story about wandering through an abandoned museum.

I bring that up because to me, the museum bit was the most powerful piece of storytelling in the entire game. In a flashback, Joel takes Ellie to a surprise. She tries to guess what it is along the way, and the two banter back and forth like the good old days.

The surprise is an abandoned museum. The first thing you see is a giant T-Rex outside its doors, and if you're the exploring type you discover that you can climb up its back and leap off its head into the pool below. Maybe you do this two or three times just because it's so light and breezy and you desperately need a break from grim and awful. It's such a cool bit of storytelling. It's so at odds with the rest of the game.

Once inside the museum, Ellie and Joel explore the displays. There are various dinosaurs and astronaut suits, and even an old rocket ship which you can go into and imagine you're taking off into outer space. You find an old Indiana Jones hat (a little nod to Uncharted) which you can toss onto one of the dinosaur's heads. It's imaginative and beautiful.

The sequence takes a dark turn in the end, and that juxtaposition of whimsy and terror makes it by far my favorite part of the game. Joel and Ellie are still a team. They have some great bonding moments. There's some laughs, a good scary bit and it's done. I wish the entire game had been like this. Moments of beauty and moments of ugliness woven together in a kind of bleak harmony. Some contrast, some variety.

Instead, it's a game about two young women trying to kill one another, while everyone around them also tries to kill each other. You stab and/or break so many necks by the time it's over, you start to feel a bit numb.

It's a game about hate and don't you dare forget it.

Let's Not Bicker And Argue Over Who Killed Who

After Joel's vicious murder, Ellie feels like crap. She wants revenge and so does Tommy, Joel's brother. He sets out first and Ellie sets out a bit later, accompanied by her new girlfriend, Dina. Halfway through the game, you go back in time to when Ellie and Dina arrive in the city, but you play the next few days as Abby instead, seeing things through her eyes. This is an odd choice given how thoroughly we despise Abby at this point, and it never stops being an odd choice. While some of her story is interesting, she really isn't. She's a one-note character who, beyond being a murderer, does really crappy things to people she cares about. Abby sucks. A lot.

In Seattle, two factions do battle as Ellie and Abby traverse the city, Ellie searching for Abby to get revenge, while Abby looks for her wayward ex-boyfriend, Owen. The Wolves and the Seraphites (nicknamed the Scars) vie for control of the city.

The former is a group of former rebels who shook off the yoke of a tyrannical post-apocalyptic government and set up their own quasi-fascistic organization. Only now with burritos! They've taken in Abby and some other former Fireflies, like Owen. (They're not a couple anymore, but Abby and Owen have sex in the game despite Owen's current girlfriend being very, very pregnant. Because Abby is the worst).

The Scars, meanwhile, are a fanatical cult-like group-the kind that shows up in video games like this and in TV shows like The Walking Dead. They're kind of like The Whisperers from AMC's zombie drama, as in they're so over-the-top it's completely immersion-breaking. The game's writers must have thought they were crafting a realistic post-apocalyptic group, but the Scars come off as cartoonishly vile and utterly preposterous.

Also, the Scars shoot arrows that are far more deadly than the most powerful gun in the game, so that's a neat trick.

Suffice to say, the Scars are a completely implausible group that cartoonifies the sequel in ways that simply didn't happen in the first entry. There were some very bad people in the original Last Of Us, but I never rolled my eyes the way I did with the Scars.

In any case, most of the game-after the opening and before the final act-takes place in Seattle across a three day period. Ellie and Dina arrive in Seattle and start tracking down Abby. During that same period, Abby explores the war-torn city and we see how the Wolves vs Scars war plays out.

Thus begins a story of revenge and violence in which Ellie stabs a couple hundred men and women in the jugular a few times and Abby breaks countless necks. Between the two of them, Ellie and Abby must murder a few hundred people, but of course only Joel and Abby's father's deaths warrant retaliatory bloodshed. All those other deaths? No big deal.

Oh, and when you kill someone and another AI bad guy finds their body, they'll call out the deceased's name like it means something.

"No, not Timothy!" "They killed Kenny!" "Brenda!!!"

It's another little touch that's designed to make the game's world and people seem more real. It doesn't work. At all. Hearing Generic Bad Guy call out the name of Dead Generic Bad Guy only made me chuckle and roll my eyes. I'm coming for you next, pal. This shiv's for you!

We have the same half-dozen enemy character models repeated over and over again throughout the game, but I'm supposed to feel something-some sense of guilt, perhaps?

Not hardly.

I mean, the game doesn't even give you a non-lethal option and stealth mechanics are severely limited so why not just murder everyone?

The Slog Of Slogs

Meanwhile, pacing is a mess. The Last Of Us Part II drags on far too long with too many encounters, too many dramatic moments and too much redundancy. I'd take a game half the length with just a few more interesting set-pieces to replace all the endless slaughter.

There are a few named characters Ellie finds and kills as she tracks down Abby, and at least one of these encounters has oomph (when Ellie discovers that she's killed a pregnant woman, having just found out about Dina's pregnancy) but largely this sense that we're supposed to feel bad for all this killing feels more like something Naughty Dog is hammering into us rather than part of a well-crafted story.

