'The Last of Us Part II' Does Not Solve its Violence Problem (Spoilers)

SPOILERS inevitably are coming. I recommend you not read AT ALL if you do not want to be spoiled.

Violence is increasingly a problem that video games have to deal with. As graphics become more realistic, gamer writers feel their stories must also adhere closer to a realism. The most classic video game idea is a competition between you, the player, and the computer. Whoever survives wins. Now that was no real problem as long the bodies competing were small abstract pixel forms blipping out of existence. Even as technology could produce 3D graphics and recognizably human bodies, it was no real issue. Those weren't people, they were cartoon blobs in a humanoid shape. However, now that video game humans look very convincing, their bodies can be destroyed in disturbingly realistic ways. This issue has reached the point that game devs have reported real psychological trauma while working hard to design all this carnage.

Naughty Dog, the developers of the new video game, The Last of Us Part II, are of course, aware of this contradiction. They have been on the cutting edge of "cinematic" gaming since the PlayStation 3, and have done as much as any studio to craft realistic violence. Even as early as Uncharted 2, our hero, Nathan Drake, was confronted by the final bad guy. This hulking brute of ruthless Russian muscle, Lazarevic could mock Drake (and implicitly the player) by asking "How many men have you killed? How many just today?". This is a good point that the hero was no better than the villain. Naughty Dog kept moving in this direction, making games full of the contraction between hero and monster. Uncharted 4 is very much a game taking Nathan Drake to task for everything he's done. The Last of Us 1 ends on an infamous and brilliant finale where everything you've done through the story may have in fact doomed humanity.

So when The Last of Us Part II is an especially gruesome experience, that's not a massive surprise for this franchise or this developer. They are too self-aware to miss the violence problem. They do not want to be the 2012 reboot of Tomb Raider (which was an Uncharted game in all but name anyway). That game saw the character Lara Croft, transformed from just a gamer pin-up girl to an believable young woman. Then she went from a grounded start as an everywoman to basically the motherfucking Terminator by the end. She murders thousands of people, and the game never notices. It's hilarious. The Last of Us Part II wants to use that contradiction between your apparent heroic goals and the actual results as the apex of its story.

The result though is... let's just say not for me. I don't think The Last of Us II has the solution to the violence problem.

I've been avoiding using this term so far because I know a lot of people will run away screaming the moment I say it. But I've talking about "ludonarrative dissonance", the conflict between the stated text of the game's story and the narrative created by the actual gameplay. This can be as simple as "you beat the boss but the cutscene shows you losing" or as vast as an entire franchise choosing to scold you for playing it. Most games praise you for doing what they tell you. Mario is a good guy because you were good at jumping so he gets a kiss from the Princess. Therefore it was pretty remarkable ten years ago when games dared call you an "asshole" for following instructions.

Ludonarrative dissonance is a very heavy term in gaming discourse today. It was well out of fashion a few years ago and actively discredited by critics like Jim Sterling and Bob Chipman. In 2016 Uncharted 4 was willing the use the concept in story design. However, it still mocked the term by giving the player a trophy called "ludonarrative dissonance". Just by writing those two words somebody has already closed this tab and will never read anything I write ever again. It got that heated. Ludonarrative dissonance really took off as a topic around The Last of Us I's release when games like BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider (2012) were pushing the boundaries of how realistic a game could be while relying on "kill"as their verb.

I'm not sure if games media overused the term after 2013. There may have been a period where it became so murky it lost most of its meaning. Or perhaps we just let our critical factories get clouded by a very toxic population in games culture who are actively opposed to thinking too hard about anything and take all criticism as an existential threat. Those people are assholes. Ludonarrative dissonance is, I think, a very useful concept that is required to ever talk intelligently about The Last of Us II.

The dissonance also was a key element in one of my favorite games of the last ten years, Undertale. Undertale was not at all realistic, it had adorable animals and skeletons. But the game seemingly was asking you to defeat those characters like you would in a normal JRPG. Then you discover the game was scolding you for following its stated goal, because secretly the real goal is to befriend them. The best Undertale ending is the one where you never kill anybody. The game breaks the fourth wall repeatedly to make it's point, so that some characters ignore the child you play as to talk to you directly. You cannot really discuss Undertale's successes without ludonarrative dissonance as a conceptual tool.

The Last of Us II does not have choices in its narrative. It is specifically made so you have no choice but to be a murder machine. It knows you're helpless to stop the story from progressing to its terrible conclusion, and maybe that's part of the effect. The game then expects you to feel very badly about what you're doing.

