Naughty Dog kicked off The Last of Us franchise back in 2013 on the PS3. With a gritty, harrowing tale of survival in a fallen world that captured the attention of fans and critics alike, the sequel, The Last of Us Part II, finally arrived in 2020. The original game received a remake in 2022, shortly before the premiere of the first gameâs celebrated HBO adaptation in 2023. Now, in 2024, fans have another reason to dive into the gameâs second installment with The Last of Us Part II Remastered, a visual overhaul of the second game that includes new levels and a brand new roguelike mode
The Last of Us: Part 2 is a direct follow-up to the first game. If you havenât played the first game, youâll pick up the mechanics pretty easily, but, in terms of story, youâll be totally lost. Many scenes are referential; some are straight-up callbacks. Characters and plot events reference things that happened in the first game. Maybe itâs been seven years since youâve played the first one. Maybe you never touched it at all. Rather than play or replay a 15-hour gameâor watch a six-hour âmovie versionâ playthroughâhereâs what you need to know.
(A special shoutout to the folks who compile and maintain the ridiculously thorough The Last of Us Wiki In researching this article, few resourcesâincluding the source materialâwere more valuable. Keep up the awesome work!)
Spoilers follow, obviously, for The Last of Us
Why all the fuss over a zombie game?
For all intents and purposes, The Last of Us is a zombie game. But The Last of Us will never admit that.
In The Last of Us, humanity is ravaged by a parasitic strain of ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which causes an illness called Cordyceps Brain Infection (CBI) in hosts. CBI drives victims mad and overrides their brain processes. Victims are left with one irrepressible urge: âSpread this virus by biting people.â
The cordyceps virus is also airborne. When a host dies, their lifeless corpse mutates into a spore-spewing husk. These spores are instantly infectious, so pretty much every surviving human carries around a gas mask 24/7.
Shortly after the outbreak, roughly 60 percent of the population is either infected by or killed as a result of (read: chomped on by not-zombies) CBI. Please forgive me for giving you impending nightmares, but you should also know that the cordyceps virus responsible for CBI is inspired by a real-world virus
That sounds like zombies.
Theyâre not zombies. Humans who suffer from CBI are referred to as âthe Infected.â The word âzombieâ isnât mentioned once in The Last of Us oeuvre.
The first stage of infection happens within a few days of exposure. All inhibitions on aggression go out the window. At this stage, the Infected becomes hostile and attacks any non-Infected humans on sightâgenerally via clawing and biting. These not-zombies are called runners
After a few weeks, runners start losing their vision and start developing rudimentary echolocation. They can still see somewhat, though, and are just as fast and aggressive as runners. These formidable not-zombies are called stalkers
Stalkers who make it to their first birthday (incubation-day?) enter the third stage of infection and become clickers. The fungal growth that starts in stage two has, by now, completely overtaken any remaining human features. As a result, clickers canât see at all. They rely entirely on echolocation, which they perform through a loud and petrifying language of clicks and screeches. While clickers are slower than runners and stalkers, theyâre far stronger. Fun fact: These not-zombies are the scariest undead creatures dreamt up in all of history. Seven years later, Iâve heard that some peopleâdefinitely not meâstill have nightmares.
In the fourth and final stage of CBI, the Infected significantly bloats in size, and develops an all-encompassing shell of hardened fungal growth. The result is a monster called a bloater. Bullets practically bounce right off them. They tear off chunks of their body to use as makeshift chemical grenades. They roar. Blissfully, bloaters are quite rare. Just seven of these not-zombies show up over the entire course of The Last of Us
Let me guess: âThe humans are the real bad guys?â
As with all post-apocalyptic stories, society in The Last of Us is fractured beyond recognition. American cities are transformed into quarantine zones (âQZsâ) that function more like police states. Theyâre generally strapped for resources. Someâlike the Hartford, Salt Lake, and Pittsburgh QZsâhave been straight-up abandoned by the government for one reason or another.
The fictional government agency in charge of these QZs is the Federal Disaster Response Agency, or FEDRA. Think: FEMA if FEMA had no moral restrictions and access to kiloton explosives. Early on in the CBI outbreak, FEDRA used those bombs to wipe out vast swathes of Infectedâand any non-Infected who happen to be in the blast zoneâin the fringes of QZs.
