Spoiler warning: The following story covers major plot details from The Last of Us Part II, which are expected to be seen in season two of the HBO TV show…
The Last of Us: Part II is a deeply unpleasant game. You stab a dog, murder a pregnant woman and discover an old porno made in homage to Crash Bandicoot. It's an overwhelming amount of awful to get your head around, despite its wildly ambitious narrative structure and some of the most affecting performances seen in a video game. Of course, the original sin for much of this tragedy is the shock death of The Last of Us Part I's protagonist Joel, who is murdered with a golf club while his daughter figure Ellie watches on helplessly.
It's a scene that's seared into the minds of anyone who has seen it, especially that long, dread-filled descent down to the log cabin's basement. Had you played its work-in-progress version just a year out from release, your response might have been, “Is that it?”
It was the end of 2019, just before Christmas, on my third and penultimate trip from London to Los Angeles, charting the story of the game’s creation by developer Naughty Dog. No one outside of the studio had seen this scene yet and with very good reason. Upon entering the room where Joel is soon to be killed, there is already an absurdly thick layer of blood caked on the walls and floor. There’s no finished music, and the audio that is there isn’t mixed, so the suspense is non-existent. The voiceover is patchy, too, and it’s not yet been bug-tested yet. It occasionally stutters and threatens to crash – the moment when Joel’s murderer, Abby, shoots his leg off with a shotgun hitches for a second and the audio cuts out. I’ve seen games in development before, but not a moment this important. I was full of doubt. Would it land?
Almost four years on, I needn’t have worried. In the finished version, it is bloody, unflinching and merciless. And you, the player, feel totally helpless. Part II’s big surprise will absolutely break fans when it airs in HBO’s TV adaptation.
After the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020, Naughty Dog was rightfully concerned that The Last of Us Part II's dark, post-apocalyptic setting wouldn’t be something that players would want to immerse themselves in. Throughout the game's development, killing Joel was such a divisive move that several team members struggled to come to terms with it. “There were people that got it,” Druckmann told me during the reporting of the game’s creation, “and then there were people – a minority – that were just stuck on how violent it is, and how dark and quite cynical it is about mankind.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game’s fan base elicited more extreme reactions of the same base emotion: hurt. While Part I is grim and dark in many places – perhaps even more so than the TV show and its bittersweet Bill and Frank romance – it ultimately rests on hope and optimism as its core emotion. In stark contrast, Part II really twists the knife by making you sit and watch one of your favourite characters die only to then ask you to forgive the perpetrator by playing through their redemption arc for hours upon end.
Although The Last of Us Part II would go on to win more than 320 Game of the Year awards following its release, it is still an undeniably contentious title. Much of the criticism levied at the game’s story when it launched was that its central message – interpreted rather simplistically as “violence is bad” – was too on the nose. So much of its marketing was hamstrung by the necessity to keep Joel’s death a secret that a story told in vicious shades of grey was left open to misinterpretation. No one emerges from Part II unscathed, but one particularly brutal trailer was initially criticised for its violence against women. “You’re like ‘Hold on, now you’ve just dismissed all the women that have worked on this trailer, including the co-writer that did the first draft of that scene,'” Druckmann said at the time.
The Last Of Us Part II, inspired by cinematic greats such as The Godfather, is the most-anticipated PlayStation 4 title ever. We spent two years behind the scenes while Naughty Dog and its creative director, Neil Druckmann, overcame pressure, delays, a pandemic and then the unthinkable to make a game-changer
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But playing the newly remastered version of the game on PS5 – more visceral than ever thanks to a native 4K resolution and a surprisingly accomplished No Return roguelike survival mode – it’s clear the game’s message is much less about the inciting events and much more about our reactions to them. Violence is bad? No, forgiveness is hard. Watching Joel get battered with a nine iron remains an emphatic depiction of the futility of revenge, and its unintended consequences aren’t any easier to watch as they sprawl out over a 20-hour grievance odyssey. How Druckmann and co-writer Craig Mazin will adapt this for HBO’s show we can only imagine. But we know they won’t pull their punches.
With TLOU 2, Naughty Dog set out to, in Druckmann’s words, “dismantle” the hope of the original game and double down on "exposing what the original game means”. Abby is just Ellie in a parallel universe – she wrought revenge against her father’s murderer and even her friends who helped her do so think she’s an “asshole”. So it’s fitting that a vocal minority of the player base is still incredibly angry, despite Naughty Dog’s audacious play for empathy. Perhaps Druckmann and his team were onto something – forgiveness really is fucking hard.