That all sounds simplistic to the point of being insulting. "Fuck you for playing me" is an aggressive stance for any game to take. But Last of Us II is a tragedy story. If you finish this game feeling like you got hit by a tractor trailer carrying six tons of shit, that's the intended emotion. When I mocked how bloodthirsty Tomb Raider (2012) was, that was not the intended effect. So if I'm deeply unhappy and unsure of things with The Last of Us II, that's arguably a success. Tragedies are not supposed to come with easy answers and should not necessarily hold your hand to finding the silver lining. There is an art to that kind of misery machinery which The Last of Us II arguably achieves. So let me at no point appear to be saying that The Last of Us II is in any way an incompetent production.

This is a game made by thousands of extremely talent people. The Last of Us II is one of the most impressive technical marvels of video gaming ever, and Naughty Dogs deserves a lot of credit for that. Their game is beautiful. Naughty Dog's teams are without a doubt the best crafters of AAA narrative in the games industry right now. Their game is as ambitious as it is risky. It's uncompromising in a way that products made for a mass market rarely are. There's tons of money riding on this product and I am truly surprised how willing they were to gamble with that investment. It is a big gamble to be so boldly unappealing to a broad swathe of the fanbase. Naughty Dog is run by people who are not stupid, and poured a ton of blood into this project. They deserve your respect in spite of how you feel about the game.

Importantly too, The Last of Us II is a successful product in terms of a violence simulator. The Last of Us 1 already was a great game to play, managing to balance a stealth shooter with a horror survival game in many smart ways. Both games have the right rhythm of loud action beats combined with slow exploration moments to build up paranoia. The Last of Us II gives you a solid stealth toolkit, but also the options to fight your way out of mistakes. I really only have one complaint about gameplay: I absolutely hate the dodging melee combat system. That sucked ass. But otherwise, The Last of Us II is actually a lot of fun. It is good work.

So if that's all that matters to you, take those last two paragraphs as my review. The cutscenes are great, the acting is great, and the combat is great. If you want a score, 10/10, "the Citizen Kane of video games". Stop reading and go buy The Last of Us II.

For everybody else, here's a rough truth: accomplishing a lot with a work doesn't necessarily mean it's a great work. It might actually be terrible, even in spite of all the achievements and successes.

This is a game mostly about cycles of revenge from multiple perspectives. There are no pure heroes, but there are several straight-up villains, and everybody is a victim. The zombie apocalypse was decades ago by the time The Last of Us II opens. It isn't that zombies are not still a problem, but most survivors have found a way to avoid them at this point. There's in fact quite a many "last of us" now, living peacefully in well-fortified city-states with thousands of friendly neighbors. Humanity has fallen into a pre-industrial economy, but that's not so bad. There's plenty of relics of 21st century technology still functioning. There's even a PlayStation Vita. The problem now is other humans. The game opens with-

-Oh, MASSIVE SPOILERS starting here, and you were warned once already, here you go again. Definitely stop reading NOW if you don't want spoilers.-

The game opens with the murder of Joel (Troy Baker), the hero of the first game. Ellie (Ashley Johnson), his all-but adopted daughter, sets off on revenge to chase down his killers. This takes her, and her nice Jewish girlfriend, Dina (Shannon Woodward) to war-torn Seattle. They're in search of Abby (Laura Bailey) who in a bit of dramatic irony, actually is out to avenge her own father as well. So Ellie and Abby are trying to kill each other, while not knowing that they are in fact mirrors to each other.

I should probably discuss a bit the actual ending of The Last of Us I before I go deeper. If you say, don't know, The Last of Us I is a road trip game where the middle-aged Joel and the teenaged Ellie travel across the country to maybe find a cure to the whole zombie kerfluffle. Ellie is immune to being infected by the freaky Matango-esque fungus virus of this particular apocalypse. Along the way they fight a few zombies, and many, many killer rednecks. But eventually they get to their destination which is a group called "The Fireflies". Unfortunately the way the Fireflies think they can find a cure is by cutting Ellie open to run tests, which will definitely kill her. Nobody asks Ellie what she thinks. Joel, however, decides for the both of them. His solution is to kill another fifteen or so people, including the Fireflies' main doctor. We then cut to Joel and Ellie on their way back to a kind of "home", the ultimate morality of that final decision remaining ambiguous.

