Talk about a mind trip
Last of Us Part II among the best video games ever
The Last of Us Part II Sony Interactive Entertainment Available on Playstation 4
The Last of Us Part II is an astonishing achievement — a searing demonstration of how a video game can marry heart-stopping gameplay, gorgeous environmental storytelling and anxiety-inducing moral complexity.
Though it uses the tropes of the zombie apocalypse, it completely transcends the genre. The Last of Us Part II is a meditation on loss and the effort it takes to muddle through maddening grief.
The Last of Us (2013) told the story of Joel and Ellie. Joel is a middle-aged smuggler hired to transport Ellie, a young teenager, across the country. They head west to meet up with the Fireflies, a hard-pressed group of survivors living in the shadow of a collapsed society who hope to use Ellie to synthesize a vaccine to counter the plague that has turned most of the human population into flesh-chomping monstrosities.
Ellie is the only known person to have survived being bitten by “the infected.” From the beginning Joel tries to remain unattached to her. But eventually he comes to love Ellie as a daughter. After delivering her to the Fireflies, he is emotionally undone to discover she will have to forfeit her life for the manufacture of a vaccine. Though Ellie is fully prepared to sacrifice herself for the good of humanity, Joel ignores her wishes and forcibly removes her from the medical facility while she is under anesthesia, then lies to her about the incident.
The episode at the hospital is repeatedly examined from different angles in the game, which picks up years later with Joel and Ellie living in a small community in Wyoming and a rift has opened up between them as Ellie becomes self-reliant.
After weathering a harrowing loss, Ellie travels to Seattle to settle a vendetta. Her journey is one of the bloodiest treks in video game history. When Ellie kills someone, they rarely go meekly into the gentle night. Unless she performs a “silent takedown,” i.e. sneaking up on someone and slitting their throat, her victims often spend their remaining seconds pleading for their lives, wailing or calling to their loved ones. The developers go to tremendous lengths to humanize many of Ellie’s adversaries. Indeed, the towering achievement of The Last of Us Part II is that it’s constructed in such a way that by the end I wanted nothing more than for Ellie to renounce killing because of the psychological harm it was inflicting on her and those around her.
How gloriously paradoxical is it that one of the finest action games ever made pushes things to such an extreme that I wanted to reject its central game mechanics? At certain points during the second half of the story I found myself reluctant to press the buttons that would lead to injury of another character. Talk about a mind trip.
The Last of Us Part II is one of the best video games I’ve ever played.