The Last of Us Part II

“I don’t believe whoever wins or loses, or whoever loses or wins, will lose or win. Everybody’s gonna lose,” Dilma Rousseff.

The Last of Us Part II is an improvement over the first game on basically every level. It’s a harrowing experience, offering a gut-wrenching story about the never-ending cycle of violence perpetrated in the name of justice that is as unpleasant as it is powerful. There’s hardly a single genuine smile to be found here after the first few hours.

Part II opens with Joel recapitulating the events at the hospital to his brother, Tommy. The scene plays like a confession, with Joel’s somber demeanor hinting at how he’s aware of the gravity of his actions to save Ellie – the people he had to kill, the lies he had to tell. “She needed her immunity to mean something,” he says, revealing how he knows precisely what was that he took from her: a chance for her life to have a purpose in a world where that was needed the most.

It’s not a surprise, then, to find that his relationship with Ellie has taken a hit: they’re cold and distant with each other, with some forced acts of kindness and love. He tells her a joke, but no one really laughs. Their interactions are awkward and filled with things left unsaid, a relationship smothered by issues they refuse to talk about openly. Ellie is four years older now, living with Joel and Tommy in Jackson – a fairly civilized town, where she can learn how to play the guitar, watch a movie, date girls, and fight off bigots. She’s getting to have a normal life. Yes, from time to time, she must go on mounted patrols to kill the infected who prowl the nearby ramshackle buildings, but such is life, we all gotta work.

Outside Jackson, however, we now follow a new character, Abby: a strong-willed and jacked young woman who seems hellbent on fulfilling her mission. She wants justice, she wants revenge. When her friends plead to her to see sense and back away, as they’re far from their home and in incredible danger, she ventures into the woods alone, with no plan, driven only by her terrible purpose. The juxtaposition of their stories is used to great effect, as the game constantly cuts from Ellie’s peaceful life to Abby’s intense journey. One striking moment, for example, we go from Ellie smoking pot and having sex with her girlfriend – the sweet Dina – to Abby being crushed beneath a fence, centimeters from being slashed and eaten by dozens of bloodthirsty infected. The message is clear: we get that Abby is going to upend things and bring that violence back to Jackson, back to Ellie.

After that happens, the game’s plot truly takes shape: this is Ellie’s journey now, not Joel’s (who remains in Jackson), and so she sets out on horseback to Seattle with Dina. She’s after justice, she’s after revenge. She’s going to make Abby pay for her attack on Jackson. After Joel lost his daughter in Part I, there was a time skip showing the hardened, brutal man he had become years later. Part II shows Ellie going through that journey in each excruciating moment.

In the game’s first hours we find its only moments of respite, mainly because Dina shows herself to be much better company than Joel. Take Ellie’s infinite repertoire of dad jokes, for example: while Joel dismissed them for a good part of Part I, in a clear attempt to smother his feelings for the girl, it’s now Dina who tells them to Ellie – and precisely because she knows Ellie likes them. When Joel tells his joke at the beginning of Part II, he’s manipulating Ellie, trying to soften her up, “look at how I’m making a gesture, how I’m trying to make things right,” he’s saying. When Dina tells a joke, she just wants to see Ellie smile. So, instead of that stubborn brooding old man, we now have someone who is more than willing to connect with Ellie and is not afraid to show that. However, Dina being much more pleasant to be around only increases the tension: there’s this rising sense of impending doom, making us fear for her safety at every turn.

Violence, after all, is so much a constant in their lives that it even manages to function as a bonding experience. There’s this moment when Ellie asks Dina how old she was when she first killed someone, and it’s revealing that Ellie makes the question with the same gravitas as if she were asking about Dina’s first kiss. They share stories of pain and murder while passing by many disfigured corpses of people eaten by zombies amidst the crumbled ruins of the modern world, and they get closer together. Love is beautiful.

