The Last of Us Part II

Synopsis

Five years after their journey across the United States, Joel and Ellie now live in Jackson, Wyoming, within a community of survivors that has managed to rebuild a form of stability despite the constant presence of the infected.

When a violent event suddenly shatters that balance, Ellie sets out on a quest for revenge that takes her to Seattle. The city has become the territory of several rival factions locked in their own war, while the infected continue to occupy the ruins left behind by the old world.

As Ellie pursues those she holds responsible, her journey gradually reveals other stories, other motivations and another way of looking at the same events. What begins as a search for justice becomes a confrontation with the consequences of violence, the memory of those who have been lost and the possibility that every enemy may also be the hero of their own story.

Overview

The first The Last of Us asked how far someone could go to protect a person who had become essential. The Last of Us Part II begins after that question has already produced consequences. Five years have passed, Ellie is no longer the teenager Joel had to escort, and Naughty Dog refuses to simply build another journey around the same duo.

The sequel moves much of its adventure to Seattle, a city transformed by decades of abandonment and by the war between communities that have replaced the structures of the old world. Flooded streets, residential districts, shattered buildings, forests and abandoned infrastructure create spaces that are larger and more open than those of the first game without turning the experience into a true open world.

Gameplay mainly gains mobility and flexibility. Ellie can crawl, dodge, slip under certain obstacles, make greater use of verticality and exploit environments that allow for several approaches. Encounters combine firearms, crafting, close combat and stealth with a fluidity that makes transitions between discretion and violence much less rigid.

Human enemies contribute more strongly to this impression as well. They communicate, search for their allies and sometimes call one another by name. Dogs follow trails left by the player. An encounter can begin silently, collapse into a firefight and then become an attempt to escape again only seconds later.

But the most important transformation has nothing to do with combat. The Last of Us Part II deliberately changes the player's position within its own story. It does not merely tell us what Ellie feels: it structures the adventure to confront that perception with those of characters the player might have preferred to continue seeing only as enemies.

Key takeaways

• The story is built around the consequences of the first game. The choices, lies and relationships surrounding Joel and Ellie are no longer simply a past to remember: they become the starting point of the conflict.
• Stealth becomes far more flexible. Crawling, dodging, using vegetation, breaking lines of sight and exploiting more open spaces make encounters considerably more dynamic.
• Seattle is the main setting of the adventure. Several communities fight for control of the territory while the infected continue to move through abandoned spaces.
• The story deliberately changes perspective. Naughty Dog asks the player to reconsider certain events from multiple points of view and builds an essential part of its argument around that confrontation.
• Accessibility marks an important step forward. More than sixty settings cover vision, hearing, motor accessibility, navigation, controls, subtitles and different combat adaptations.

PANACHES review

The Last of Us Part II does not simply ask the player to watch Ellie seek revenge. It asks how long they are willing to keep considering that revenge legitimate once the victims begin to have names, loved ones and histories of their own.

It is a much less comfortable proposition than the first game.

The Last of Us gradually built a bond between Joel and Ellie until it made understandable a decision whose morality remained deeply questionable. Part II almost works in reverse. It begins with an emotion that is immediately understandable — anger — and then spends dozens of hours dismantling it.

That intention runs directly through the gameplay. Naughty Dog has never made its combat this fluid. Ellie moves quickly, improvises with whatever she finds, disappears into the grass, strikes with extraordinary brutality and moves on before the other enemies fully understand what has just happened.

And yet the game constantly works to make that efficiency uncomfortable.

An enemy calls out to someone who no longer answers. A dog has a name. An area crossed as a simple obstacle can, a few hours later, become a place connected to characters whose motivations we now understand. The mechanics constantly say “become more efficient,” while the story asks “are you sure you still want to continue?”

That contradiction produces some of the game's most powerful moments, but also part of its limitations. Part II wants so strongly to control the player's emotional relationship with its characters that it can sometimes become possible to feel the structure behind the emotion. The game organizes parallels, shifts perspectives and delays certain information with a precision that may feel admirable or manipulative depending on how willingly one accepts its proposition.

The change in point of view is obviously at the heart of this tension. It is not simply about offering another playable character to vary the gameplay. Naughty Dog asks the player to spend time with someone the story had prepared them to reject.

That is probably the game's bravest decision.

It does not necessarily work the same way for everyone. Empathy cannot be activated on command, and no number of hours spent with a character guarantees that the player will change their judgment. But Part II accepts the risk that its device may fail, which is much more interesting than a story that only seeks to confirm emotions that are already present.

From a gameplay perspective, this ambition is accompanied by a remarkable level of control. Animations allow encounters to move almost seamlessly between improvisation, escape and confrontation. Spaces possess greater verticality. Sound conveys extremely precise information. Transitional animations give the characters a sense of physical weight rarely achieved in an action game of this generation.

That precision, however, also makes the violence particularly difficult to ignore. Part II wants it to feel tactile, audible, physical. It rarely attempts to make its encounters heroic. A victory often leaves behind a space far quieter than it was when the player first entered.

The game could probably have said certain things in less time. Its determination to multiply parallels and make the player experience every stage of its characters' journeys creates a considerably long adventure, sometimes at the risk of dulling the very emotional exhaustion it is trying to provoke.

But there is something unusually stubborn about that choice.

The Last of Us Part II would rather risk being rejected than give its audience the comfortable sequel it expected. It would have been far easier to revive the Joel-Ellie duo, invent a new threat and send them back onto the road.

Naughty Dog instead chooses to ask what remains after the happy ending we thought we had obtained.

The answer is neither especially gentle nor perfectly clean. Above all, it suggests that understanding someone's pain does not mean excusing what they do with it — but refusing to look at that pain will not make it disappear.

Good to know

• The Last of Us Part II was released on June 19, 2020 for PlayStation 4. It takes place five years after the events of the first The Last of Us.
• The game was developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It is a fully single-player experience.
• Naughty Dog developed the game using a new evolution of its proprietary engine, allowing for more detailed environments, more complex animations and larger combat spaces.
• At launch, the game already offered more than 60 accessibility settings, including tools designed for blind or low-vision players, deaf or hard-of-hearing players and people with motor disabilities.
• A PS5 update released in May 2021 allowed the PS4 version running through backward compatibility to target 60 frames per second.
• In June 2022, Naughty Dog announced that The Last of Us Part II had surpassed 10 million copies sold worldwide.
• At The Game Awards 2020, the game won seven awards: Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Audio Design, Best Performance for Laura Bailey, Innovation in Accessibility and Best Action/Adventure.
• The Last of Us Part II Remastered was released on PlayStation 5 on January 19, 2024. This version notably adds technical improvements, deleted levels presented as development material and the roguelike survival mode No Return.
• The Remastered version was later released on PC on April 3, 2025. The ps5 and pc values in the plateformes field therefore refer to this remastered edition of the same work.
• SensCritique currently displays an average score of 8.3/10.