An enemy combatant pokes their head over the barrier they’re hiding behind. With one shot they crumple to the ground, dead. As their companions scramble to attack or flee, they’re quickly dispatched as well. In the course of just minutes, a dozen formerly living beings lay strewn lifelessly across a room. This scenario plays out across dozens, if not hundreds, of video games. And in almost all of them, it’s fun.
Of course, art doesn’t have to be fun to have merit. Plenty of movies (Requiem for a Dream), television shows (The Leftovers), and novels (American Psycho) are deeply unpleasant to experience but still recognized as brilliant works. The same principle applies to video games, but the nature of the medium introduces complications. A movie has to hold the audience’s attention for only a few hours, but video games must keep the player engaged for much longer, potentially across dozens of hours. And while shows and physical art can be engaged with passively, games demand active participation.
Video games have flirted with the notion of putting fun aside for years to make players uncomfortable. Spec Ops: The Line asked players to consider the cost of war in its retelling of Heart of Darkness, but its gameplay is indistinguishable from the shooters that revel in their violence. Horror games like Resident Evil and Outlast use the trappings of horror to startle players, but only superficially, ushering players toward the next thrill. Very few games even attempt to make a player genuinely feel bad, and fewer succeed. It’s fully possible though, and no game series has done it as well as The Last of Us, particularly The Last of Us Part 2.
To keep an audience engaged while making them uncomfortable, any narrative-driven piece of media needs to have unassailable writing. It’s no secret The Last of Us shines in that regard. For nearly a decade now Naughty Dog has received praise for the story they crafted, and the story of Joel and Ellie (Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson respectively doing some of the best work of their careers) hits hard. Both games begin with a character—one a child, one beloved—murdered in a defenseless state. Neither scene looks away from the brutality of violence, setting the tone for the games from the start. This remains true throughout the story, with numerous named characters tortured, maimed, and killed. There are small moments of levity and humor, but the world of Last of Us is oppressively bleak.
It’s what happens between the cutscenes where The Last of Us sets itself apart in terms of making its audience squirm. The original game did an admirable job given its release in 2013 on the PlayStation 3, an infamously difficult system to develop a game on. Anyone who has played the game can remember the first time a Clicker, one of the nastier strains of the Not Zombies infested with the fungal infection behind the pandemic, ripped Joel’s throat out with their teeth. And the mini-boss Bloater tearing Joel’s face open by the jaws remains one of the most gruesome deaths in gaming. But like in all great zombie media, it’s what we do to other people that matters the most.
The Last of Us used the graphical fidelity granted by the PlayStation 3 (and later the PlayStation 4’s upscaling upon the game’s 2014 release on that console) to show the brutality Joel inflicts on the human body. Exit wounds gape open on enemies hit by headshots, their lifeless eyes staring blankly. The game’s shotgun, granted early in the story, carries enough power to rip limbs off at close range. The human body is both beautiful and fragile, and inflicting so much carnage on it is deeply unsettling.
The Last of Us Part 2, designed solely for the PlayStation 4 and taking advantage of years of graphical and technical progress, makes players feel even worse about their actions. All of the same gory ethos is there, with Ellie displaying even more ruthlessness than Joel in her hand-to-hand kills, displayed in stunning, nauseating detail. Part 2’s story, a meditation on revenge at any cost, is considerably darker than Part 1 on its own, and the level of violence displayed matches it. But it's not just the level of violence or the depiction that Part 2 uses to confront the player; it’s the immediate consequence of it.
Thanks to improvements in the game’s AI, enemies (which, it should be reiterated, are other human beings who presumably have their own rich inner lives, the same way the protagonists do) react to what you do to them. Shoot someone to death in view of their squad-mate? Said squad-mate will cry out in terror and sorrow as their friend falls. Take off someone’s leg with that shotgun? They’ll writhe and scream in anguish, desperately crawling away from you. Part 2 introduced dogs into the game, and upon killing them their owners will react with the pain anyone who has lost a pet can feel in their bones.
Across both games, the gameplay forces the player to ponder the morality of the characters. Is Joel a good person? Are Ellie or Abby bad people? The lines between all of them are left deliberately murky, but the history of violence they share is presented as something to be held against all of them. In a vacuum, any of their decisions could be justified, but morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Their—and by extension, the player’s—violence might be a choice between their own life or death, but it doesn’t take away from the monstrosity of their actions. The Last of Us never makes the violence feel good, because it isn’t.
For Part 2 especially, the off-putting nature of the gameplay is a key part of the message the game is trying to convey. Revenge is a cycle, and a wholly unsatisfying one at that. Violence breeds only more violence, and no one gets back what they’ve lost; they only get blood on their hands. Ellie has chance after chance to turn back, to let go of her pain and begin to heal. Each time she chooses to enact more violence, and Part 2 makes it clear she’s in the wrong. With each maimed body, and every stolen life, the gameplay makes the player feel how wrong she is.
If there is any improvement to be made with The Last of Us Part 1, a remake of the 2014 original and truly breathtaking graphically, it’s that it could have added more of these extra AI reactions from Part 2 into its gameplay. The graphics and physics updates make the gore more queasily realistic, but the added punch of the frantic, pained interactions between wounded enemies could have added further heft to Joel’s actions. While Joel’s fate in Part 2 was probably always going to be contentious, it would be interesting to contextualize it after playing as him with the updated gameplay. By his own admission Joel has done appalling things, and perhaps feeling the fuller weight of all of the lives he’s taken and the pain he’s inflicted would have added extra understanding surrounding the opening of Part 2.
Both games in The Last of Us franchise don’t shy away from the most brutal, horrible aspects of human nature. More than that, they make the player feel every second of it, even during gameplay. That they’re able to do it so well and remain so acclaimed is a testament to their artistic vision and execution.