But violence here isn’t. It’s brutal and it’s raw, it’s seen up-close and put front and center. When Ellie plunges a knife into someone’s throat, we can see their eyes bulging and losing their spark, we can hear their muffled scream and cry for help. When Ellie shoots someone in the head, they don’t simply fall down with a thud; here, there’s often an uncanny instant of stillness where the body seems unsure of what’s happened, in shock. Violence in Part II is the theme; its effect is the point. When we shoot a man’s leg off with a shotgun, his screams of pain will linger for a good while, becoming the background score of the following action. We are expected to be unsettled by the violence, disturbed by its result.

And Part II is keen to judge these acts of violence. When Ellie first encounters a man who was tortured for information – by a friend of hers, no less – there’s a red curtain behind the corpse bathing him in a red light, which functions both as a warning for Ellie and a condemnation of what transpired there. When it’s her time to follow her friend’s footsteps, it’s not only Ellie’s victim that is covered in red light but the whole room – and the fact that her hands are seen shaking later is telling: Ellie may be treading Joel’s path in life but she’s not the same cold-blooded psychopath. At least not yet. So, she grasps her head in horror when confessing her actions to Dina, and does what Joel would never do in her place: she talks about it, letting herself feel the guilt derived from her actions.

There’s this moment in the game that will happen many times, anywhere, and in different ways: we’re in an intense firefight, taking hit after hit, and we see a woman approaching from the right, behind a balcony. Without hesitating, we take out our rifle and put a bullet in her head. She was an enemy, and now she has been properly dispatched, dealt with. We mourn only the precious bullet we had to spend on her, maybe our last one for a while, and promptly move our attention to the next enemy. This is when we hear someone shout that woman’s name, “Emily,” in pain, and in anger. For them, she was a person, and she has been brutally murdered, taken from them. They mourn the loss of a friend, maybe even of a lover, and suddenly, they’re coming for us for justice, for revenge. It took only the utterance of a name during combat to make an otherwise ordinary gameplay moment quickly encapsulate the whole thematic discussion of the story.

The Last of Us Part II offers a deeply unpleasant interactive experience, as it’s thoroughly designed to judge us for the only actions we’re allowed to take. Part II is a videogame, so we must shoot Emily in the head, and we must put an axe on Priscila’s shoulder and hear her scream in pain, see the distorted look of surprise and hate in her face, and feel the thump of the hit in the controller. We must plunge a knife into Troy’s neck and witness his eyes bulge and turn white, we must take out Matthew with a silent pistol and then hear his dog start to whine and then shoot the dog down too, before they call attention to what happened. All to progress. Ellie is coming after Abby and her whole group of friends with a vengeance and she sees them purely as enemies to be dispatched and dealt with (those who deeply wrong us often stop being people, after all). So, she must do all these horrible things to get to her goal and we’re tied to her quest, whether we like it or not, and forced to partake on her increasingly disturbing actions: we’re not allowed the safe distance of a book, of a movie, of a tv show, of watching a let’s play. We can’t simply sit back and judge her actions from the comfort of our couch or even agree with Ellie, but without having to feel the burden of being in her shoes and having to actually perform these terrible actions. Here, we are driving that knife into Rachel’s belly and watching her blood flow down to the ground and stain the pavement. We are hitting a dog with a spiked mace several times until it stops whining. We are pushing the buttons. In a story about accountability, this matters. This is everything.

If a person happens to have fun playing The Last of Us Part II, it’s okay. Really. Unlike the game, we don’t judge. Therapy exists for a reason and may even be affordable in some places. But there’s no joy to be found in this game’s mechanics. Part II is a game designed to make us feel bad for killing people, where we get to kill a lot of people. And it uses not only the brutality of violence to shock us but also empathy: by giving enemies an identity, they stop being generic red dots in a minimap and become people. We are invited to do the inconceivable: put ourselves in the shoes of those who wronged us deeply and understand them as human beings, no matter what they’ve done. If Ellie’s narrative arc here is to become Joel, and gradually turn into a man who would butcher a lot of people in a hospital without ever caring about what that entails to everyone but him, the game urges us to do the opposite and abandon the self-centered mindset of a violent act.