I watched a bit of footage I'd captured the other day where Ellie stabs this guy in the neck four or five times and it's just gross. It doesn't make me feel bad it just feels completely gratuitous. I simply don't care about any of these people I violently murder in The Last Of Us Part II, and honestly, neither does Ellie. That may be the real problem with the game's violence. It doesn't square with the game's seriousness or flimsy attempts at some kind of message. It's so nihilistic so much of the time, you get the sense that there is no message. Nothing learned, nothing gained. No meaning to be found, even when you get to the dregs.

Yes, we get a sense that Ellie is traumatized by all the violence. When Abby let's her go for a second time, despite having just killed everyone Abby cares about (and despite Abby having proven already that she's the vengeful type so this mercy makes no sense whatsoever) we follow Ellie and Dina and Dina's new baby to a farmhouse where they've cobbled together a new life together. But what appears to be all peaches and sunshine falls apart when Ellie has a bad flashback. Tommy shows up and chastises her for not killing Abby. So Ellie gives up her nice little life and sets off again, to try to kill Abby again.

Because Ellie learns nothing in this game. She must have left behind two hundred corpses in Seattle, including all of Abby's friends, but that's not enough to sate her thirst for comeuppance, and she doesn't realize, bafflingly, that it will never be enough. Revenge won't bring Joel back and it won't assuage her guilt at how she treated him and it won't lead to a life of happiness.

But off she goes to California.

Many people who aren't super-fans of Naughty Dog were incredibly upset by the game's ending. So was I, but for somewhat different reason. We'll get to that in a second.

After her stint at the farm, Ellie abandons Dina and the infant they were raising together to once again seek out Abby, this time in Santa Barbarra. It's just another way the game makes you hate Ellie. Her pettiness, her bitterness, her endless self-obsession and selfishness. That the game feels it necessary to have Ellie try for revenge once, fail, and then go out again is pretty ludicrous from a narrative standpoint, not only extending the game for no good reason-it's about ten hours too long-but making Ellie out to be even more unsympathetic in the process.

In any case, Ellie ditches Dina (who deserves better, quite frankly) and the child and heads to Santa Barbara. It's a great location, all sun and heat compared to Seattle's rain and gloom; orange and yellow instead of green and grey. Once again, Naughty Dog proves that it can craft some truly jaw-dropping environments. Your first moments in Santa Barbara are wonderfully scary and tense.

But once again we have another group of wicked bastards to contend with. This group is called The Rattlers. The Rattlers aren't as psycho as the Scars, but they're close. They keep slaves and crucify troublemakers down at the beach. In Naughty Dog's apocalypse, life truly is nasty, brutish and short. Psychopaths and creepy cults are everywhere.

This group must have sounded good on paper but to me the Rattlers are just more cartoon villains for us to stab and shoot and blow sky high, this time with a silenced SMG in your arsenal. There must be a more nuanced take on the apocalypse that all these game and TV show studios could come up with, one in which people are complicated, and groups of people aren't always so different from one another. But so far, only the Jackson, WY settlement seems to be comprised of real people with actual shades of grey.

I'd say that Naughty Dog tried to make Abby and the Wolves complex, too, but they kind of botched that when they had them murder Joel in the very beginning. Every subsequent attempt to humanize Abby and her co-conspirators falls short thanks to that misstep.

In any case, back to Santa Barbara.

The sequence starts with Abby and her companion Lev searching for the Fireflies in Santa Barbara. We met Lev back in Seattle. He and his sister were Scars, but they were cast out and were going to be killed when Lev cut his hair. Lev, we discover, is biologically female but wants to identify as male, and the uber-religious Scars think this is an unforgivable sin. It's a pretty ham-handed attempt at tackling the issue of trans people and tolerance in the game, simply because the Scars are so outlandishly awful. But Lev is a good character and Lev and Abby's relationship is the one point of redemption in Abby's entire arc, and one which I wish Naughty Dog had handled almost entirely differently. More on that later.

Abby and Lev are looking for the Fireflies so they can rejoin Abby's old group, and just when they've made contact over the radio they're ambushed and taken prisoner by the Rattlers. You can tell right away that these are Very Bad Dudes.

Sometime later, Ellie shows up, following the lead Tommy gave her back at the farmhouse. She discovers the Resort and this new enemy faction after creeping through some very zombie-infested buildings. One thing this game does do very well is make the various spore zombies scary, as much through their terrifying warbling and screeching as anything. Naughty Dog's sound design is matched only by their graphical prowess. Nobody can discount just how technically and artistically this game succeeds. It's the writing, the narrative, where everything falls apart.

And we come, at long last, to the ending.

This Is The End, Beautiful Friend

Depending on how you play, you either sneak or blast your way through the Resort area until you free some prisoners and they tell you that Abby has already been taken and punished for trying to escape. So you head to the beach as the prisoners go to battle with their former captors (or what's left of them after Ellie cleaved her bloody path through their ranks).

She walks down to the beach. It's dark. The sounds of combat echo in the distance. The sea is draped in fog. Abby and Lev, along with countless others, are hanging from posts, basically crucified and on the verge of death, skeletal from starvation. It's as grim and awful as anything we've seen up to this point.

