The Last of Us: Part II is a deeply unpleasant game. You stab a dog, murder a pregnant woman and discover an old porno made in homage to Crash Bandicoot. It’s an overwhelming amount of awful to get your head around, despite its wildly ambitious narrative structure and some of the most affecting performances seen in a video game. Of course, the original sin for much of this tragedy is the shock death of The Last of Us Part I’s protagonist Joel, who is murdered with a golf club while his daughter figure Ellie watches on helplessly.
It’s a scene that’s seared into the minds of anyone who has seen it, especially that long, dread-filled descent down to the log cabin’s basement. Had you played its work-in-progress version just a year out from release, your response might have been, “Is that it?”
It was the end of 2019, just before Christmas, on my third and penultimate trip from London to Los Angeles, charting the story of the game’s creation by developer Naughty Dog. No one outside of the studio had seen this scene yet and with very good reason. Upon entering the room where Joel is soon to be killed, there is already an absurdly thick layer of blood caked on the walls and floor. There’s no finished music, and the audio that is there isn’t mixed, so the suspense is non-existent. The voiceover is patchy, too, and it’s not yet been bug-tested yet. It occasionally stutters and threatens to crash – the moment when Joel’s murderer, Abby, shoots his leg off with a shotgun hitches for a second and the audio cuts out. I’ve seen games in development before, but not a moment this important. I was full of doubt. Would it land?
Almost four years on, I needn’t have worried. In the finished version, it is bloody, unflinching and merciless. And you, the player, feel totally helpless. Part II’s big surprise will absolutely break fans when it airs in HBO’s TV adaptation.
After the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020, Naughty Dog was rightfully concerned that The Last of Us Part II’s dark, post-apocalyptic setting wouldn’t be something that players would want to immerse themselves in. Throughout the game’s development, killing Joel was such a divisive move that several team members struggled to come to terms with it. “There were people that got it,” Druckmann told me during the reporting of the game’s creation, “and then there were people – a minority – that were just stuck on how violent it is, and how dark and quite cynical it is about mankind.”
