Words&Dirt

Spoiler Warning

If you care about spoilers and have managed to avoid learning what happens in The Last of Us, Parts I or II––or in HBO’s TV adaptation––proceed with caution. What follows assumes total familiarity with the plot and does not avoid major spoilers.

Introduction: Video Games and Moral Crimes

I committed my first digital sin at the age of seven, tucked away in an upstairs bedroom at my uncle’s house. He had this newfangled gadget called a Super Nintendo, and I was dying to know what wonders might flow from this novel marriage of controller and TV screen. Mario, dapper in his red cap and moustache, landed square on the shoulders of an unsuspecting Goomba. The creature flattened, my score ticked upward, and the game cheered me on. I suddenly learned that violence could be innocent fun, so long as the target was brown, mushroom‑shaped, and threatening in exactly zero meaningful ways. I don’t recall even a pin‑prick of guilt at the arbitrariness of my victim’s fate. Looking back now, I’m not sure why it was so easy––and so exciting––to annihilate this hapless creature. But if I’d possessed the embryonic moral conscience required to ask the question, I would have asked it of an art form that hadn’t yet learned to blush.

The rest of gaming history has played out in variations on that moment. We press X to assassinate Templars, left‑click to vaporize aliens, waggle the Wiimote to decapitate zombies––always under the comforting rationales of princess‑saving, world‑saving, or plain old self‑preservation. If cinema lends us the voyeur’s eye, video games hand us the executioner’s blade, and we have rarely declined the invitation. Public anxiety has kept pace: the 1993 Senate hearings that birthed the ESRB, Jack Thompson’s daytime‑television jeremiads, and a thousand op‑eds predicting pixelated carnage made flesh. Despite all the hand-wringing, decades of research have failed to produce data drawing a practical causal connection between video gaming and increased aggression. So the industry sidestepped the accusation with a shrug and another power‑fantasy sequel: see, Mom, it’s only code.

Even if gaming doesn’t cause violence, plenty of people get squigged out by the idea of a massive entertainment industry built primarily on allowing people to commit extreme forms of simulated violence for fun. Sooner or later, the medium was bound to stare into this abyss and see something uncomfortably like a mirror. A few modern titles have flirted with this reckoning––Spec Ops: The Line with its sand‑scoured mea culpa, Undertale with its pacifist dare, Papers, Please with its bureaucratic complicity, the non‑lethal ghost runs in Dishonored if you’re patient––but Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (TLOU) detonates the question with genre‑shattering force. Part I forced players to hold still while it tattooed the phrase “What if you’re the baddie?” across our lizard brains. The sequel, now released in a PC-ready Remastered edition, picks up the needle and digs deeper, carving a sermon about revenge, perspective-taking, and the fragile stories we tell ourselves to license violence. Even its zombies function as footnotes in a treatise on humans devouring one another long before cordyceps gets a bite.

I had known TLOU’s reputation long before Sony decided to release these games from console purgatory. When the Remastered edition of Part II (P2R) arrived on PC, I decided to make the best of a week off work due to sickness, shut the blinds, and surrendered. Finally getting to play this title felt like watching a sealed library finally open its doors to scholars who had been peering through the windows for years. The experience left me feeling exhilarated, beaten, and––most troubling of all––hungry for more. Sometimes guilt heightens appetite.The following review will cover P2R’s Art Design, Gameplay, and Story. It does not include commentary on P2R’s DLC, No Return, as I have not yet had a chance to try it out.

Art Design

From the first frame, P2R hijacks your optic nerve and never lets go. Character models verge on photoreal, but what startles is not polygon count so much as the micro‑expressive tremors that ripple across every face. Ellie’s jaw-tightening when resolve arrives, Abby’s involuntary nostril flare when challenged––such moments bypass conscious appraisal and ping the limbic system directly. Naughty Dog hasn’t merely captured motion. They’ve choreographed interiority, shrinking the gap between actor and avatar until the distinction feels trivial. Across the board, the dialogue and voice acting are superb. 