It's just that we're all so very, very numb by now. Another fresh hell stuffed into 30 hours of grimdark violence, atrocity and betrayal. A powerful moment that needed to come much, much sooner. (Honestly, they should have scrapped California entirely and had Ellie find Abby strung up by the Scars in Seattle).

Still, it's probably the first time I felt real sympathy for Abby. No matter how much of a monster she was-a faithless friend, a brutal killer, a small-minded ruffian-it's tough to see even your worst enemy starved, hanging from a post, dying slowly. And Lev was innocent. He didn't deserve this fate. Nobody does.

When Ellie cuts her down, and Abby carries Lev to a boat to make good their escape, and it looks like Ellie has finally realized that revenge really doesn't make anything better, I was actually pleasantly surprised. There is a beauty in mercy. Even Abby showed mercy-not once, but twice-to Ellie, after all.

Abby is not a sympathetic character and nothing the game tries made me like her, but I do want to like Ellie. Ellie taking revenge on Joel's killer might feel good, but Ellie showing mercy makes her more human. It makes her a better person. It means that after all this blood and death and hate, she could come out the other side as someone who has grown and changed and run the gauntlet of suffering and still come out the other side with her self intact.

If she had simply turned around and left her to her fate, I could have accepted that ending as well. It would have been more cruel and Ellie would have been less humanized by it, but at least it would have been a decisive and powerful ending.

Or if Abby were already dead, there would have been some poetic justice to that as well. Ellie's hands would be clean. Well, not clean exactly but cleaner. I've heard it said those damned spots don't come out.

But instead, Ellie cuts her down. And they go their separate ways, not friends or allies, but united in suffering and tragedy. An end to the cycle of violence. Something like resolution, however bitter and incomplete.

Only, no, not quite. We need some mud-wrestling, don't we? We need to see the women get down and dirty. We need that sweet, sweet misery porn.

What follows is the single worst moment in the entire game (aside from forcing us to play as Abby for fifteen hours of it, or the total character assassination of Ellie). Instead of cutting her down, showing mercy, Ellie decides that actually she still needs to get revenge. Wouldn't want all that stabbing practice to go to waste, right?

She's going to stab this woman, who has been starving to death hanging from a pole, until she bleeds out and dies. Only, not really. Nope. She's going to stab and slash her a few times and then let her go again.

Fun times. This is really how I want to spend my video game time.

Have Mercy

Now, a lot of people are angry that Ellie didn't end up going through with it, that she spared her sworn enemy. They hated Abby and think that a satisfying ending required Abby to die, and Ellie to kill her. I think that's rubbish. Sure, it could have worked in different circumstances. If Ellie and Abby had met on equal terms, for instance. But this "I'm going to save you and let you live, oh never mind time to die, oh never mind again you can live" nonsense is just bad writing.

Revenge can be fun. John Wick does "fun revenge" very well. I remember watching Braveheart for the first time and William Wallace's revenge was thrilling. But the moral of the story in serious works of fiction is that revenge is bitter (not bittersweet) and never quite plays out the way you'd hoped. It creates a cycle of violence that hurts everyone caught up in its wake. Hamlet is consumed by his desire for revenge-prompted by the ghost of his father-but in the end it just means that everyone dies, including innocents like Polonius and Ophelia and, though she's perhaps a little less innocent, Hamlet's mother as well. Revenge, like that green-eyed monster, jealousy, is dangerous. Something to be avoided if at all possible. Even justifiable revenge-think A Time To Kill- can lead to all sorts of problems.

What this game needed in the end was grace. The kind of strange, unsettling thing that comes over someone when they suddenly realize something profound and choose to take a different path. When Ellie sees her emaciated enemy hanging from a poll and, instead of feeling gleeful satisfaction, feels only horror and pity, she acted with grace and mercy and, in that moment, became the person we hoped she would become. It was never about killing Abby. It was about Ellie finding her own redemption.

And then they throw it all away.

Two angry, beat up, half-dead murderesses slicing each other over and over again in the shallows, blood and saltwater spraying everywhere, until suddenly Ellie gives up and let's Abby go. Again. I'm not one to usually criticize games for their violence, but this felt exploitative to me. And redundant. All that potential for mercy and grace lost.

Ellie already let her go! She already came to the conclusion that she should let Abby live when she cut her down! Why go through all that again? Why have this horrible, violent, senseless slasher fight if, at its conclusion, Ellie simply let's Abby go again?

The ending could have worked with mercy or revenge as the outcome, but apparently the writers had trouble making up their minds about which direction they wanted to go, and decided to try and have their cake and eat it, too. The result feels sloppy, repetitive and frustrating.

More than anything, this game's ending needed to not beat around the bush.

Either cut her down and let her live (mercy) or have Ellie take revenge (leave her to die) or have her already dead when Ellie gets there (chance). You can't have it both ways, all ways, whatever. If you want to end the game with a knife fight, do that. But don't make Ellie cut her down first. Have them meet as equals. It's too much like Indigo Montoya helping the Man in Black up the cliff just so he can kill him. Only not in the least bit funny.

The last scene, when Ellie returns home to an empty farmhouse, Dina and her baby long gone, is better. A fitting reward for Ellie's selfish, self-destructive obsession with revenge.

A game about hate, sure, but even more a game about loss.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.

