It helps that Ellie is now able to navigate terrain far more competently than Joel ever could, smashing windows, abseiling off walls, and jumping from precarious heights to enter previously unreachable areas, allowing Naughty Dog to challenge players with more diverse environmental puzzles that enrich combat and exploration. The sense of pace and flow that underscores each level as a result is impeccable, each mission resembling a playable tapestry that builds and crescendos at a tempo that always feels unpredictable and compelling. Naughty Dog's environmental design still gently guides you along the critical path even with all that added emphasis on exploration, though, and never in a way that feels forced, or draws you out of the illusion. Every place has a story, offering a window into both the world that Ellie never knew, and the one she's all too familiar with, all told authentically through deftly placed artefacts, heuristic clues, and cleverly devised organic moments that bring each space to life. You can spend hours poring over the digital seams of every building, forest, and cavern, not just out of a desire to scavenge as much craftable scrap material as Ellie can carry, but to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy the bespoke minutiae of Naughty Dog's handiwork. The Last of Us Part 2 has more accessibility options than any other Naughty Dog game (opens in new tab) Naughty Dog has stretched the parameters of its linear game design to create environments that always feel like part of something larger than you are, yet are still crammed to the gills with the kind of handmade detail typically only reserved for more compactly structured single-player experiences.
The Last of Us Part 2's story is one of great scale and intricate nuance, then, and the same can be said for its world.
If you thought The Last of Us' giraffe scene was a tear jerker, boy does this sequel have some treasures for you. Speaking of, Troy Baker steals some of Part 2's best scenes as Joel, showing us new sides to the character that enriches and complicates the relationship we developed with him over the course of the first game. The complexity of suffering is no easy thing to depict on screen, but Johnson's ownership of Ellie's character throughout it all is nothing short of awards worthy, aided seamlessly by Naughty Dog's cutting edge facial animation technology, which lets even the slightest change in body language speak a thousand words.Įllie is surrounded by an equally compelling cast of characters, too, with new additions like Shannon Woodward's Dina, Stephen Chang's Jesse, and many others quickly proving themselves to be as well-rounded and multi-dimensional as the game's returning cast of familiar faces. As with the original game, Naughty Dog cunningly exploits the interactivity of its medium with masterful assuredness, forcing players to take a cold, hard look at every action they make as Ellie, with all the discomfort and distress that entails.Īt the heart of it all, however, is Ellie, once again textured with incredible warmth and humanity by Ashley Johnson, in the kind of performance that we'll still be talking about years from now. I won't divulge any more details beyond that, but suffice to say that what starts out as a fairly straightforward tale of retribution morphs into something far more complex, surprising, and sinister. This pursuit takes our teenage heroine away from the rural pastures of Jackson County and deep into the urban overgrowth of Seattle, a city that experienced a very different kind of societal breakdown to The Last of Us' Boston, and thus poses its own unique threats to Ellie's survival. Set five years after the events of her pan-American odyssey with Joel, an indescribably traumatic opening episode leaves Ellie hellbent on a crusade to hunt down those responsible for a seemingly unforgivable crime. If 2013's The Last of Us (opens in new tab) was a road trip turned twisted coming of age story, The Last of Us Part 2 is its revenge western companion piece.
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