Visual richness radiates outward into environments that feel less like “levels” than apocalyptic dioramas crafted by a talented but deranged artist. Replicas of real Seattle neighborhoods sprawl in ruin, drywall blooming with black mold, bullet holes haloed by rust. Turn your head and discover the city as a museum of failed contingency plans: coffee shops fossilized mid‑latte art, pharmacies whose aisles glint with broken syringes, an abandoned fire engine begging to be looted. Exploration becomes a devotional act, each storefront a reliquary of possible supplies, every blood‑spattered note an inverted paean to ordinary catastrophe. P2R’s texture artists lean into biological grotesquerie with painterly zeal. Cordyceps blooms coral‑pink across skulls, teeth jutting from fungal petals like kelp‑strewn ruins of a forgotten reef. Lighting is the obvious shepherd of this aesthetic pilgrimage. Even rendered by my no-longer-state-of-the-art rig, sunbeams filtrate through shattered skylights, atomizing into dust motes that hover like angelic static. Decaying signage reflects on drenched streets, raindrops plopping into puddles with stunning realism. Despite the game’s intense and dark tone, the player’s experience is punctuated by moments of divine illumination. 

P2R’s sound design matches this chiaroscuro with an aural palette that lurches from elegiac to horrific. New takes on the sparse acoustic motifs from the first game thread through quiet interludes, ceding the channel to Clicker echolocations or the wet gargle of a newly-knifed WLF trooper. Headphones reveal a micro‑soundscape: floorboards sighing beneath fungus‑eaten weight, a distant crow startled into ragged flight. Horror is sometimes described as the fear of what you cannot see, but P2R favors the fear of what you can hear but dare not locate.

The overall palette toggles between ravishment and ruin. One minute I’m stalled on an overpass suffocated by morning mist, awestruck by sunlight refracted through wall-climbing ivy. Then I’m suddenly gutting a Seraphite from my haunt in the tall grass, hating my heart for not breaking fast enough. The game insists that rot and splendor are Siamese twins, each impossible without the other.

Gameplay

Naughty Dog’s most rebellious game mechanic is invisibility. Not cloaking tech, but the deliberate erasure of navigational clutter that modern players have come to expect and, in some cases, been forced to endure. There is no mini‑map, no neon breadcrumb trail, no chorus of UI pings cajoling you toward The Next Important Thing. Instead, level geometry, lighting, and environmental storytelling conspire to lure you along paths that feel discovered rather than assigned. The studio’s philosophy seems cribbed from Miyamoto’s model of “garden design”: if you notice the creator’s hand, the spell breaks. In P2R, the spell holds. You learn to read detritus—overturned newspaper boxes, moss‑slick bus shelters––as a vernacular map. That literacy rewards the patient explorer with surprises and micro‑dramas, the most poignant of which is Ellie’s impromptu “Take On Me” cover that she performs for Dina. As a product of emergent, unprompted investigation, this moment is like stumbling on a wild orchid in a parking garage: improbable, gorgeous, utterly arresting.

Seattle’s districts exemplify what I’d call “dense‑elastic” design. Each hub expands just enough to suggest urban sprawl while compressing its secrets into reachable pockets. Picture a focus‑pulled photograph: soft impressions at the periphery, knife‑sharp detail where you choose to linger. I was never disappointed when I chose to spend an extra few moments climbing through an open window or squeezing through an opening in a crumbling wall. There was always some worthy reward to be found, often just crafting resources or ammo but sometimes entirely new weapons, manuals to unlock skill upgrades, or new gun holsters to improve my combat effectiveness. Players who march straight through the most obvious routes will find difficulty spikes calibrated to remind them of opportunities missed. The negative feedback loop is pedagogical rather than punitive: curiosity is a stat, and the game tutors you into leveling it.

Loot distribution subtly nudges playstyle adaptation. Ammunition scarcity demands a fluid toggling between stealth and aggression. Crafting recipes hinge on mutually exclusive resource pools, forcing agonizing triage decisions. Do you spend alcohol on a medkit or a Molotov? The wrong choice reverberates minutes later when a Clicker creeps through shelving you thought secure. Even weapon sway––reduced by investing scarce supplements and gun parts––becomes a wager on your future temperament: will you still be the sort of player who takes 50‑meter rifle-shots when the Seraphites come whistling through the woods, or will you wait patiently for a silent assassination to save bullets?

