The Last of Us Part II’s Constant Liminality

I played through the entirety of The Last of Us Part II in around 35 hours. 35 hours of grief, suffering, glorified torture, idleness, and dormancy.

The Last of us Part II strives for a personal, grueling play-through of grief and revenge, but falls short because of the gameplay-justifying walking controls. Moving from one cutscene to another as a player-directed exercise in pacing and emotional build-up that’s obstructed by giving the player that ability, the rhythm of the game and the areas explored are either rushed or dulled down.

Part II’s large play areas mix both a promise of an open world, and a confined linear path. Cutscenes and walking segments weave into one another but linger too long or too little, leaving in areas that could’ve been skipped over, or walks that could be cut down to shorter cutscenes with a few lines or exchanges without having to worry about the AI cutting a sentence too short or missing an interaction completely while being constrained in large areas and the carnage they invite.

The myriad of walking scenes felt like an attempt to bridge the gap between cutscenes and environmental storytelling discoveries, this mechanic struggles when presenting a new area as each level has a lot to take in with both decadent scenery and looming danger present. Having important conversations during these initial prefaces present a form of gaming sensory overload. The use of some form of text and audio log for these interactions would have been useful to go over throughout this sparsely dense game.

The graphics and the art style presented in the game are beautiful, beautiful in the same sense that hyper-realistic art is, an initial ‘wow’ at first that’s then gotten used to. Recognizing the skill and dedication it takes to create every fictional zombie creature and polygonal being as real as the system allows; the entire game is adorned by these meticulously crafted eyelashes, dirty fingernails, bodies of rotting flesh, and blood-tainted pond water assets that the player get accustomed to overlook. No matter how well a t-shirt might move, the standardization and expectancy of realistic graphics in Triple A games does not give the audience time to take in all the hard work poured into each level before introducing hordes of enemies that hasten the limited time one has in these areas.

Part II’s story can be dissected in many different ways, seeking an impossible fulfillment of justified agony through the game and the lack of choices and enforced shame. The loss of communicating how each character feels by relying on shared trauma and the ever-present motivation the deaths of both Ellie and Abby’s fathers has been the only driving force for them, becoming so engrossed in unattainable closure that feels unnecessary against all the other acts of violence and deaths that were caused because of it.

This sequel salvages the crafted ambiguity of the first game’s ending by dismissing all the violence it brought up because of it. Every cutscene, flashback, and scattered note all serve to cater Ellie’s wary forgiveness promise to her surrogate father. Joel’s indiscretion for being the main character even after his death is hard to digest knowing the trauma Ellie had always been through because of him. The loss of Ellie as a character of her own, only evident through optional journal entries or recollections of her past that were obscured, still, by Joel’s dependency on her to fill the role of the daughter he was shortly able to call his own.

The Last of Us Part II is a bloated and draining game that loses itself in the outdated shame it tries to bestow upon its audience. Hard to see if and how a third title could resolve the misunderstandings the first two have.