The Video Game That’s Stuck in an Endless Cycle of Violence

The power of The Last of Us hinged on that connection between player and character, between simple gameplay and deeper intention. As video games evolved over the decades, they struggled to bridge the gap between their ever more complex storytelling and the relative straightforwardness of gameplay—a conflict dubbed “ludonarrative dissonance” in the industry. Essentially, how do you tell a resonant tale with proper character development when the game you’re creating mostly involves running, jumping, punching, and shooting people? The ending of The Last of Us made Joel’s history of violence a feature, rather than a bug, and in 2013 that felt revolutionary—the player wasn’t being rewarded for killing their way to the ending, but instead being asked to think about how they’d gotten there.

Now, seven years later comes the much-awaited sequel, The Last of Us Part II, an epic blockbuster that tries to reckon with the consequences of Joel’s choice while also delivering many more hours of zombie-fighting gameplay. The title is full of plot twists, tense action sequences, and loads of bloody violence—the worst instances of which are once again unavoidable. The Last of Us Part II is an even more ambitious treatise on video-game moralism than its predecessor, but more often than not, the lesson it’s trying to impart is one the player has already learned. The first game took a well-known genre and tilted its perspective, so that players could consider its grim underpinnings. Part II seems to have the same mission, but by upping the ante, it gets caught up in the very cycles of violence it’s trying to critique.

The first half of Part II follows a grown-up Ellie, who is now living in a developed settlement of survivors with Joel. Early on, Joel is captured and murdered by a militarized strike force, spurring Ellie to cut a bloody swathe through an overgrown Seattle as she hunts for Joel’s assassin, a soldier named Abby. Halfway through the story, they come face to face—only for the game’s point-of-view to switch to Abby, who’s revealed to be the daughter of one of the doctors Joel killed. She was exacting her own revenge and continuing a cycle of killing that will seemingly never end for the Last of Us franchise—at least not as long as these acclaimed games keep setting record-breaking sales numbers.

The game’s meta argument seems to be that these cycles of vengeance are fated, or programmed, if you will. As a character, Ellie is trapped—she must continue her mission to avenge Joel, because the player is controlling her and because any video game demands a mission. At first, her mission is tolerable because it mostly involves killing the undead, but once Ellie finds the humans she’s chasing, pure brutality is demanded of the player. In one pivotal scene, Ellie has to beat someone to death to get valuable information, and the game makes the player press a button to land every single blow. Horrified, I set my controller down and watched the screen for minutes to see if I could avoid this task entirely; eventually, it was clear I couldn’t.