Combat itself is an accordion of pacing. Encounters often begin in a hush broken only by muttered patrol chatter or crunched glass underfoot. You exhale, choose a target, lob a stun bomb, and the entire scenario becomes jazz improvisation. Enemy AI routines flank, advance, and check over their shoulders as they hunt you; wounded enemies crawl behind cover and shout your last known position; comrades address each other by name, transforming anonymous enemies into briefly mourned acquaintances. Experimenting with new rhythms of kill, flee, hide, kill again was joyful and empowering, at least until I ran into the next inevitable reminder of the monstrous nature of my actions. 

For me, the presence of dogs in P2R was the reminder that injected a chilling ethical challenge into my combat choices. Mechanically, they’re scent‑tracking heat‑seeking missiles. Strategically, they ruin the cozy binary of seen/unseen by dragging your aroma into 3D space. As Ellie, I learned to target dogs with silent arrows to take them out of the fight early, even knowing that their human companions would be emotionally gutted. No matter, they’d also be dead soon anyway. The kills became routine, necessary. Then, after a protracted firefight where I’d lost track of how many dogs were involved, only a lone German Shepherd remained. Deprived of the comforting presence of its handlers, it whimpered and padded between blood-soaked corpses. I could have left––the exit route was clear––but the completionist demon whispered promises of unlooted drawers brimming with goodies. The dog went down with a roar from my shotgun, and I loaded up supplies through a haze of self-loathing. 

Compared to Part I, I welcomed the expansion of Ellie and Abby’s arsenals in P2R. Ellie’s bow and Abby’s crossbow incentivize complementary strategies with subtle differences in reload speed and ammo recovery. The ability to craft silencers for pistols is another happy addition that expands stealth options. Melee feels heftier, with dodging now in play and each swing a physics lesson in torque. Abby’s guns are particularly fun to shoot and upgrade, including a double-barreled shotgun and hunting pistol. Workbenches unfold like altar tables, tools clinking as scopes slide into place. You can practically smell the gun oil. 

Despite being an obvious masterpiece, P2R does have some flaws. Enemy variety on the human side is engaging, toggling between the WLF’s fire-armed discipline and Seraphite guerrilla tactics, yet for some reason the infected roster remains relatively static. The new Shambler enemies and “Rat King” boss aren’t enough to make it feel like Naughty Dog spent much time or effort deepening the infected roster. This keeps encounters familiar but risks sameness for players craving necro‑bestial taxonomy. Another confusing choice is the streamlined skill trees, now gated by forced linearity, which restrict customization options compared to the more player-directed buildcrafting that I enjoyed in Part I. 

The game’s extreme and pervasive violence also deserves frank warning. Headshots uncork red geysers, jugular slashes gurgle, and death screens linger long enough to trigger visceral disgust. The game is not content to merely depict atrocity. It insists on your complicity with every button‑press affirmation to send Ellie’s switchblade slicing through flesh. If your stomach curdles at interactive cruelty, or if you prefer digital heroism untainted by regret, P2R is not the game for you. Equally non‑negotiable is the demand for perspective‑taking, as the game is an empathy gauntlet disguised as a third‑person shooter.Yet when the cycle clicks––explore, scavenge, craft, creep, slaughter, decompress––the game achieves a player experience of rare and precious quality. On Hard difficulty, I found myself rationing shotgun shells, trying to keep my head down, raining hell on my enemies when my cover was blown, then exhaling during a cut‑scene as if surfacing from a dive. The loop is narcotic, punishing enough to endanger, generous enough to suggest mastery always lies one experiment away. Ultimately, the gameplay in P2R is a moral centrifuge. It spins every mechanical delight until what separates inside you is the admission that fun and discomfort can share a bedroom. You may finish the campaign a quicker tactician, but will assuredly finish it a slower judge of other people’s choices.

Story

All the digital sorcery described above would be mere illusion if the narrative core were hollow. Instead, P2R delivers a ruthless meditation on revenge that subverts gaming’s default mode of epic showdowns with a granular, intimate unfolding of interpersonal hell. Proximity is a primary engine of its cruelty: the camera never lets you retreat to the altitude where statistics live. Every death is a face at arm’s length, eyes wide with you in the reflection.