Not everything about The Last Of Us Part II's story was terrible. I loved all of Ellie's flashbacks with Joel and Tommy. I might have even enjoyed Abby's if her character deserved it.

As I noted further up, I also very much enjoyed the sights and sounds. Graphically, few games I've ever played can compare. For all its violence and misery, The Last Of Us Part II is a true beauty. Sound design, though, is what really makes it scary. When the game bothers trying to be scary it succeeds more often than not.

Gameplay gets bogged down at times by the lack of a full-fledged stealth system and somewhat dense AI, but there are still some exhilarating sequences and combat, while far from my favorite, can be tense and exciting. There's simply too much of it, like there's too much of just about everything here. Too much crafting, too much scavenging ( though remember there's an option to make that more tolerable), too much story and too many hours of game to get through.

For all my complaints-complaints I genuinely found made me dislike this game and everyone in it more and more the longer I played it, and the longer I stewed over it after-I still had something resembling fun while playing. I finished the damn thing, which is more than I can say for a lot of games.

I also really enjoyed the entire frightening intro sequence with Yara and Lev, and those characters in general. If only Abby had had some sort of dawning realization about Lev and her relationship with Lev made her better understand Joel's actions. She could have let go of some of that hate. If Abby had realized that protecting Lev from Isaac and the WLF was basically exactly what Joel was doing by rescuing Ellie from her dad and the Fireflies (only he knew Ellie a lot longer) we might have actually had a story with some interesting dynamic character arcs.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wish that The Last Of Us Part II had never been about Joel and Ellie at all, and that the entire thing had been the story of Abby and her desire for revenge and how that transformed into understanding and forgiveness for her father's killer as she grew into the role of protector and surrogate mother for Lev. She could have found empathy along the way, and chosen to spare Joel's life, sparing Ellie her own story of revenge and horror, and saving all four characters in the process.

Perhaps a game about hate could have turned into a game about love, after all.

P.S. This was a strangely challenging review for me to write. I didn't get a review copy so I was late to actually playing it, but even after I finished the game I had a hard time putting pen to paper. I finished my first draft of this review weeks ago and then found myself unable to come back to it. I'm not entirely sure why.

In one sense, it's because the game left me with such conflicting feelings. It's clearly a very good game in many ways, and yet also sort of horrible at the same time. And even though I ultimately found the tale of revenge and violence too pretentious and not nearly as effective as its creators hoped, I was still haunted by it. It had emotional resonance even while not really standing up to scrutiny. So my apologies for the very late review, but sometimes that's how it goes. Writer's block is a helluva thing.

P.P.S. I wrote that first P.S. a couple weeks ago and still didn't publish this thing for some reason. Today I went back in and edited a lot of it. I'm probably still not entirely satisfied, but oh well. I'm going to publish it now, come hell or high water.

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'The Last Of Us Part 2' Review: A Beautiful, Terrible Sequel

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There is much to admire in Naughty Dog's ultra-dark revenge video game The Last Of Us Part II. And there is much to critique. The devs who poured their blood, sweat and tears into the game deserve praise for its technical achievements. The writers who mangled the story deserve the lumps that follow.

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In The Last of Us Part 2, the story is everywhere.

Hours into The Last of Us 2, deep inside a flooded bookstore, a page lies torn from a children's novel. If you direct Ellie to pick up the scrap, you'll see it holds two stories. The first is an illustration of a solemn horse and rabbit, mottled by damp. "When a child REALLY loves you," says the horse, "then you become real."
"Does it hurt?" asks the rabbit. Ellie reads the exchange next to a broken bookshelf that yawns up at the sky like a shattered rib cage."Sometimes," the truthful horse replies. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

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Flip the paper and among the damp brown spots a mother and her child have penciled their own conversation. Something terrible happened, and the child was upset. "What if we talked like this for a bit?" the mother wrote. "Okay," is scrawled underneath in shaky, oversized letters. The mother apologised for grabbing her child and said mommies get scared sometimes. She wrote that although she misses "him" too, the child shouldn't scream. The child wrote "I want..." then crossed it out. "I need..." then crossed it out. Finally, they settled simply on "I know."

In a game whose heartbeat thumps to the rhythm of violence, quiet moments like this show the collateral of conflicts beyond The Last of Us' main characters. Environmental storytelling is usually talked about in world-building terms: Overheard conversations, notes, and useful navigational signage all help conjure believable places from polygons and code. But The Last of Us Part II goes further by ensuring its environmental stories don't just make post-apocalyptic Seattle feel realistic; they mirror central character arcs and form a scaffold that bolsters the game's pivotal themes.

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In a game whose heartbeat thumps to the rhythm of violence, quiet moments show the collateral of conflicts beyond The Last of Us' main characters.

In the Kingston bookstore note, the theme is love and how much it hurts to lose it. The jagged black lines that bisect this child's attempts to express their grief mirror the black scratches across Joel's eyes in Ellie's journal. Both characters struggle to express their trauma. Meanwhile, the rabbit's fear of love's pain reflects Ellie's torment as her pursuit of revenge takes her far from home and the person she once was. In this and every other note across hours of play, characters work through the same emotions and experiences that drive Ellie and Abby's stories. The effect is twofold: A believable world is built on the bones of apocalyptic struggle, but also, our understanding of what Abby and Ellie feel increases. Their characters are fleshed out through the trauma of people we'll never meet.

