The Last of Us Part II does not let you win. It lets you finish. That is the distinction Naughty Dog built an entire game around in 2020, and it is why the studio’s sequel to its 2013 survival story still sits apart from almost everything else in the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 library. The game is an action-adventure title played from a third-person perspective, with heavy survival horror in its bones. It is also one of the most expensive video games ever made, at a reported cost of around US$220 million.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Ellie Returns to Jackson, Wyoming
The setup is quiet before it is not. Four years after the events of The Last of Us, Ellie and Joel have settled in Jackson, Wyoming, living among a thriving community of survivors. The infected still press at the edges, and so do desperate people. Their relationship has grown strained, which matters more than any monster in the game.
Then a violent event breaks the peace. Ellie embarks on a relentless journey to carry out justice and find closure, hunting those responsible one by one. What she finds instead is the physical and emotional cost of the hunt itself.
The structure is the point. The game intermittently switches control between Ellie and Abby, a soldier who killed Joel and who becomes caught in a conflict between her militia and a religious cult. You also briefly control Joel in the opening sequence. By the time the credits land, you have spent real hours inside the person you were taught to hate.
Abby, the WLF, and the Seraphites
Abby is not a twist. She is a second lead, and Laura Bailey plays her. The game’s plot makes her case in detail: Abby seeks revenge against Joel for murdering her father, the Firefly surgeon who was to operate on Ellie. Joel confesses his role in stopping the Fireflies’ attempt to develop a cure by saving Ellie from a non-survivable surgical procedure. He tells his brother, Tommy, played by Jeffrey Pierce.
The factions are concrete. Abby’s group are former Fireflies now part of the Washington Liberation Front, a militia based in Seattle, Washington. Against them stand the Seraphites, a religious cult locked in a battle with the WLF over control of Seattle. Ellie walks into that war while chasing Abby, and the game never lets the war become background noise.
Ashley Johnson returns as Ellie. Troy Baker is Joel. Shannon Woodward plays Dina, Ellie’s girlfriend, who follows her to Seattle and reveals she is pregnant. Stephen Chang plays Jesse, Dina’s ex-boyfriend, who follows them both. Chelsea Tavares plays Nora, a friend of Abby’s whom Ellie tracks down and tortures for information. Patrick Fugit plays Owen, and Ashly Burch plays Mel, who is pregnant when Ellie kills her and Owen. Derek Phillips plays Abby’s father.
Firearms, Bows, and a Workbench
The mechanics serve the dread. The player uses firearms, improvised weapons, and stealth against hostile humans and cannibalistic creatures infected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus. The character’s nimble movement adds platforming: you jump and climb to cross environments and gain advantages in combat. You can break glass, including windows, to reach areas or grab supplies. Some stretches are traveled by horse or boat.
Here is what the combat kit actually holds:
- Long-range weapons such as rifles and bows
- Short-range weapons such as pistols and revolvers
- Limited-use melee weapons such as machetes and hammers
- Bricks and bottles, thrown to distract or attack enemies
Collected items upgrade weapons at workbenches or craft equipment such as health kits, Molotov cocktails, and makeshift silencers. Supplements feed a skill tree, and training manuals found in the environment unlock extra branches, letting you upgrade the health meter, crafting speed, and ammunition types.
Stealth is a real option, not a fallback. You can attack undetected or sneak past enemies entirely. “Listen Mode” locates enemies through a heightened sense of hearing and spatial awareness, shown as outlines visible through walls.
A Crunch Schedule and a Pandemic Delay
The production story is part of the record. Development began in 2014, after The Last of Us Remastered. Neil Druckmann returned as creative director and co-wrote the story with Halley Gross. The themes of revenge and retribution were inspired by Druckmann’s experiences growing up in Israel. Johnson and Bailey recorded motion and voice simultaneously. Gustavo Santaolalla returned to compose and perform the score.
Development reportedly included a crunch schedule of 12-hour workdays. Delays pushed the release, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The game arrived for the PlayStation 4 in June 2020, and a remastered version followed for the PlayStation 5.
The Order of What the Game Asks You to Carry
The control switch is the most argued-about decision in the game, and it is also the best one. Handing the player Abby’s body, her weapons, her friends, and her reasons forces a collision between two kinds of knowledge: what Ellie believes and what you have seen. The game does not resolve that collision. It makes you carry it.
Three moments do the heaviest work, and they land in this order:
- Joel’s confession to Tommy about the Firefly hospital and what he did to save Ellie.
- Abby beating Joel to death at the WLF outpost, which Ellie witnesses.
- Ellie torturing Nora for Abby’s location, then killing Mel and Owen.
The flashbacks keep resettling what you thought the story was about, including one showing Ellie traveling to the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City two years earlier.
The cost of that ambition is pacing. The game is long, and its middle chapters ask for patience while the two halves of its structure line up. Players who want the 2013 game’s cleaner arc will find this one messier and slower.
Where The Last of Us Part II Lands
The Last of Us Part II is not a sequel that plays it safe, and that is the reason to rank it near the top of the generation. The switch between Ellie and Abby is not a stunt. It is the argument. The game’s willingness to make the player complicit in cruelty, then ask them to understand the person on the other side, is the thing most big-budget games still avoid.
The technical work holds up. The environments, the horse and boat sections, the workbench economy, and the skill tree all serve the same mood. Santaolalla’s score never oversells a moment. The cast carries material that could have turned into melodrama.
The crunch schedule behind it is not a footnote. A game this polished came at a documented human cost, and that belongs in any honest accounting of what it took to make.
The game’s biggest weakness is its length. The Seattle sections stretch, and the flashback structure occasionally stalls momentum right when the story needs to move. That is a real complaint. It is also the complaint of a game that chose to be too much rather than too little.
The Last of Us Part II earns its reputation as one of the defining games of its generation. It is brutal, deliberate, and unwilling to let the player look away. That is not comfort. It is craft.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