I cannot praise The Last of Us I enough. Even the sequel holds onto to many of the great traits of that first title. This is one of the very few franchises that gives its characters a kind of interiority and psychological depth that even they cannot express. Most games are simple melodramas of simple emotions, that's not the case with Joel and Ellie. Even The Last of Us II continues that trend, where most of Ellie's actions are a death wish born out of her guilt from her survival from the first game.

Players and even the franchise itself will probably debate the results of Joel's actions for years. There's plenty of fascinating arguments to be had about The Last of Us I's ending. I'm personally leaning more towards pro-Joel in this. The ends have never justified the means in this undead universe (or even our non-zombie one). Everybody who thinks they can solve the zombie problem by breaking a few eggs ends up a psychopath wacko. But that's neither here nor there.

The Last of Us II is not aiming for a bittersweet ending. It ends badly for everybody. Nobody makes the right decisions. Nobody even makes debatable decisions. Nobody is improved by their journey. Everybody was wrong. We would have been better off if they all stayed home. This is a bad time.

Ellie may be the heroine on the box, but you only play as her for half the game. For the rest of it you're controlling Abby's very muscular arms. (Important note: there's some confusion here, but Abby never identifies as a trans man throughout this game. She is a "she". There is another trans man later in the story, but that is not Abby who is a girl regardless of her muscle mass.) She's a former Firefly turned member of The WLF (Wolves), a faction in Seattle's civil war. Abby is actually the daughter of that doctor Joel murdered in the first game. That's the best way The Last of Us II can figure out how to drag the moral ambiguity of the finale into its inciting incident. Really Ellie's immunity is irrelevant to this story and Abby's dad could have been any one of the countless crazy rednecks you murdered during the last adventure.

By flipping perspectives you end up with a brutal reflection of your actions. But you also realize that Ellie and Abby probably should just fucking stop and talk this shit out for a minute. Because the whole cycle of revenge and counter-revenge ends up sounding incredibly stupid if any of these characters would just voice it. "You killed my dad who killed my dad, so I had to kill your friends which led you to kill my friends and then..." Call a damn truce, ladies, please.

But without the perspective switch you'd never get the brutal reveals that the The Last of Us II is all about. After fifteen hours of Ellie's campaign, you'll have murdered a lot of WLF. You'll have killed several of Abby's friends, including one who is pregnant. You'll kill a dog or two. Ellie turns into Michael Myers in Halloween II at one point, chasing down a young woman through a hospital, until she finally gets to brutalize her victim with a blunt instrument.

Then we cut over to Abby's perspective. Turns out one of the dogs you killed as Ellie was a pupper Abby worked with and liked to play fetch with a stuffed squid plush. Turns out that that young woman you brutalized with a blunt instrument was very helpful and was just trying to save a person's life. Abby isn't a psychopath, she's more concerned with saving her ex-boyfriend Owen (Patrick Fugit) and two children, Yara (Victoria Grace) and Lev (Ian Alexander). During Abby's campaign you'll get to walk through a morgue filled with the bodies Ellie cut to shreds. Abby lives in a town based in the Seahawks stadium which is as peaceful and functional as the one Ellie starts off in.

So absolutely the point is to feel terrible about your Ellie campaign while playing as Abby. It is often overly broad and again, insulting. You'll also be way ahead of this game even before the dramatic "play fetch with a dog you murdered" reveal. The Michael Myers segment was enough for me personally to write Ellie off as a lunatic that needed to just stop. (I guess The Last of Us II does answer the question of the first game. Joel was wrong to save Ellie, because Ellie has grown up to be a monster with a death wish. Oh well.)

I had twenty hours more of game to play with more awfulness upon awfulness. The Last of Us II is too damn long and too brutal too fast. I was never fully with Ellie at any point. I never felt the a satisfaction of revenge - and neither does she. She's not even having fun with this, why would I?

There was fun in this game at one point. The first hours of The Last of Us II are Ellie and Dina wandering an open section of Seattle. This is by far the high point of the entire experience. You do not get into a proper shoot out with other humans until well into the game. So for all of this part it is just two young women on a horse, exploring freely and collecting resources. Every so often you'll take down a few zombies but that's it. This part of the game is very much like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, a fantastic half-sequel to Uncharted 4, and my personal favorite game of that entire franchise. That also starred two female protagonists, and was much lighter in tone than the previous game. The Lost Legacy avoided the ludonarrative dissonance problem entirely but just ignoring it. It aimed for a low-stakes adventure, and mostly by being fun. Imagine that: fun.