"Oh yeah, we are team theme," says narrative lead and co-writer Halley Gross. "Everything goes back to 'is this talking about the cycle of violence? Or breaking the cycle of violence? Or the consequences of the cycle of violence?' Let's make sure that we're having that conversation at any moment we can." For the often faceless people met in these easy-to-skim-past narratives, Naughty Dog's ethos was "Let's give these characters names, let's give them experiences, let's tug at the heart strings to make people realise that this isn't just a faceless war. There are victims of violence in every iteration."This is particularly powerful given that one of the differences between Part I and Part II is that all the playable characters here were born into the pandemic. As Joel, we viewed the world through the lens of what had been lost, but Abby and Ellie climb the broken teeth of skeletal skyscrapers with no lived understanding of what these structures were before the ivy claimed them. As every note, every overheard conversation, and every discarded toy in a rotting bedroom teach the player a little more about the world, Abby and Ellie learn too.

Writer Josh Scherr says the team used voice lines to illustrate how Abby and Ellie's lessons from these environmental stories tie into their character arcs. "When Abby comes across the memorial at Martyr's Gate, there's all those prayer notes. If you read one Abby'll scoff at it. She blows it all off, but by the time she's had the whole journey with Lev and Yara and she's reading the prayers [on the Seraphite island] it's a lot more sobering; she's grown."

Environmental storytelling ended up being key to fleshing out the Seraphites. Scherr remembers there was originally going to be a section of Ellie's playthrough where she was swept by the storm to the island and had to escape, which would have been an "opportunity to see the Seraphites up close in a peacetime setting." But due to pacing reasons that was cut. "The end result," says Scherr, "was a lot of things about their religion have to come from conversations with Lev as you're going through the high rise, various notes that you find, the murals." These are built into production at the earliest stages; there's concept art of a Seraphite corpse on a Chinatown rooftop in the "Extras" section of the game.

The Last of Us Part 2 Merchandise

"Ultimately, when you do make it to the island, one of our goals was to humanise [the Seraphites] as much as we could in the short amount of time. So a lot of the notes are these very mundane things about catching a deer, or here's a young acolyte who just got his scars talking about being in love, or here's a prayer note from someone in their shrine who's so traumatised by the loss of their husband they've become a different person. They're trying to show how the cycle of violence affects everyone, and everything we could do to align them with everyone else is done through environmental storytelling."

This Sherlockian effort by the player to understand the Seraphites through the traces they leave behind is also required to understand their mortal enemy, Isaac. With only two cutscenes of physical presence, his entire arc is told through environmental storytelling. The effect is stark: We establish his mystery, grandeur, and menace long before he emerges from the darkness of the interrogation room.

With only two cutscenes of physical presence, Isacc's entire arc is told through environmental storytelling.

The open-world section in downtown Seattle bears the fingerprints of the WLF's ascension and, in turn, Isaac's rise to power. Notes, posters, and convoys of corpses chart his story. "Even little subtle things," says Scherr, "like in one of the most wanted leaflets you find, the other characters are wanted for things like sedition and handing out pamphlets. One of the things Isaac does is 'murder a FEDRA officer' so even from this poster you're like, ok, this guy's a little bit more hardcore than everybody else."

But for all Isaac's importance, one of the key points of his environmental narrative isn't just to establish the WLF, but to add credence to the central struggles that drive Abby and Ellie. "Isaac has this need to retaliate, this need to justify protecting your own by hurting other people, which is the girls' struggle too," says Gross. This is clear from the dead WLF scout Abby finds on the island, whose bloodstained recon note lies in the dirt as the roar of the Wolf attack carries on the breeze. Isaac is so mired in the cycle of violence that he'll charge in blindly - like Abby in Jackson, or Ellie when she abandons Jesse. The fact that you have to imagine Isaac's backstory through environmental storytelling, to put in the effort to picture his past in order to comprehend his present, invites you to look deeper into the motives of other characters.These are all small moments in The Last of Us II, easily missed. That's the nature of environmental storytelling; worlds are peppered with micro-narrative vignettes that the player might walk straight past. But find them here, and Abby and Ellie's choices make more sense. Ellie in particular is such an introverted character, that paying attention to how she moves through the world and responds to these stories is useful to understand her interiority as grief carries her far from the girl who once stroked a giraffe's nose.

Part of that journey is made possible by the journal, which Gross says "allowed us to figure out what she's thinking, working through, and how her PTSD is growing louder. That came online really, really late - weeks not months! But it was another great opportunity to expound on her identity as she becomes someone we're more unfamiliar with."

Other environmental clues as to how Ellie is coping can be found right from the beginning of the game in Jackson, where Ellie displays Sam's tragic robot from the first game in her room - "I had no idea it was there!" says Scherr, highlighting how narrative at Naughty Dog is a team effort between writers, art, and design. Later, in a Halloween shop filled with the same masks that Ellie and Riley once goofed around with, Ellie disinterestedly shrugs them off as not her thing. Suddenly Ellie's brutality starts to make more sense - she's a long way from the girl we once knew. "It's not like she's then expounding on Riley which we certainly could have done," says Gross. "She's a girl that locks in and locks in and locks in."

