The Last of Us II didn’t give me any moments like that. In the above-quoted video, Druckmann says the core of the game is about “these really intimate, intense relationships.” I bring this up not to quote the game’s marketing, but to try to understand what the people who made it thought they were doing. The story I experienced was about relationships only insofar as characters did things to each other. I didn’t learn anything about what it means to be human, or what we’re capable of when we’re hurt, or what can happen when we want to hurt others. The way Joel hurt Ellie in The Last of Us felt relatable to me; even if the fate of humanity has never hung in the balance, I know how it feels to make a desperate, selfish choice to hang on to something you love. The Last of Us II’s amount of cruelty and violence ultimately overwhelmed any chance of that relatability here. I didn’t find it prurient—the game doesn’t relish in its gory deaths or emotional suffering. It just takes every opportunity to show them, over and over, and decides that counts as saying something about them. It showed me so much ugliness, and in such detail, that I felt numb as terrible things befell more characters I cared about. Sometimes I did these terrible things myself, through gameplay. Sometimes I just watched things play out in front of me with no say in the matter, a lack of agency that was so skillfully used in the first game. Neither circumstance felt more affecting than the other; both just felt like more. The game’s diversity, which I appreciated at the beginning, just felt like an equal opportunity for different kinds of people to suffer as the game went on. Eventually, my numbness turned to an anger I’ve never felt about a video game. Late one night, I paused the game and asked myself aloud if the developers thought I was stupid, if they thought the existence of violence had just never occurred to me before.
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