With HBO’s The Last of Us Season 2 beginning, it’s no surprise that the conversation around the 2020 game has picked back up with renewed vigor. For Season 1 of the show, I was ecstatic and found myself chomping at the bit every week in anticipation of the next episode, absolutely giddy to see how Pedro Pascal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie would bring to life some of my favorite moments from the game. But Season 2 feels different. Instead of excitement, I feel this impending sense of dread. Instead of excitedly counting down the days, I feel myself bristling with anxiety at each reminder. Not because I expect the season to be bad. But because I expect it, much like Season 1, to honor its source material down to the letter. And Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us: Part II is a remarkable, tragic, beautiful, soul-crushing game. One that I’m grateful exists and grateful to have played, but have no desire to experience again.
Warning: The rest of this article will feature heavy spoilers for The Last of Us: Part II.
Where Part 1 introduced us to what true, primal and instinctual love can mean for a parent and their child, Part 2 showed us that such love and its actions don’t come without consequences. Following Joel’s brutal torture and death within the first 90 minutes of the game at the hands of a young woman named Abby, Ellie takes vengeance into her own hands and tracks her all the way to Seattle. We are with Ellie the whole way, hot and furious over the death of Joel, a character much beloved by many players for almost a decade to that point. And then, at the critical juncture in the game when Abby and Ellie finally come face to face, the game does something mind boggling: it switches perspective to Abby for the next 15 hours, forcing the player to experience that same span of time in her shoes.
When I realized what had happened, I put the game down and walked away for two whole days. I was incredulous. No. Absolutely not. I had zero interest in playing as the cold-blooded murderer of one of my favorite characters. Nothing she could say or do could cause me to have a shred of empathy for her. I genuinely had to talk myself down and remind myself that this was an entirely intentional narrative direction for the game. Naughty Dog wanted me to experience Abby’s perspective. There was something to learn, a reason for such a horrendous act of violence.
I won’t lie and say I enjoyed my time playing as Abby. I didn’t. I was angry the entire time. Even when we get our big reveal, that Abby’s father was the doctor researching the cure for the cordyceps infection, the very doctor Joel killed while trying to save Ellie, I was still angry. But at the same time, I paused and said, “Oh.” This wasn’t a game about vengeance. It wasn’t a game about “justice for Joel.” It was a tragedy, a true Shakespearan lament for modern times. It was a game about that same primal love, and how easily it can drive us to our most basic animal instincts to kill and protect. Abby wasn’t a ruthless killer. She was a girl consumed by grief with nowhere to go. Ellie wasn’t a ruthless killer. She was a girl who lost the only father figure she ever knew and committed unspeakable violence to try and ease her pain. And neither Ellie nor Abby came out of that experience whole.
When I finished the game, I didn’t feel the same knot in my stomach like I had with the first game. A lingering sense of sadness for a man and a little girl telling each other lies because they desperately need them to be true. Instead, I felt numb. Hurt. Empty. Grieving for so many characters whose lives were irreparably damaged in the interest of saving themselves. There are no winners. There’s no satisfying conclusion. There is only emptiness, and the reality that all Ellie or Abby can do at this point is move on with less than they had before.
The hollowness I felt at the end of Part 2 lingers even now, nearly five years later. It’s like a small dim light in the back of my mind, flickering occasionally. Reminding me that no change of perspective or a new understanding of empathy comes without pain, the grief of losing the truths you thought to be immovable and accepting what you desperately want to be false. Like the experience of films that yield no joy but take up residence in your heart and mind, glimmering like a bad dream: Schindler’s List, Requiem for a Dream, Grave of the Fireflies. Stories that rewire your heart and your brain chemistry; necessary, maybe even essential in some respects. But something we only need to experience one time, and spend the rest of our lives unpacking. That’s what The Last of Us: Part 2 is for me.
I will always be grateful for the experience I had playing Part 2. It was a pivotal moment of growth for me as an academic within the gaming space, and as a human being. And I will be there for Season 2 of the show, despite how much I desperately don’t want to re-experience the emotional upheaval the game put me through. But, growth never comes without pain and without letting go of your old worldview. So I’ll say goodbye to Joel one more time, seethe with hatred as Ellie one more time, and force myself to open my heart to Abby’s grief one more time.
And that will be that.