Some players will never realise the significance of the coffee cup to Ellie's last conversation with Joel because they didn't discover it in his kitchen.

Some players will never realise the significance of the coffee cup to Ellie's last conversation with Joel because they didn't discover it in his kitchen; they might never have played the Left Behind DLC to understand that small moment in the Halloween store; nor might they read every note. While writing a game is totalitarian - Gross, Scherr, and the team have total control as they build the world - the act of playing a game is democratic. Once a game releases, everyone has a different relationship to the characters, and public imagination naturally shapes how it's interpreted. Nowhere is this clearer than in environmental storytelling, where creators can't force players to find every narrative thread or listen to every line of dialogue - and even if they did, much is left to the audience to fill in the blanks.

We'll never know what happened to the mother and child in that book store, but they still feel real. It's that spark of connection with a faceless character - that imaginative power - which makes environmental storytelling a cornerstone of one of The Last of Us's final core pillars: Empathy. Alysia Judge is a freelance writer and presenter.. Chat to her on Twitter @alysiajudge.

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The Unexpected Ways The Last of Us 2 Told Its Story - IGN

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In The Last of Us Part 2, the story is everywhere. Hours into The Last of Us 2, deep inside a flooded bookstore, a page lies torn from a children's novel. If you direct Ellie to pick up the scrap, you'll see it holds two stories.

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Ellie is more agile in The Last of Us Part II and has more explorable environments, allowing her to climb on top of objects and jump over obstacles.

The Last of Us Part 2 will have more environments to explore than its predecessor, giving Ellie new objects to climb and obstacles to jump over during gameplay. In the original game, The Last of Us, players took on the role of Joel, survivor of the zombie apocalypse who became responsible for transporting Ellie, then a young girl, across the country. Ellie was the potential key to curing a virus that turned people into zombies. The two eventually bonded, though, and Joel remained with Ellie at the end of the game.

The Last Of Us Part 2 happens five years later. Ellie is now the playable character (although Joel will return in the new title), and it is her job to help protect the group from a mysterious cult, as well as humans infected with a new strain of the virus. Ellie will have to use skills related to stealth, as well as firearms and other weapons, to do this. Gameplay mechanics have evolved since the previous title, though, and Ellie will have a series of new tools, skills and options in her arsenal.

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Related: The Last of Us Part I & II: How Their Zombies are Based on Real-Life Undead

One new skill that will give Ellie an advantage is her ability to explore her environment more fully. Naughty Dog tweeted about this feature, noting that Ellie is more agile and will have more verticality. She will be able to easily climb up to higher vantage points, as well as jump over obstacles.

In The Last of Us Part II, Ellie is more agile in combat and when exploring the world, allowing us to introduce new verticality and discoverable areas to environments as you climb and jump over obstacles. pic.twitter.com/n9bwpXLB9q
- Naughty Dog (@Naughty_Dog) March 17, 2020

Initially planned for release in February 2020, Naughty Dog recently announced that The Last of Us Part 2 wouldn't launch until May 2020. It seemed that Naughty Dog needed more development time, although the company is one of many that has recently come under fire for its crunch culture, with accusations that developers are working unhealthy long hours to meet the new release date for the title. The May release date, though, could prove timely, especially considering the current state of the real world and its reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak.

It's probably a safe bet to assume that The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the most anticipated games of the year. It's also one of the last exclusives to head to the PlayStation 4. With Sony set to unveil more details about the PlayStation 5 soon, the company's new focus will probably shift to its next-generation titles. That console and those titles could see some delays, though, so having one more great exclusive title such as The Last of Us Part 2 will keep players entertained until the PlayStation 5 hits retail shelves.

Next: What to Expect From The Last of Us 2

The Last Of Us Part 2 releases on May 29, 2020 for PlayStation 4.

Source: Naughty Dog/Twitter
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The Last of Us Part 2: Environments Will Have Even More Areas To Explore

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Ellie is more agile in The Last of Us Part II and has more explorable environments, allowing her to climb on top of objects and jump over obstacles. The Last of Us Part 2 will have more environments to explore than its predecessor, giving Ellie new objects to climb and obstacles to jump over during gameplay.

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"Fuckin' video games," a character sighs halfway through Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II.

One can't help but agree with the exasperated, self-aware sentiment. Fuckin' video games indeed.

The Last of Us 2 is a game that demands conflicted feelings. It engenders adoration for the brilliant graphics, compelling acting, and substantial gameplay. But the story made me feel utterly miserable, even if I really admire it.

The least subtle game in history, The Last of Us 2 feels like a golf club to the head. The game that's caused stress nightmares made me love its ambition, but I sort of hate it for the emotional labor involved.
Extensive spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II follow.
In the first Last of Us, protagonists Joel and Ellie feel like real people in a dismal world where the Cordyceps brain infection wiped out most of the population. Society has crumbled. Zombies are everywhere. Ellie, who's immune to the virus, is the key to developing a vaccine, but the vaccine would kill her. So Joel murders dozens of people to save Ellie. The game doesn't cast judgment on his choice, so we're left to answer this moral question ourselves: Did Joel do the right thing?