This is why Part II’s non-linear narrative structure is its greatest strength. It ties everything thematically, for after playing with Ellie for almost ten hours, we’re forced to leave her behind and return to Abby, going back to the day when Ellie started her journey through Seattle. And we stay with Abby for ten more hours, allowing her – and her skill tree – the same time and space to breathe and be developed. But here is the most important thing about this abrupt change in perspective: since we’re with Abby’s group now, the people we’ve been killing up to that point suddenly appear as our friends and colleagues. We get to know their names, their quirks, and their struggles. We get to hear some of them cracking inspired jokes and caring for each other… after we have brutally murdered them. Part II makes us kill people and then forces us to befriend them later. It’s hell: as they barely escape an infected attack, as they start to make plans for the future, as they progress forwards in time towards the moment of their demise, we’ll always have their deaths playing on the back of our minds, on replay: a constant reminder of how their struggles and dreams will simply vanish after meeting the point of Ellie’s knife.

Life is a fragile thing in The Last of Us Part II, where major characters die with little fanfare, victims of a single instant of violence. One second they’re there, talking to us, the next there’s a hole where their left eye used to be, their sentence cut short forever. There’s a moment when a giant of a man kicks down a door and comes for Ellie wielding an enormous hammer: in other games, he would be a boss fight, both imposing and hard to take down, but here after firing a single time with a shotgun he is already on the ground, headless, in a pool of his own blood.

Abby’s people hit Jackson because they were wronged, and now Ellie is coming after them because she has been wronged, which will lead Abby to come after her because she will have been wronged again, and so the cycle of violence continues with no end in sight, with the unflinching pursuit of justice leading to a continuous barrage of injustices. But what’s the other option for Ellie and Abby? Stay put and do nothing? Don’t retaliate when the people they care about are hurt?

Ellie has this diary that is full of drawings of recent events and the people she loves – there’s even a poem/song she wrote for Joel – and, at the beginning of her journey, she writes there how she was so glad to spend time with Dina when traveling through Seattle that, for a merciful second, she forgot all about Jackson and her mission. She was just living in the moment and being happy. And here’s the important bit: she feels guilty for having felt that happiness and believes it was a mistake that should never happen again. She owes the ones she lost her misery; she owes them the perpetuation of the cycle of violence. She must make Abby pay, and that is only fair.

When Abby visits an aquarium, she finds a note on a corpse: the man’s kids judged him for not wanting to avenge the death of their mother and abandoned him there, leaving him alone to die. “What kind of example is that? You should’ve gotten angry. You should have made them hurt worse than they hurt us,” they wrote him. He chose to stay put and do nothing, to break the cycle of violence, and that was considered a display of weakness by those he cared about. The manly thing to do was to get on a horse, put on a cowboy hat, and drive into the sunset to get his revenge. Just like Ellie and Abby did.

The complexity of the game’s narrative comes from showing that, even though the girls’ path leads only to more death and ruin, the other option has its own share of problems, too. The game portrays how it’s not enough to say “enough is enough” and make a truce with those who wronged us: peace is great, but it never lasts. Peer pressure calling for payback can lead someone to break the truce. Idiots, who refuse to see the other as anything other than an “other”, may break it as well. People who learn about the injustices suffered, but not about the ones perpetrated, are bound to break it. For justice, for revenge. Historical grievances may be weaponized by people who see in the conflict an opportunity for profit and an easy grab of power. There are no simple solutions to be found in The Last of Us Part II, only the inevitable misery of the human condition: no matter how much we try, everybody’s gonna lose.

We soon discover, for example, that Abby’s group – called Wolves – is locked in a war for land with another one – called Scars. The first time we meet the Scars is early on with Ellie. They’re a scary bunch: they gut people in religious rituals and communicate by frightening whistles – which are scary precisely because we don’t understand them. They’re the “other” in its purest form: inscrutable, foreign, and dangerous. And they’re also the home of the kindest character in the entire game.

Their truce with the Wolves was broken some time ago by some idiots and now both groups are just like Ellie and Abby, duty-bound to kill each other. Was their mistake the act of leaving people alive, someone to take revenge?  “It has to be all of them,” Abby’s leader (a very brief but memorable Jeffrey Wright) says in one moment, as if he had just found the solution: total and complete eradication. Genocide. He has a cold, sinister tone of voice, and we first meet him covered in shadows, torturing a man. “Make sure he doesn’t fall asleep,” he instructs a guard, before leaving to grant Abby an audience.

