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• #The last of us part 2 review scores full#

Then there’s the narrative itself, which is the other way the game gradually confronts players with the consequences of the violence they enact as Ellie.

There are several parts of the game where you can skillfully evade conflict, but there are many scripted, unavoidable duels, and they are all grisly. Removing those hazards is cathartic - and Last of Us wants to complicate that catharsis, often leaving you with no other options.

In video games, combat is a puzzle, a maze with shifting hazards to navigate. Shoot a foe dead and their partner will scream their name attack with a melee weapon and your target with wail in agony use a blade and they’ll choke on their own blood. Those scenes are among the most brutal in a modern video game. The most direct is by regularly presenting the player with situations where fighting is the only way forward. The ensuing excess of violence would seem pointless if the game wasn’t so interested in re-contextualizing the things it made you do, seemingly damning you for treating the digital foes in front of you as fodder to be put down rather than representations of real people. Across that time, the actions undertaken by the player are largely the same: carefully navigating a hostile environment in order to find enough supplies to dispatch or slip past a small army of infected, cultists, or militia members. Where The Last of Us Part II differs from past stories of blind vengeance is that it’s a video game that requires 25 to 30 hours to complete. As in many revenge stories, the closer Ellie gets to her goal the more reprehensible she acts, with a horrible mess left in her wake. As Ellie, players get a brief taste of idyllic life in the post-apocalypse before something terrible happens, inciting her vengeful mission. The ambiguity of Ellie’s response extends throughout The Last of Us Part II, set four years later as Joel and Ellie have settled down in Jackson, Wyoming, an area that has managed to become a flourishing city despite the horror that surrounds it. The game’s final moment jumps ahead sometime later, as Joel lies to Ellie and tells her there was no cure, and she receives his story with an uncertain: “Okay.” In a climax that is still a high-water mark for big-budget video games, it’s revealed that developing a vaccine would kill Ellie, and so the player, as Joel, decides to murder the surgeons and their attendant militia guards just as an unconscious Ellie is about to go under the knife, unaware of her fate. Eventually, he discovers that Ellie is immune to infection, and he’s bringing her to the last remaining medical facility in the States in the hopes of developing a cure. The game cast players as Joel, a smuggler charged with bringing Ellie across the country for reasons unknown to him. When the first Last of Us game debuted in 2013, zombie fiction was already trite and exhausting, but the game still succeeded by virtue of being a technical marvel that also focused squarely on its characters. Rather, it’s the behavior of the people who remain after the parasite’s arrival brings about the end of civilization as we know it.

However, like The Walking Dead, it isn’t the afflicted that represent the real horror.

These fungal zombies, known as “infected,” are violent, carnivorous, and highly contagious, releasing spores that will infect others. The PlayStation 4 release is the sequel to 2013’s The Last of Us, which was set in a world where the real-life cordyceps fungi - a grotesque parasite that inhabited insects, causing them to behave erratically - has made the leap to humans.

#The last of us part 2 review scores full#

Her path to revenge is full of perhaps the most unsettlingly rendered violence a video game has portrayed in some time, most of it committed by the person playing the game. The protagonist, a young woman named Ellie, endures something terrible, and everyone involved in perpetrating it must pay with their lives. In The Last of Us Part II, nearly every character is as far from a “good day” as a person can be. Trouble is, The Last of Us Part II thinks itself clever by making this the point of its story, seemingly unaware that one does not need a thirty-hour video game to make this point. If you heard it all without the benefit of context, perhaps by being in an adjacent room while someone played, you’d register a parade of murder that would seem exceedingly difficult to justify. For hours on end, thanks to the craftsmanship of top-notch audio engineers and dedicated performers, you will hear sounds of human misery: people shrieking in pain, pleading for their life, gagging and gurgling as blood seeps out of them. The Last of Us Part II is the worst video game I’ve ever heard. A moment of solemn reflection amid bloodshed? Or doomscrolling Twitter?