The price we all pay for Joel's sentiment is The Last of Us Part II, which metes out the consequences of the first game's perfect ending.

A brilliant, surprising story with hollow characters

The sequel steps back into this world five years later when a moody, adult Ellie embarks on a quest for revenge to the ruins of Seattle after a new character named Abby murders Joel with a golf club while Ellie is forced to watch.

The Last of Us 2 starts out as a revenge story but spends an exhausting 24 hours of gameplay trying to convince us that this is not supposed to be fun. Joel killed Abby's father at the end of the first game, and then we're asked to play as Abby for the second half of this one. Last of Us 2 is her revenge story in equal measure.

These shocking, broad strokes were the focus of a devastating batch of leaks that surfaced in April. At face value, it seems infuriating: A total stranger kills our hero from the first game, and then we're supposed to play as her for 12 hours!?

Those seemingly divisive narrative choices produce a result that's brilliant. Even if the parallels drawn between these characters are about as subtle as Abby's 7-iron, they're still artfully done.

Over the course of the game, Ellie grows more enraged. She'll later growl obscenities like "Eat shit...!" at a woman whose throat she's just slit. Ellie is so consumed by violent revenge that she'd blindly risk, and spend, the lives of her friends.

Hailing from a Seattle community where everyone is supremely kind, particularly to dogs, Abby embarks on an overlapping adventure where an innocent teenager helps quell her simmering rage and restore a sense of humanity. We're meant to see the obvious mirror to Joel and Ellie's dynamic in The Last of Us. Abby is also a super-buff badass who spent three solid years power-lifting in the Seahawks' workout room. (Really. The Washington Liberation Front is headquartered in a stadium.)

Both of these women are enraged by the trauma that's happened to them in life, justifiably so.

The big picture gets more compelling the longer you stare it, but the characters seem to lose depth as this franchise continues.

Ellie, Joel, and other Last of Us characters feel "real" because of their nuanced array of emotions. Their decisions are sometimes astonishing, but they're always believable. Most characters in The Last of Us 2 feel one-note by comparison. Even if characters look more realistic than ever, they often don't feel like it.

Engaging gameplay, short on innovation

The Last of Us 2 has developer Naughty Dog's signature polish, but it all feels a bit outdated despite the beauty rendered in the pixels. There's very little that feels innovative in the gameplay.

There are new guns, characters, weapons, and enemies to fight. But the core loop of looting and shooting before squeezing through some crack in the wall gets repetitive when trapped on the railroaded plot. Last of Us 2 is a pretty game, but it by the end, you just want it to be over.

There are moments that represent a leap forward for video game storytelling, even for a AAA title. For instance, you'll spend much of Ellie's first day in Seattle entirely on horseback, exploring a small "open-world" area of the city. You're given a map and the freedom to wander, which felt like a genuine surprise. There are ruins to be combed through, letters and notes full of lore to discover, and even a shotgun tucked away in a bank.

It's a shame that after a few short hours of exploring, your horse is blown to smithereens by a landmine. Thus ends the wandering.

Had The Last of Us Part 2 committed to an open-world concept or more diversity in the action sequences, or better characterization, it may have truly been a perfect game. Naughty Dog plays it a bit too safe, investing all the creative energy into the plot.

This meditation on the cycle of violence is just too heavy

Game Director Neil Druckmann has repeatedly said The Last of Us 2 is "about the cycle of violence" and intends to leave the player feeling "repulsed by some of the violence they are committing themselves." The sense of horror we feel is exacerbated when the leveled-up graphics and state-of-the-art motion capture work make the violence that much more visceral.

Experiencing this world through Ellie and Abby's dual perspectives challenges us to think more deeply about the violence we perpetuate in video games. By slowly revealing Abby's backstory as an unapologetic, brave woman, we sympathize with the enemy, more so in the moments where The Last of Us 2 gives a name and a history for almost every single enemy - even the dogs.

Similar to stories like Star Wars: The Last Jedi that buck fan expectations and tear down our heroes, The Last of Us 2 drags players outside of their comfort zones so they can grow and see the world from more diverse perspectives.

Even when The Last Of Us 2 makes you uncomfortable, it's worthwhile.

Most of the game's harshest critics discuss unlikable characters unable to grow or reckon with the consequences of their actions. That's frustrating when we remember the nuance of the first game, where compelling character arcs made Joel and Ellie feel larger than life. Instead of taking this approach to character arcs, Part 2 's narrative arc forces us to grow and change instead.

This unconventional narrative winds up feeling like a cautionary tale or parable about the cycle of violence that's so exhaustive and repetitive in its refrain that I can't help but wonder: Is the journey worth it?

The answer is yes, because The Last of Us 2 is a must-play game, but you'll probably only want to play it once. 8/10.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: When it comes to video games, Inverse values a few qualities that other sites may not. For instance, we care about hours over money. Many new AAA games have similar costs, which is why we value the experience of playing more than price comparisons. We don't value grinding and fetch quests as much as games that make the most out of every level. We also care about the in-game narrative more than most. If the world of a video game is rich enough to foster sociological theories about its government and character backstories, it's a game we won't be able to stop thinking about, no matter its price or popularity. We won't punch down. We won't evaluate an indie game in the same way we will evaluate a AAA game that's produced by a team of thousands. We review games based on what's available in our consoles at the time. For instance, we won't hold it against a video game if its online mode isn't perfect at launch. And finally, we have very little tolerance for junk science. (Magic is always OK.)