"Fun" is absolutely not on the mind of The Last of Us II after this point. Ellie and Dina's charming banter disappears since the plot sidelines her for the rest of the game thanks to a cheap pregnancy reveal. Your horse FUCKING EXPLODES. You are stuck in a linear path for the rest of the game. Then you get to the grim business of making people dead and making the undead even more dead.

The art style of the game grows increasingly into a bitter wet slog through a half-flooded Seattle. Slowly the city feels less and less like the Pacific Northwest and more like the Vietnam War. You won't find Edward Cullen or grunge rock, but you will find tribes of zealot guerillas and genocide.

There's a group the WLF are fighting called "the Scars" who are this vague amalgamation of Evangelicals and the Viet Cong. They have hit and run tactics designed to scare the hell out of you. It calls to mind for me stories of jungle warfare in the Pacific Theater of WWII and Vietnam. Naturally they scar their faces and leave freaky stick designs on the walls. They're also extremely anti-trans in case they aren't dehumanized enough. So Lev, one the children Abby wishes to save, is a trans boy who is repeatedly dead-named by these zealots who want to marry him to "an elder". (His actor, Ian Alexander is trans, by the way.) There's something deeply gross about all of this. I am not pleased with how easily the Scars fall into tropes of barbarian indigenous tribes. Oh, and if the WLF seem nice, they're actually imperialist bastards trying to burn down the tribe's villages.

As I said before, we would have been better off if everybody all stayed home. As Ellie and Abby's conflict is unnecessary and pointless, so is this grand ethnic war. Why are the WLF and the Scars even fighting over Seattle anyway? Can't either of these groups just head off to fucking Vancouver? It seems like there's plenty of space for humans, what is so important about this particular patch of ground? Unfortunately, The Last of Us II has no answers for this subplot. One group will genocide the other and nobody can help that.

I also want to point out that you do not necessarily need to add homophobia to every story you tell about LGBT people. There is more to LGBT characters than being a victim. The Scars did not need to be a tribe of JK Rowlings. Ellie and Dina's kiss from that E3 trailer two years ago now ends with a bigoted old man slinging a slur. I understand that we're aiming for hideous awfulness with this game, but there's enough of that particular kind of awfulness in the real world that frankly I don't need it here. Thanks for that. At least The Last of Us II proves definitively that lesbian women can be just as myopic as the whitest of heteronormative male leads. Is that progress?

The Last of Us II is littered with choices here and there to make sure the experience is especially unpleasant. The death animations are extreme gore gags. This means particularly difficult sections can become nauseating spectacles of watching your heroine's face get blown to pieces again and again. This game has a vast stealth toolkit as effective as Metal Gear Solid V's. Except it has no option for non-lethal take-downs. A normal stealth take-out, the primary method of clearing enemies, is a grisly affair of ripping apart flesh on a human neck. You watch this animation every time. A less effective trick the game uses is having enemy soldiers bark out "oh my god, she killed Timmy!" when they find their friend's body. The game wants you to feel guilty that you set Timmy on fire with a molotov cocktail and watched him roast. However, you will inevitably get numb to all this. That's a pretty gross effect, numbing you to your own psychopathic behavior. But it's an achievement.

The game is littered with attack dogs on leashes. Theoretically you can not kill these pets. But in actuality, they are machines who will break your cover and will also leap at you from tall grass where you can't see them. So unfortunately you have to kill the dogs, and that's absolutely a priority. Then the game does the same routine where the dog's owner freaks out. "BEAR!!!" yells a very upset dude. That was a dumb move, since Upset Dude was now wide open for me to kill him with a shotgun blast to the chest. I feel nothing now.

Maybe you can sneak past everybody, but the levels are complicated 3D mazes. You don't know the exit, so the safest routine to kill all the humans and all the canines. Then The Last of Us II yells at you for being too violent.

Unfortunately, all of this ultimately cheapens the rest of the story. There's all these great moments in The Last of Us 2 which really use all of Naughty Dog's talents. They remember the giraffe scene well from the first game and so replicate it several times. Ellie and Joel in a flashback go to a science museum. Abby and her dad save a wounded zebra. However, when juxtaposed with the inevitable horror of the next moments of gameplay, it all feels (I hate this phrase but will use it anyway) like emotional manipulation. I would love a game where Abby and her dad saving a zebra could be just about saving that zebra. Instead it has to be this justification for why you should be angry and kill. Anything good in The Last of Us 2 has to be ruined by the fundamental awfulness of this product.

