Tortured by a Video Game: Thoughts on The Last of Us Part 2
A sadistic game about how sadism is bad
(This post contains spoilers.)
“If I die of stress and heartbreak, send my remains to Naughty Dog”. This is what I said to my boyfriend about eight hours into my playthrough of The Last of Us Part 2, after yet another heartbreaking plot twist had made it pretty clear that I was not the good guy, but probably definitely the bad guy. Now that I’ve successfully completed the game without having had any heart attacks (there were a few close calls to be sure), here are my impressions.
(Almost) Everything About This Game is Great
Notwithstanding my feelings about the narrative (which we’ll get to in a moment), Naughty Dog have excelled at pretty much everything here, and innovated in some respects too. The ruined jungle of post-apocalypse Seattle is realised in amazing detail. The acting is top notch. The zombies are as terrifying as ever. The moments of horror are ruthlessly effective. As a result of some clever design decisions, a couple of surprise attacks genuinely catch you completely off-guard — but it never feels cheap. It’s the post-apocalypse, you’re gonna get jumped. It’s your own fault if you weren’t ready.
The combat is just as solid as the first game, with some surprising changes. The most startlingly effective one is that the people you have to mow down in gun fights are now… people. Each of them has a name, and they call out to each other when things get hairy. This may not seem like anything amazing until you play it and realise that this is the first time you have ever felt like you’re actually fighting real people. You hear things like, “Anna, circle her from behind!” and “Flank her, Mark!” I pump a guy full of bullets and someone nearby, sounding very distressed, yells “Jacob’s down!” Sorry Jacob, I say to myself as I step over his limp body. It’s difficult to see how I will ever be able to go back to any game with generic-dialogue AI. That’s the sign of a great game — it ruins other games for you. If I had to wrestle my personal torment into submission and review this game objectively, I’d say it’s excellent. But this isn’t an objective review. So let’s get to the hard part.
Twisting the Knife
For a game whose central message is a warning against the temptations of violence, this game sure does freely and unashamedly indulge in a lot of it. If The Last of Us Part 1 involved an emotional gut punch at the end, Part 2 sticks a knife in your heart right at the beginning and spends 10 long hours twisting it this way and that. Ellie tortures a girl to death with an iron pipe. Twist. Ellie sneaks behind a girl wearing earphones and stabs her to death. Twist. Ellie murders a pregnant woman. Twisty twist twist. Every time Ellie set out on yet another mission of mass slaughter, my stomach clenched sickeningly. No Ellie. Stop. What are you doing. Please, don’t make me go through this again. What have you become.
I can see why a lot of people reacted against all this. It is the most arduous gaming experience I have ever had — to have to witness what this precious little girl has grown up to become. I know that, technically, Naughty Dog created these characters and it’s their right to do whatever they want with them. But we’ve all known and loved Joel and Ellie for seven years now. We’ve been to hell and back with them. We want to see justice done to their characters (and I don’t mean in a “golf club to the head” way). So, we can’t help but feel a sense of ownership over them too, and if our beloved characters are going to be executed and/or transformed into horrible villains, then it had better mean something.
So did it all mean something? Does The Last of Us 2 achieve its artistic goals? As far as I can tell, Naughty Dog’s intent with this game was to generate empathy for two characters on different sides of a conflict (goal 1), in order to make the point that sectarian violence and revenge killings only lead to more suffering (goal 2). The idea is fantastic, on the face of it at least. The bungling is in the execution.
Goal 1: Creating Empathy
Not only did I not empathise with Ellie, her actions made me lose the empathy I already had saved up from the previous game. This is not just because she’s a horrendous butcher… but because she’s also an irresponsible girlfriend and a bad friend. Even after she finds out her brand new girlfriend is pregnant and very sick, and will probably die if left by herself, Ellie still abandons her to go on an extremely dangerous outing because she hasn’t massacred enough people yet. Her friend Jessie might not be along for the ride if he found out what kind of person Joel really was. He deserves to know what he’s really risking his life for. But Ellie deceives him into continuing to think Joel was an outstanding guy and the people who killed him deserve what they’re getting. Jessie ends up shot in the head, and in a way, his blood is on Ellie’s hands. When her uncle Tommy gets in trouble, she leaves him to the Wolves (a dangerous paramilitary group out for his head) to go looking for her enemy instead. Joel, for all the terrible things he did, always protected those he loved. Ellie doesn’t even seem to care about doing that. She’s not just a vicious mass murderer, she’s an all-round shitty person. I’m astounded, even angry, that Naughty Dog thought this was in any way an empathetic character.