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'The Last of Us Part 2' review: It's the most emotionally corrosive video game ever

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"Fuckin' video games," a character sighs halfway through Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II. One can't help but agree with the exasperated, self-aware sentiment. Fuckin' video games indeed. The Last of Us 2 is a game that demands conflicted feelings. It engenders adoration for the brilliant graphics, compelling acting, and substantial gameplay.

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The Last of Us: Part 2 was just released today, and it's already being review bombed.

The critical consensus for The Last of Us: Part 2 is all-around positive, and on Metacritic, it has a score of 95. But users aren't so happy it seems as the current user rating is sitting at 3.4.

According to the vast majority of user reviews, the main complaint is the story with character development a close second. Others state that gameplay "is boring and monotonous."

Of course, there are others who complain about the game being "SJW" while others state even though the game has"SJW parts," those "parts" are inconsequential, as the game is "just bad."

Many though do admit the graphics are amazing, just the "plot and characters" were "disappointing."

You can head through the link to the user reviews to read over them for yourself, just be careful: some do not contain a spoiler tag.

If you are picking the game up today, check out our review of The Last of Us Part 2. We also have a guide for all the safe combinations, and one for all the card collectibles. You should also give our video discussing how the game improves upon the original.

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The Last of Us: Part 2 has been review bombed on Metacritic

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The Last of Us: Part 2 was just released today, and it's already being review bombed. The critical consensus for The Last of Us: Part 2 is all-around positive, and on Metacritic, it has a score of 95. But users aren't so happy it seems as the current user rating is sitting at 3.4.

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It is kind of weird that I really want to write about the Last of Us Part 2. The original game - the last of us was the best game that I ever played so far and the ways in which it makes people immerse into the story and develop attachments the main character was so effective, probably because of the well-written story. People are pretty mad for the last of us part 2, mostly because of the ways that game unfolds the story. This article will have some spoilers.

I thought t was brilliant. It is a provocation that forces us to re-think about a game as a medium of storytelling.

In the last of us part 2, they were able to show the other side of the story is potentially the most brutal way - gamers need to play as a villain who killed the most beloved character. It is the frustration that players have to develop on their own hands. I do not think the game developers did an effective job in making viewers attached to Abby - I am not sure even if they wanted to. It was more like - "Okay, I see why you are doing this - you want me to understand Abby's perspective, but I won't buy it." the whole time. However, it is the gamer that needs to NOT die in the same apocalyptic world. It is the gamer that needs to fear the height and to surveil the area to survive. A player is like a zombie whose soul is "trapped in there without any control of their body" - as Sam said in the Last of Us Part 1. They truly become someone who has to kill not to be killed (or more precisely to move forward in the story). More agile and nimble Ellie in the first half of the game became a threat when she was confronted as a boss that dodges attacks. Tommy, who used to teach Ellie how to shoot is a sniper who knows what he is doing. It is the most effective way to convey the story that Joel was the villain to the Fireflies as the gamers get to experience how strong Ellie and Tommy are from the other side.

Suppose for a moment that the Last of Us Part 2 was a film (or 20 hr long TV series). There have been shitty sequels. The ways that those make viewers mad is fundamentally different from what happened in the Last of Us Part 2. Let's say Han Solo dies in the first 10 mins, and the extent to which a viewer can have an attachment to a killer would be limited. Probably you would need a separate movie to make it work - like Joker or Warm Bodies with a clean slate. Therefore, filmmakers wouldn't take the risk as they would not have an effective (and efficient) method to do so. If it was a film, viewers could simply say I don't get it and leave it. However, in the game, gamers do not have a choice; the story is linear, but its operation is interactive. They can hate the story, but they are not provided with an opportunity to become indifferent about it. They still need to pay attention to it, respond to threats, and scavenge items for a character that they hate. This is the beauty of the Last of Us Part 2. The game makers exploited the interactivity of the media in the most brutal way to convey the message. In the apocalyptic world from which the message comes from, people do not have a choice.

The Last of Us part 2 revealed the power of the game in its provocation of rage, madness, and suffocating emotion in the most effective way. This ironically proves the power of the media - the emotion does not quickly fade away; it makes you keep thinking about it, and makes you want to understand the choices that Ellie made. It provokes dialogue, controversy, and discussion, and it is evidence that the game is likely to be a masterpiece in retrospect.

These intense responses from the community can be, again, attributed to the success of the original game (part 1); without the attachment that people developed over the game to Joel and Ellie, people would have not been so mad. An interesting thing is that even after violating viewers' anticipation in an undeserved way, the last of us part 2 demonstrated the power of the game that can keep people playing for 20 more hours. Would you have watched it even if it was a TV show?

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Reflection on the Last of Us part 2 (spoilers)

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It is kind of weird that I really want to write about the Last of Us Part 2. The original game - the last of us was the best game that I ever played so far and the ways in which it makes people...

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A well detailed oriented piece on the game. This video paints in perfect detail the effect that this game has.

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The Painful Art of Empathy – Deconstructing The Last of Us: Part 2