Ellie and Abby are two sides of the same coin and the structure reflects that. They have similar flashbacks, for example, with Ellie being guided to a dinosaur museum by Joel, while Abbie is led to that aquarium by her crush, a young man named Owen. Both male figures even push the girls into the water, forcing them to dive deep to get to their destinations. In one scene, Ellie mimics Joel’s words ironically and instead of being upset, he’s glad because it means she at least listened to him. The same exchange happens between Abby and her dad. The only difference between them is that Abby is always one step ahead than Ellie in their narrative arc, having been wronged first: with Abby, we see the judging red light in memories and nightmares, marking the beginning of her journey of revenge, blinking as she approaches the fateful door that led to all this despair.

In Part II, goodness is not a quality inherent to a person. No one is simply good or evil in a vacuum. Morality here is a matter of perspective and a social judgement: you’re only good and evil to someone. A Scar says to Abby that she’s a good person, while her best friend tells her she’s a horrible person, and the truth is that she’s both: she’s good to the Scar and horrible to her friend. This is precisely the rub of Ellie and Abby’s journey: in their quest for revenge, when they dehumanize those who wronged them, they forget that the violence they’re about to perpetrate will damage many innocent people, too, and those who cared about their target will come for them.

Finally, if we haven’t talked about the zombies until now, it’s because they hardly matter in Part II. Around the middle part of the game, Joel says to Ellie, “Found two runners in a house.” But he’s not scared, he’s bored, speaking about the runners as if talking about the weather. Killing the infected has become routine to these characters, it’s like going to the supermarket – if the aisles could gobble you up if you made a mistake. The result is that, save for two late sections with Abby – one takes place in a hollowed building where we can look down at all the infested floors we must go through, and the other is a bonkers Resident Evil set piece in a hospital –, the moments with the infected are largely uninspired. They’re there just to break the pace and alleviate the tension: after all, there are no moral conundrums in the act of killing zombies, so we can finally shoot at something with peace of mind. Clickers, however, work much better here than in the first game and can be very terrifying and unpredictable, finally appearing to react to our movements instead of just sound.

There’s also this great moment when we first arrive at Seattle and get to a big open area, where we can explore the whole dilapidated neighborhood at our discretion: if we find a note stating there may be supplies in the bank, for example, the judgment call of whether or not it’s worth risking our ammo to retrieve whatever is in there is solely ours. This more open structure does wonders for the game: this section in Seattle may be brief, but the rest of our journey is littered with optional houses and stores to explore in search of supplies. Since Part II introduces the revolutionary mechanic of… breaking glass, Ellie and Abby are only barred from entering a place if the place itself is blocked by rubble or something along these lines. After killing a zombie, for example, we may find a note on the body stating that the man was going after some deserters before he was bitten – deserters he believed were hiding in that neighborhood with a stash of guns – and we may decide to go looking for them, breaking windows to get inside the nearby apartment buildings.

Another optional activity is discovering safe codes – they’re usually written somewhere nearby, but there are some clever ones hidden in the environment – and collecting stuff, such as written notes – there’s a series of them talking about a guy named Boris, who went full Joel after the Wolves killed his daughter, that basically serve as a cautionary tale – and superhero cards, which tell the weird backstory of their characters. It’s interesting to notice, for example, how each superhero with a backstory related to acquiring revenge at any cost is classified as a “neutral villain” by the card – another clear moral judgement that the game passes over its main characters.

This is why the new game mode released with the PS5 remaster of the game feels like a thematic betrayal of the core game: called “No Return”, this mode is an effective roguelike experience, where we defeat waves of random enemies – people and zombies – to unlock characters, weapons, and skins. And it feels wrong precisely because it’s very fun, going against everything the main game attempts to do.

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s just gonna hurt,” Ellie writes in her diary at one point. And as she continues to transform into Joel, we begin to suspect that there’s nothing good waiting for her – or anyone else – going forward. No matter what happens then, Brazil’s former President Dilma Roussef was right: everybody’s gonna lose.

March 28, 2025.