[Spoilers for The Last of Us and its sequel.]
I spent my first playthrough of the second Last of Us waiting and hiding. Crouching behind busted cars and toppled concrete pillars and the seats of derailed subways and other chest-high pieces of cover; crawling and slinking beneath solar arrays and military trucks and through short and tall grass and shrubbery; constantly pressing R1 to enter the high-contrast, black and white “listen mode” where you can magically see through walls to locate the position and movement of enemies.
I had, as players tend to do, “[optimized] the fun out of [the] game.” I identified the most boring and conservative playstyle — study enemy patrol routes, sneak up behind them and press triangle and square to grab and stab/strangle them, immediately return to cover (if spotted, run away and wait for enemies to shout “FIND HER” and then, 30 seconds later, “WE LOST HER”) — and never engaged with the new weapons and upgrades I gradually acquired.
Which is a viable if tedious way to get through the game on lower difficulties. My first playthrough in 2021 was on normal; when I recently replayed on New Game Plus Hard (fully decked out with endgame equipment), sneaking up on enemies was significantly more difficult and less reliable. I finally realized that the old, boring playstyle wouldn’t work anymore in a level uncreatively titled “Houses” and is exactly that: a sloping residential neighborhood where you work your way downhill, scrambling through crumbling houses and overgrown backyards filled with successive waves of heavily armed soldiers and attack dogs. The level is too sprawling and too open for you to safely stealth kill enemies, too many ways for you to get cornered and swarmed. I died over and over making little to no progress, watching and rewatching the many ways player character Ellie can be unceremoniously killed, before finally realizing what the game wanted me to do: attack, loudly and aggressively, and strategically retreat.
Attack, retreat. Attack, retreat. Throw a molotov to set a soldier on fire, the flames crawling up his legs and arms and head as he spastically tries to put them out before collapsing into a smoking pile of singed flesh, and crawl away. Aim a shotgun at another soldier’s head and pull the trigger at point blank range, blasting off the left half of her head as she screams out in pain with the remaining right half, and quickly move before enemies converge on where the sound of the shot came from. Raise a machete as a snarling dog charges at me and bring it down hard on its head, a sharp crack coming from its skull and a tiny whimper from its mangled throat, and then hide in nearby grass, ready to kill whoever comes to investigate.
When I used the full arsenal of weapons, I found myself astonished at the viciousness of the game’s violence. In my boring playthrough, I became intimately acquainted with how Ellie quietly and efficiently slit an enemy’s throat and stabbed their chest as they choked on their own blood, a gurgling sound accompanying their expiration. It was brutal, but relatively tame even compared to the violence depicted in cutscenes. In my more aggressive playthrough, explosive arrows quickly became my favorite weapon — miniature missiles that can take out two or three people at once. The first time I used one I aimed directly at a soldier and fired; it hit her right in the torso and exploded with a sickening wetness. Somewhat stunned, I inspected the blast site. She had completely vaporized. It looked like the aftermath of a suicide bombing, a flower of burnt blood blooming onto the ground.
“All of the human enemies in the game have names,” said co-director Anthony Newman. “They’ll also react in anguish and call out each other’s names when they see one of their friends die … these aren’t just faceless goons that you’re fighting against, these are real people who care about each other, and you are committing these heinous acts against them.”
In practice, what this means is that you’ll hear a lot of “AMIIIIIR” and “JORGEEEEE” and so on as you kill and kill and so on. (The racial diversity of the people you kill is notable, so I guess props to developer Naughty Dog for that.) The fact that named enemies is one of the sequel’s few new features (if it can even be called a feature) feels like an admission of failure on Naughty Dog’s part, that they’ve given up on resolving the deader-than-a-dead-horse debate about “ludonarrative dissonance” — aka why is it that in Uncharted, Naughty Dog’s other action game franchise, protagonist Nathan Drake is a lovable, quick-witted rogue in the noninteractive cutscenes, but the second the player takes control he becomes an unrepentant mass murderer who mows down and blows up hundreds upon hundreds of people (mostly brown people from the Global South) without batting an eye? Why is there such a disjunction between narrative and gameplay?