I really wanted to like Abby. By the time the story switched over to her perspective I was gasping for someone to root for. But it was so hard to find anything about her to connect to. I’m sure she had a personality once, before she became this one-note character (kill Joel, kill Joel, kill Joel). I understand that this is what revenge does to someone, but it doesn’t change the fact that one-note characters are not interesting characters — not unless we knew them before, so we can grieve the human who has gotten lost underneath all the pain and rage. Wanting revenge is not who a person is, just something they want to do. I still have no idea who Abby is behind the bloodlust. Later in the game (much later, too late) she saves some innocent kids so I guess she’s a good person, which still isn’t enough to make her interesting. What is her personality? All I can tell is that she’s kinda tough, and she likes coins (and liking coins is actually more of a hobby than a personality trait). That’s all I have to say about Abby. I really have no feelings about her whatsoever.
Goal 2: Violence is Bad
From the moment roughly five minutes after Joel’s death, when Ellie decides to drag her new girlfriend into a blood-soaked revenge mission, it’s clear that this is a bad idea. That Joel wanted, more than anything, to keep her safe and that he wouldn’t want her running off on some suicidal hunt for the sake of vengeance. That life, and love, are right at home. And if we already know at the beginning of the game that what she is doing is wrong, what further purpose does the 10–20 hours of graphic carnage that we then have to play through serve? Nothing was learned by me having to control Ellie as she shot, blew apart and stabbed a hundred people (and their dogs, you had to make me kill the dogs didn’t you Druckmann). It just felt like being tortured by a video game. If Naughty Dog’s aim was to condemn senseless sadism, perhaps they should have taken a look in a mirror.
Is it too extreme to say that the game failed entirely in its artistic intent? Maybe it just wasn’t meant for me. Maybe someone out there, who didn’t already know that violence only begets more violence and that the people on the other side of the battle lines are people too, experienced some revelations. You could perhaps say that the game still works as a simple survival horror drama, a portrait of two strong women losing their humanity on opposing sides of a conflict. But to say that is to ignore the fact that one of those women is Ellie. Ellie. The little girl who gave us back our humanity, who is now blasting and clobbering her way to brutal revenge. No, I do not accept that Ellie had to become a monster for no good reason. Like I said, if you’re going to do this to such a beloved character…
It Had Better Mean Something
In the first game, Joel’s descent into violence prompted interesting questions, which people are still arguing about seven years later. What is the dark side of being human? Is it a good thing to be willing to do anything to save your child? Would you let your daughter die if it might save humanity? The most interesting question the sequel asks seems to be “How many people can Ellie stab in the neck before it loses its shock value?” The violent ending of the first game threw Joel’s actions into a morally grey area. In contrast, it’s difficult not to feel a heavy-handed moralism behind the sequel every time Ellie bludgeons another person to death. What she’s doing is so obviously wrong from the start, that there’s no room for grey. And so, the game does not teach any meaningful lessons, raise any interesting questions, or explore any moral grey areas. It’s a 25-hour long act of cruelty, apparently for the purpose of condemning cruelty — about as subtle as punching someone twenty five times to really make sure they get the message that punching people is wrong.
In Conclusion… I Have Too Many Feelings About This Game
I could not give you a singular overall impression of this game if you strapped me to a chair and tortured me with a lead pipe for it. The technical craft is masterful, and Naughty Dog need to be praised for (as usual) excelling at pretty much everything they put their hand to. And they should also be given credit for being willing to make brave, unpopular narrative decisions. In Part 1, that bravery paid off. In Part 2, it didn’t. The decision to make Ellie into a monster lacked purpose, compassion, and at times even believability. The bitterness I felt about this overshadowed my enjoyment of everything else about the game, no matter how hard I tried not to let it.
One review of The Last of Us 2 called it the Schindler’s List of games. I would call it the Passion of the Christ of games. It has a fairly uninteresting message (violence is bad, mmmkay), and hammers it home with needless, self-indulgent ghastliness. It seems to believe that the best way to deliver an anti-violence message is to force a grim buffet of gore down the player’s throat while saying “LOOK, ISN’T THIS BAD”. Did you think I thought it was good?! Neither is it a particularly empathetic or life-affirming work. For that to be the case, it would have to impart us with the sense that human life is precious and beautiful, not just that a wrench to the head is terrible.
The Last of Us 2 is a game that takes an ugly, pessimistic view of humanity while pretending that it’s delivering some higher message about how being a bad person is bad. But it never rises above what it condemns in its characters. At times I hated what this game was doing to me so much that I wanted to throw it into a mulcher just to hear it scream. But that would be an act of violence — and I hear that, apparently, violence is a wrong thing to do.
Youtube: Pixel a Day (youtube.com/pixeladay)
Patreon: patreon.com/pixeladay
Twitter: @pixel_a_day
Tumblr: tumblr.com/blog/katfrompixeladay
Bluesky: @pixeladay.bsky.social
Other published work:
