Sony showed off a lot of great games at E3 and in any other year, the closer look we got at Ghost of Tsushima, a dazzling love letter to the cinematic language of the samurai epics I grew up on, would’ve earned it game of the show but not in a year in which Naughty Dog brought The Last of Us Part II gameplay goods. No, sir.
It was the kiss heard around the world, then the disemboweling heard around the world, then the hammer to the face heard around the world, then the… I mean, you saw it. It was a whole lot of ugly and depravity sandwiched between a whole lotta pretty. The roughly 12 minute trailer showed us a grown up, socially trigger shy Ellie locking lips with a comely lass at the community hoedown. The trailer went on only to smash cut to Ellie mid-throat slice, stalking and killing her prey in a fumbling ballet of death which relished in the perverse dismantling of the human form. Genre best animation trumpeted every cracked bone and torn or punctured bit of flesh with a level of minute anatomical detail like we’ve never seen in a game before. It was stunning and made perhaps more so because of the uncharacteristically celebratory and joyful bookends.
Although The Last of Us is often praised for its wonderful storytelling, charming characters and atmospheric setting, I am a firm believer that it does “shit hits the fan” style gameplay better than any other. The original was all about that moment when a perfect plan goes to pot and you have to run in with brick in hand to gain back some advantage. The trailer for The Last of Us Part II which showed off, a perhaps idealized version of, what it will be like to play as Ellie, gave us a glimpse at how they’ve improved in this regard.
For one thing they seem to have doubled down on the survivalist realism of the original. At one point Ellie takes an arrow to the shoulder, with a sick thud, and it stays put, hobbling her until she’s able to find a moment in the chaos to extract it. In another scene, she crawls beneath a car and waits patiently for an enemy combatant to expose herself to a headshot, a new mechanic to the series which shows an eagerness to improve on its already impressive stealth mechanics.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about all of this is that there’s almost nothing new about it. The setting of old grey buildings, overgrown grasses, abandoned cars and store fronts looks like it could be right out of the first game. There’s no new Infected to ooh and ahh over or new weapons to salivate about and yet… it’s absolutely enthralling not just because of what it portends but because of how it shows a commitment to the ideas they established in Part I. A ruthless, lawless world, every encounter a dirt level fight for survival, and something to hope for at the end of the struggle.
The only doubt I have now about The Last of Us Part II is that something this dynamic and technically demanding can run smoothly on a PS4 but, as they say, in Naughty Dog We Trust.