The narrative structure of P2R scratched a very special and personal itch for me. More than fifteen years ago, I studied “ethically complex narratives” for my undergraduate degree in philosophy. I used this term to describe stories that intentionally sabotage binary moral schema. A key metric, I argued, is whether the villain receives enough interiority to challenge the reader’s reflex to condemn. Literature, TV, and film are replete with such examples, but video games usually eschew such nuance. P2R thwarts this trend with a remarkable combination of intellectual elegance and emotional impact, to the point where I found myself in tears many times as I made my way through the game.

Story Recap

Just to be sure we’re all on the same page: playing as Joel, Part I lures us into believing we are pursuing the usual goal of saving the world, then ends by forcing the player to massacre the Fireflies to spare Ellie from a fatal surgery that would have resulted in a vaccine against the cordyceps infection. By exchanging humanity’s salvation for one teenager’s heartbeat, then lying to Ellie about the truth of his decision, Joel shapeshifts from gruff but good-hearted father figure into something more sinister and self-centered. 

Part II fast‑forwards several years, and we meet Abby Anderson. We don’t learn this until later in the game, but Abby is the daughter of the surgeon that Joel murdered when he rescued Ellie. Thirsty for revenge, Abby captures Joel and tortures him to death, brutally caving in his skull with a golf club while Ellie is forced to watch. From this crucial turning point, Ellie’s agony calcifies into a vendetta that slides inexorably from proportionate retaliation to pathological obsession. 

Story Analysis

Revenge narratives can easily collapse into nihilistic nonsense in the absence of well-drawn characters. P2R’s supporting cast provides solid interpersonal bonds that anchor the ethical maelstrom to recognizable human stakes. Ellie and Dina’s relationship––alternating between the giddiness of new relationship energy and wartorn intimacy––imbues every bullet Ellie fires with the tacit question: what future are you willing to orphan for the sake of the past? The surprise arrival of Jesse, the virtuous father of Dina’s unborn child, complicates the fledgling couple’s dynamic while also bringing welcome support in their battles against the WLF. Abby’s interpersonal solar system follows a parallel structure: Owen embodies a deferred promise of peace and human connection, Mel literalizes that promise with her pregnancy, and Manny supplies black‑humored camaraderie that renders the WLF more than a monolithic militia. Pregnancy––the possibility of new, innocent life––hovers over both plotlines, indicting every spasm of violence as potential infanticide.

P2R weaponizes flashback with surgical flair, each temporal incision revealing connective tissue previously obscured. Joel and Ellie’s museum day––dinosaurs, lunar rovers, astronaut helmets––pulses with an unfiltered wonder, providing brief but bittersweet relief from the game’s gloomy vibe. We also learn that Ellie returned to Salt Lake City and figured out the truth of Joel’s actions there, leading to a rupture in their relationship that explains why things are so tense between them when the game begins. Abby’s memory of helping her father free a trapped zebra before returning to sterilize his instruments for Ellie’s surgery helps her loss begin to feel equally tragic. Another flashback to Abby and Owen’s discovery of the aquarium in Seattle shows a fleeting glimmer of carefree discovery in P2R’s fallen world. These moments accrue like sedimentary layers, changing what felt like bedrock into shifting shale.

The structural fulcrum of P2R’s narrative is the mid‑game protagonist swap. One instant you’re Ellie, the determined avenger shocked by witnessing Jesse’s death by headshot from Abby’s pistol. Then, before you can learn what happens next, you’re pulled back in time and find yourself suddenly inhabiting Abby’s broad shoulders and gym-juiced biceps. This jarring transition, which still garners outrage from a certain faction of P2R’s player base, is one of the most daring and impressive decisions I have encountered in any narrative medium. Playing as Abby is supposed to be infuriating at first. But, slowly, it becomes something else. As Abby, we chat and banter with friends in the WLF. We experience loss and hardship with them, leveraging their support to progress through the game. 