This goes on for thirty hours. I became beyond tired of it. You know what? Fuck you, Last of Us II. You'll even think the game is over before it surprises you with a whole other three-hour coda segment in Santa Barbara, California. This is so you can kill even more people and the story can find a way to end even worse. I sure hope you liked the final boss of Metal Gear Solid 4, because you get to do with two half-dead women killing each other over truly nothing. It is grim and effective and bitter, as intended. Naughty Dog is good at this. Sadly, I wish they had told any other story but this one. I thought last year's Joker was incredibly competent and well-executed while still being nihilist fucking trash.

By the way, this section in Santa Barbara reminds of me something... All this Vietnam imagery. All this ludonarrative dissonance... What could it be? It's a sandy resort turned into a compound for half-crazy soldiers. There's a band playing on the radio that these bad guys are listening to... What band is that? Oh, The Black Angels! What game were they in?

Oh yeah, Spec Ops: The Line. This is last section is 100% Spec Ops: The Line. Now that Naughty Dog has laid their cards on the table for their influence. Let me explain what they got wrong in all of this. There's a reason why The Line worked and The Last of Us II does not.

In 2012 this trick of ludonarrative dissonance reveals that the player was the monster the whole time was a lot fresher. Spec Ops: The Line was one of the first titles to ever do that, other than a few themes in Metal Gear Solid 2 and the maybe first Nier game. Yager Development took the dudebro cover shooter genre and turned it into a brutal satire of the War on Terror all set in a homage of Apocalypse Now. This was right in the era of gaming that was maybe at its least cerebral. The PS3/Xbox 360 generation was basically all dudebros all the time as I recall. So for a game to stand up and be so provocative as to say "maybe games like Call of Duty are terrible and you're terrible for playing them" was wild back then. Spec Ops: The Line is still a bit controversial now. I don't think we will stop referencing it any time soon.

You need to remember, in 2012 we weren't all that far past debates on whether video games turned you into a psycho killer. Jack Thompson was a name people still referenced. Spec Ops: The Line was brutally satirical and uncompromisingly dark. I had never played anything like it before. It had this wonderful punk meta aesthetic where it mocked you with messages like "how many Americans have you killed today?" and "do you feel like a hero yet?" It's this endless journey down into hell - a hell of your own making. I believe that no game will ever be able to top the White Phosphorus sequence in terms of shocking reveals. That pregnant woman Ellie murdered in The Last of Us II was nothing compared to what you did to people with ol' Willy Pete in Spec Ops.

It is worth remembering that Spec Ops: The Line plays like absolute dogshit compared to The Last of Us II. Spec Ops is just a bland cover shooter with a few great narrative choices. As a game, it is a brutal slog. The last level of that game is like 4:30 PM on a Friday at the office and your boss has just handed you a big project that you need to have finished before you can go home. The Last of Us II is a barrel of monkeys in comparison.

But I would take Spec Ops: The Line anyway because ludonarrative dissonance feels important in that game where it just does not in The Last of Us II. Games want us to solve problems with shooting, which we can tell instinctually won't solve anything. We're still told all across society that tougher policing and more violence verbs will make everybody safer and then we give our cops the high score. We were told that torture and bombing would make the Middle East better. How heroic do we feel now in year eighteen of the War on Terror? The US military isn't a tool to save lives, it's a weapon that creates deserts and calls it "peace". Ludonarrative dissonance isn't just a game problem, it's a world problem. Spec Ops demonstrates that. Your character in that game destroys everything he touches, because he is not a hero. He is a killer with a gun and thanks to only having the "kill" verb, he makes everything worse.

Just to be clear: I am not asking for The Last of Us II to convince Americans not to invade Iran or anything. No game is going to do that. But what am I getting out of The Last of Us II? Why is this game like this?

The Last of Us II is not solving violence, it's excusing it. The Last of Us II isn't horribly violent because it's story is nasty and brutish, it's nasty and brutish because it is horribly violent. Naughty Dog is using the same verbs of "shoot", "stealth", and "kill" that they were using fifteen years ago with Uncharted 1. This game was going to be full of murder arenas whether Ellie was Pol Pot or Santa Claus.

Yet by staging this horrific story the ludonarrative dissonance becomes a feature rather than a glitch. "See, we intended for that all along, can't you see?" I am just not convinced by this synthesis of gameplay and story.

