The Last of Us Part 2: Violence begets violence
Published Jun 12, 2020 10:47 pm
“Shut up.” Ellie whispers these words in a choked hiss as she stabs a woman in the throat. She crumples to the ground choking on her own blood. Her name is Angel - her comrade says so when he discovers her corpse. Over the next five minutes I dismember, set on fire, and decapitate her friends, leaving no survivors. The last man standing gets shot in the arm, and he falls. He limps away, cursing at Ellie, calling her a monster before I make her pull the trigger and turn his head to mush. I can’t help but feel the same. Ellie is a monster. You’d have to be a monster to murder so many people, so brutally.
I really don’t like Ellie.
The Last of Us: Part 2 is a third person survival horror shooter, and the sequel to the PlayStation 3 smash hit The Last of Us. Set in a post-apocalyptic America, humanity is beginning to heal after the end. You play as Ellie, now a young adult, on a personal quest for revenge.
TLOU2 is an unpleasant experience. I don’t mean the gameplay - the gameplay is stellar, with tight controls that make the game a tense, thrilling thing to play. Weapons hit like a truck and kick like a mule, but the scarce ammo count means you have to pick your shots carefully. The levels are structured with freedom in mind, with alternate routes allowing for different approaches to the same goal. The presentation is fantastic, from the lush greenery and ruined buildings to the music and the acting and the pacing. So why is it such a discomforting game?
The first time I cracked a man’s skull open with a shotgun, I gasped. One moment his head was there - the next, there was a chunky splatter on the wall he was standing in front of. Enemies will explode into bloody chunks, sometimes sticking to the ceiling only to fall moments later. Dismembered foes might writhe around in agony before dying, screaming all the while. TLOU2 is steeped in violence, and the dedication to realism borders on the stomach-churning. Enemies have names that their friends will call out. Dogs, too. While it is possible to make your way through sections of the game without killing anyone, it’s extremely difficult. When the bodies start piling up it gets harder to hide them.
TLOU2 is a revenge story - but leaving it at that would be like calling the first game a walk from A to B. It’s a story about the cycle of revenge, about the lengths someone would go to get vengeance. It’s about tribalism, and rejecting it. And it’s about hurting people.
Ellie hurts a lot of people.
Despite being nail-bitingly hard, TLOU2 manages the impressive task of including a wealth of accessibility options. Subtitles are a given, but now you can toggle directional indicators as to where the dialogue is coming from if you’re hard of hearing. I personally used a helpful lock-on system - I had sustained a hand injury before playing the game, and I was able to more easily play thanks to how robust it was. It was still hard, but now the difficulty came in inventory and resource management as opposed to the mechanical difficulty of aiming. I was able to enjoy the story better without worrying about being good or bad at the game - though “enjoy” is a bit of a stretch.
With its themes of violence seemingly used to deconstruct violence in videogames, TLOU2 brings to mind another thematically similar game in Hotline Miami. In that game, the protagonist Jacket is compelled to do acts of extreme violence because of mysterious phonecalls that turn out to have been empty threats. It draws a parallel to how players will need little justification to play a game, other than being told by the game to continue. TLOU2 attempts to bring this idea further with Naughty Dog’s usual cinematic flair. I fear it worked a little too well; by the second in-game day I was already teetering on being sick of the violence, but I pushed on, compelled to see the story through to the end.
Which brings me back to Ellie. She is not an audience surrogate, by any means. By the virtue of the linear story, she is the protagonist. While I may have controlled her, I was under no illusion that I was her. Not when she was perfectly capable of enacting violence like she was recording a beheading for Facebook. Not when she jeopardized herself and her friends. And definitely not when she kills dogs. TLOU2 managed the Herculean task of getting me to organically hate a character and question my own motivations - the only thing that keeps me from calling it bad writing is that all that hatred for the designated hero does, indeed, pay off. By the end of the game I was left wondering if it was all worth it. I felt empty and hollow, like part of me had died.
The Last of Us: Part 2 is a bold narrative direction. While I enjoyed my experience by the end of it, I knew that the story was going to be divisive. Can I recommend this game? Honestly… I don’t know. I’d say play it, if you want something different, and if you want to be hurt emotionally.