Although the core gameplay remains consistent, the feel of playing as Abby is different in subtle and important ways. In contrast to Ellie’s slight frame that favors stealth, playing as Abby generates a greater sense of physical empowerment, including a “momentum” skill that further strengthens her melee capabilities. Abby’s an absolute tank, her bare-knuckled zombie takedowns facilitating some of the game’s most satisfying segments. The comedown from this adrenaline rush is shot through with moral confusion as we begin to relish succeeding as Abby by deploying the focus and strength that executed Joel. 

Emotionally, the internal experience of Abby’s dilemmas and struggles with trauma slowly chip away at our hatred of her, replacing it with a disquieting combination of respect and curiosity. She forms an unlikely friendship with Lev, a young Seraphite apostate whose transgender identity has branded him for execution. Lev’s presence recasts the ideological scaffold of the Seraphite/WLF conflict, exposing both factions as variations on fundamentalism. It also gives Abby a new mission, one rooted in protection rather than revenge or mere survival.  

Once again, dogs play a critical role in the empathy assault. After learning to hate and fear dogs while playing as Ellie, you then begin to love them while playing as Abby. You meet Alice, a German Shepherd who bounds over with that special energy that all humans recognize as fully, exuberantly dog. Naughty Dog invites you to scratch Alice’s ears, play fetch, and fight zombies with her. Then, in one of the game’s most vicious and effective gambits, you arrive at the aquarium to find Alice’s corpse––felled by Ellie when she came looking for you. The devastation transcends digital sentimentality, converting the murder of a dog into an acid test for player allegiance. Immediately thereafter, Abby discovers the corpses of Owen and Mel, also casualties of Ellie’s rampage of revenge. It’s these final traumas that send Abby barreling back to seek Ellie’s demise, and that consign Jesse to an unceremonious death. 

The showdown against Ellie, played from Abby’s perspective, transforms earlier triumphs into present terrors. Fighting Ellie converts a skill set you spent hours cultivating into a nightmare of tricks perfectly designed to counter Abby’s head-on attacks. Pride in Ellie’s lethality transmutes into dread at being her prey. When she finally has Ellie at her mercy, Abby once again proves herself capable of restraint by listening to Lev and sparing Dina. This act seems to not only free Abby from this particular cycle of violence, but also allows Ellie and Dina to return home and realize their dream of having a farm together. Playing once again as Ellie, we get a quick taste of this bucolic bliss before Tommy shows up with a lead on Abby’s whereabouts in Southern California. Still tormented by traumatic memories and her promise to avenge Joel’s death, Ellie abandons Dina and their baby son JJ to once again seek Abby.   

The closing sequence in Santa Barbara, played briefly as Abby and then finished as Ellie, is more last gasp than explosive conclusion. Ellie descends on the Rattler compound not as avenging angel but as wounded ruin‑wraith, dismantling a slaver economy for purposes that feel indistinguishable from vengeance even when cloaked as rescue. Abby, emaciated, hair brutally shorn, now embodies the fragility she once hunted. Their brawl in the coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean is less a fight than a mutual drowning, halted only when Ellie flashes on Joel’s image. In this moment, Ellie realizes that killing Abby won’t bring Joel back, won’t recover any of her other losses, and won’t honor the spirit of how she wants to retain Joel’s memory. So she lets Abby go.

As the plot unfolds, it becomes ever more apparent that Ellie and Abby function as distorted reflections of one another. They have much in common: each is orphaned by violence, each converts vulnerability into weaponized competence, each mistrusts tenderness because tenderness has a body count. But their differences matter too. Abby quarantines her vendetta––Joel, no further––before redirecting her ferocity into protecting Lev. This gives Abby a pathway to redemption, or at least a means of living that doesn’t further compound her sins. Ellie, in contrast, lengthens her kill list until it includes almost everyone she loves, either literally or figuratively.

The game’s coda, with Ellie returning to the now-abandoned farmhouse, is a masterclass in negative space. Dina’s absence yawns louder than any Clicker shriek, guitar strings buzz impotently beneath Ellie’s maimed hand, and she finally confronts the cost of confusing momentum with mandate. The final flashback scene between Ellie and Joel reveals the deepest reason that drove Ellie’s desire for revenge. Abby’s killing of Joel denied Ellie the attempt at forgiveness that she committed to, permanently precluding reconciliation with her best shot at a proper parental figure. One could reasonably play the game wondering exactly why Ellie is so hell-bent on avenging Joel’s death when the cost of doing so continues to grow, but this scene conveys her reasons perfectly. Even so, we know that this path did not lead where Ellie wanted to go, and in fact drove her further into isolation and disconnection. She sets the guitar down, shoulders her pack, and trudges toward a new journey, alone. 