This all reminds me more of Lindsay Ellis's concept of "Woke Disney". This feels like a game written by people who read the TV Tropes page of their other games. Thus,, they feel they need to address the criticism. But you aren't actually solving the problems of sexism or implicit abuse in Beauty and the Beast by making a few characters "#girlbosses" in your unnecessary remakes. Nor are you solving the problem of your hyper realistic game being too damn violent by making your characters raging psychopaths. You're just lampshading the issue and doing it anyway. The Last of Us II is as revolutionary as Sidney Prescott in Scream complaining that girls in slasher movies always run upstairs when they should go out the door - then doing exactly that in the next scene.

I'm glad you're self-aware, Naughty Dog, but I didn't want you to embrace violence and killing. I wanted you to do something else. The last two Tomb Raider games followed the issues of the 2012 reboot by turning Lara Croft into an increasingly deranged maniac. That's the opposite of what I think people wanted.

Naughty Dog has created this Walking Dead-esque world full of ultra-serious survivalist assholes. However, does main verb doesn't have to be "kill, kill, kill"? Sony trusts this studio. They gave them free reign to write a story where the beloved hero Joel gets his face smashed in with a gold club. Therefore Sony should be willing to trust Naughty Dog to make something other than endless unpleasantness. Eight months ago I played another PlayStation exclusive also set in the post-apocalypse. But that game's main verb was "hike". That's Death Stranding, a game that made fetch quests the central focus. Every action was a small bit of mutual support for everybody else. You made friends with a baby in a jar and saved the world through package delivery. It was uplifting and impressive. The Last of Us II is so grimdark we may be embarrassed for this game in just a few years.

What is closer to real human nature? Never-ending self-destructive nihilism like in The Walking Dead? Or is it running a few errands for a stranger? I think too many writers are far too dim on human nature right now. Most people are genuinely good people who want to do the right thing. If the question is between banding together to survive or breaking apart to die, the human animal bands together. So why am I stuck killing the umpteenth band of hapless WLF motherfuckers who have the bad luck of having to run their pre-programmed search routines in the house I happen to need to pass through? Is there anything else we could be doing with our time right now?

And fuck The Walking Dead anyway. Why can't zombies be fun again? Where's my George A. Romero-ish zombie game? Where's Return of the Living Dead: The Game? Please give me fewer hulking monster dudes with torn out faces and more Captain Rhodes getting his guts eaten by a thousand hungry zombies. Less realism and more shambling corpses moaning "Brains" while Linnea Quigley dances naked on a tombstone. Horror can be fun. There's even exactly one fun boss fight against a wacky zombie rat king in The Last of Us II that sadly is nothing like the tone of the rest of the game. I feel so goddamned old when I complain this game is too nihilistic. I feel like the same loser critics who could not appreciate zombie movies from the past. However, zombie movies from the past were better than this. This is incredibly well-crafted but miserable. I don't care how old I sound when I say that.

The Last of Us II ends with Ellie coming home to nothing. A few hours earlier you got to see her absurdly idyllic life after Seattle. She has a nice farm with a nice Jewish girlfriend and a little baby with a goofy goober face. If the game had ended there I might be fine. Instead we have to go to Santa Barbara to find that Abby has been starved and tortured for months (and probably raped too cause why the fuck not at this point?) by some random slaver group. Ellie is so broken she cannot even finish her revenge. She is neither at home in her home or at home on the battlefield. She is just a shell that cannot let Abby live or die. Then we cut to Ellie coming home. Her nice Jewish girlfriend left her. She can't even play guitar anymore because she lost two fingers. She has nothing, nobody. She should have stayed home.

This is a diseased obsession. Ellie is unwell. She is a sick young woman and needs help. Nobody in this game wants to give that.

I wonder how much of this plotline was driven by this game's development. It is well-documented how bad the crutch culture is across the games industry and how bad crunch is at Naughty Dog. The Last of Us II is the kind of game that might break a studio. It definitely breaks employees. There are talented, brilliant people who will never make a game again after their experience on this. Perhaps there was a bit of ludonarrative dissonance behind the scenes too. People really hurt themselves to finish this product and that's something I wouldn't feel good about even if this were the greatest game ever made.

So maybe when Naughty Dog made a game about a person driven by a diseased obsession, forced to keep going and keep fighting beyond the point of all sanity, they were not just making art for art's sake. They were begging for help.