In The Last of Us games, the protagonists are unrepentant mass murderers in cutscenes and unrepentant mass murderers in gameplay. Which I suppose is one way to skin a cat, but misses the entire point of the critique: why can’t we have a nonviolent big-budget AAA game? You can feel Part II straining towards a less violent version of itself with the many quieter sequences where you leisurely explore a richly detailed environment while conversing with your companion. But all you can do in these sequences is press triangle at designated locations to trigger dialogue or scripted interactions — and then it’s back to “committing heinous acts.”
What Part II suffers from is a fundamental lack of imagination. Like the original, you navigate ruined American cities crawling with zombie and human enemies — but this time the violence is even more exquisitely and grotesquely rendered. “Every facet of the original game has been expanded and enlarged in the sequel, but not actually improved,” wrote Rob Zacny in his review. “It sets out to surpass its predecessor, but the only meaningful contrast between them is in its even more oppressive bleakness and violence.”
It’s a game with no new ideas about what a game can be, a game that’s aesthetically and narratively stuck and spinning its wheels. Perhaps it makes sense that the game’s characters are also stuck, endlessly reliving and acting out of their respective traumas. Joel, the protagonist of the first game, is stuck on his daughter’s death and murders a doctor who could’ve engineered a zombie virus cure from Ellie, who has become his surrogate daughter. Abby, the doctor’s daughter, is stuck on her father’s murder and subsequently murders Joel in the second game. Ellie becomes stuck on Joel’s murder, with PTSD flashbacks plaguing her waking life, and pursues Abby to fulfill her own quest for revenge. Part II ends with Abby making contact with a few remaining members of the Fireflies, the rebel faction that she and her father were members of. But the Fireflies failed to save humanity the first time around — why should this time be any different? Why should we hold onto any sort of hope when the game shows us again and again that this is a hopeless world filled with endlessly repeating cycles of violence?
While making Part II, many Naughty Dog staffers also lost hope in the very company they worked for, a company endlessly repeating a cycle of brutal and unsustainable working conditions. An investigative piece from Jason Schreier revealed constant turnover due to employees “working 12-hour days (or longer) and even weekends when the studio is in crunch mode, sacrificing their health, relationships, and personal lives” with the development of each new game. This is in spite of Naughty Dog’s best efforts to avoid mandatory crunch for Part II, whose development literally could’ve killed someone when “a large metal pipe” crashed onto the floor at 9 pm, a team of artists still in the office and working late into the night.
Part II cost $220 million to develop; who knows what cost it took on the bodies and minds of the people who made it. In 2022, two years after Part II’s release, Naughty Dog released a remake of the first Last of Us for PS5, which itself was already remade for the PS4 in 2014 after its original launch on PS3 in 2013. In 2023, the original game was adapted into season 1 of an HBO show. In 2024, Part II was rereleased for PS5 (I’m waiting for the inevitable re-rerelease for PS6). In 2025, the first half of Part II will be adapted into season 2 of the show; the second half of the second game will be adapted into season 3.
“I promise you, we will not be ‘The Last of Us’ studio forever,” said Naughty Dog head Neil Druckmann (the man largely responsible for his company’s toxic work environment), while also confirming that “multiple single-player projects” are in the works — one of which has to be Part III, right? The IP is too reliably profitable and broadly recognizable to not keep milking it for all it’s worth. Season 1 of the show cost over 100 million USD to make and was the most expensive TV show ever filmed in the Canadian province of Alberta, which subsidized production with a 30% tax credit (i.e. HBO gets 30% off any taxes it owes to the provincial government). Season 2 is being filmed in British Columbia, which in some regions offers a tax credit of up to 53.5%. Naughty Dog and HBO have already spent — and the Canadian government has already waived — hundreds of millions of dollars into telling and retelling and remaking and rereleasing this story of killing and killing and killing that audiences are more than willing to pay to play and replay and watch. Why stop now?
So I’ll dutifully watch season 2 next year. I’ll watch season 3. I’ll play Part III when it inevitably comes out. I will shoot and stab and impale and immolate and attack and retreat and attack and retreat; I will buy the next PlayStation and renew my HBO subscription; I will consume and reconsume a cultural product that is an aesthetic and economic dead end, that cannot imagine a world without violence — whether it’s depicted on screen or enacted on exploited workers — that presents and represents a future that’s no future at all.