Critics often ask whether video games can stand shoulder‑to‑shoulder with the great novels, plays, and movies of the past and present. As far as I’m concerned, P2R answers that question. The game brilliantly exploits an affordance unreachable by prose or film: player complicity. We do not simply watch Abby find Alice’s corpse, we made it happen. We do not merely observe Ellie’s unraveling, we press each button that loosens the thread of her sanity. Where most AAA titles brag about branching paths, Naughty Dog welds us to inevitability. There is no dialogue wheel offering mercy, no alternate ending to sanitize the moral ledger. We advance only by committing atrocities and then marinating in their psychic fallout. The crime on repeat is sacrifice––of self, of loved ones––at the counterfeit altar of vengeance. The resulting discomfort isn’t a sideshow, but rather the main event. Philosophers call this participatory guilt; therapists call it moral injury. Whatever the label, Naughty Dog found a delivery system for this experience with a unique level of visceral clout.  

For you Bayesians out there, every narrative update you receive––each bloody battle, each cinematic, each document perused––shifts your probability distribution about who the “real monster” is. Will it be Abby or Ellie in the final analysis? As the posterior approaches something like 50/50 by the final scene, a pathway to revelation opens. The cathartic opportunity offered by P2R isn’t the haughty ecstasy of vengeance, but the release that comes from dissolving the dichotomy of good versus evil in favor of something more nuanced and reflective of humanity’s true complexity. If moral reasoning is a map of causal counterfactuals, P2R forces us to live inside a world where every node is a person you once thought expendable.

Conclusion: A Narrative We Need Now

Part of me wishes I could have played this game when it first was released five years ago, but I’m glad I had to wait. P2R’s moral urgency means more to me in 2025 than it would have in 2020. The intervening half‑decade has incubated pathologies that make the game’s core assertion feel less like narrative audacity and more like a user manual for surviving the attention economy. Pandemic lockdowns, algorithmic outrage engines, and the ambient hum of AI‑authored propaganda have begun to collapse the distance between digital antagonism and physical harm. We have learned, often the hard way, that a casual online taunt can metastasize into real‑world violence, and that outrage, like XP, can accrue with every click. In this climate, a game willing to slow the trigger finger and ask “Who pays for your catharsis?” qualifies less as entertainment and more as guerrilla ethics training. We are all becoming experts in real‑time dehumanization, and P2R is advanced coursework in “rehumanization,” the art of dragging compassion back into the room after rage has slammed the door.

The takeaways? Perspective is anabolic to conscience and right action; revenge is catabolic. Protect the vulnerable, especially when wrath begs otherwise. Embrace the discomfort that comes when empathy and abhorrence occupy the same heart. P2R falls short of offering true redemption, but it leaves space for a chance to tell the next story with one fewer corpse at your feet. The game stages these principles across a thousand tiny pressure points.

Our politics could learn a thing or two. Revenge, once an implicit influence in our political discourse, is now an explicit feature of political agendas. Our political systems currently incentivize performative repudiation––tweet dunking, factional schadenfreude, the dopamine hit of tribal vindication. P2R reminds us that every casualty you cheer for is someone else’s Joel, or Owen, or Dina, or Alice. The calculus of vilification is quick. The compound interest of shared grief accrues slowly but ultimately proves fatal. 

Not every title should drag players through this wringer. Many games still can and ought to be breezy sky‑islands or twitchy roguelikes that just give us a break from life’s hardships. And Manichean narratives have their place too, for true evil exists even if it’s not the norm. But knowing such heights of ethical design are attainable rewires expectation. P2R proves that the medium has matured, and the moment demands nothing less. So take this review as a plea wrapped in praise: play this game, absorb its unease, and let the next conversation you have––online or off––distribute the weight of what you learned along the way.