Opposite FEDRA is a group of rebels called the Fireflies. At face value, the Fireflies are noble: They want to repeal martial law, restore democratic order, and deploy scientists to find a cure for CBI. Some of their means to that end, however, are questionable. For instance, your first introduction to the Fireflies is a front-row seat to one of the Boston cells blowing up a checkpoint. The Fireflies call the Salt Lake City QZâor, rather, whatâs left of itâhome.
Thereâs also no shortage of merciless bandit groups. These bandits operate much like bandits often do: Kill innocent people and take their stuff. In The Last of Us, a group called the Hunters have commandeered the Pittsburgh QZ. Later on in the game, you run into a group called the Cannibals, who, Iâm sorry to report, religiously follow their namesake like (more on them later).
Everyone else exists in the gray area. As you quickly learn through playing, you donât survive in The Last of Us unless you have some questionable morals.
Wait, I think I know this one: The main character is a total jerk with a heart of gold.
Yes and no. In The Last of Us, you play as a grizzled former smuggler named Joel (voiced by Troy Bakerâs smooth-as-butter pipes). Joelâs story starts at the onset of the CBI outbreak, in September 2013. While trying to escape Austin with his daughter, Sarah, she gets shot in the gut by paranoid FEDRA soldiers. The plot picks up again two decades later. Joelâs made a new life in the Boston QZ, mostly by operating in the outskirts of strict martial law. (At one point, itâs implied he used to be a member of the Hunters.) Over the course of the game, Joel becomes a surrogate father toâŚ
…Ellie, a foul-mouthed, comics-loving 14-year-old girl who happens to be the most important living human being on the planet. See, before the gameâs events, Ellie was bitten. Three weeks have passed, and she still hasnât turned. A Firefly leader named Marlene spots opportunity and asks Joelâalong with his partner, Tessâto smuggle Ellie out of the Boston QZ. At the rendezvous, Fireflies plan to take Ellie westward, where scientists think they can reverse engineer a cure for CBI.
Iâm sure everything goes according to plan.
It sure does.
Really?
No, this is a video game. The plan goes off all of the rails. FEDRA soldiers close in on their location, and a bitten Tess makes a sacrificial final stand so Joel and Ellie can set off to find Joelâs brother, Tommy, who used to be a Firefly. In the outskirts of Boston, the duo meets up with Bill, an old acquaintance of Joelâs. Bill hooks them up with a car, which they use to make their way to Pittsburgh.
Hey, thatâs where the Hunters are!
Indeed. Joel and Ellie barely make it three hundred feet into the City of Bridges before theyâre attacked by Hunters. To escape the city, they team up with a man named Henry and his younger brother, Sam, who are also looking for the Fireflies. Ellie and Sam become fast friends. Then, on the way out of town, Sam is bitten, turns, and lunges at Ellie. Henry shoots him down before turning the gun on himself.
A few months later, Joel and Ellie catch up with Tommy in Jackson, Wyoming. All things considered, Tommy has it pretty good. He and his wife, Maria, run a secure settlement near a fully operational hydroelectric dam. Itâs clear of Infected. Itâs secure from bandits. And, most importantly, itâs not a QZ. Naturally, Joel decides to leave Ellie there. Sheâs just âcargo,â after all, right?
Rude.
I know. But Joel comes around (Ellie brings up Sarah), and, soon enough, theyâre off to Colorado. Per Tommy, the Fireflies set up shop at the University of Eastern Colorado. By the time Joel and Ellie show up, the rebel org is long goneâdecamped, as our heroes deduce, to Salt Lake City. As they head out, bandits attack. Joel tussles with one and falls off a balcony, impaling himself through the lower-right abdomen on some rusty rebar.
Joel and Ellie make it out alive (well, barely so, in Joelâs case) and camp out in an abandoned hamlet. While hunting for meat, Ellie runs into a stranger, David (Nolan North, who also voices Nathan Drake in Naughty Dogâs Uncharted games). David offers to trade some medicine for Ellieâs game, but not before revealing that, as luck would have it, heâs the leader of all those bandits Joel wiped out in Colorado. She accepts the trade regardless and runs off.
https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-the-kotaku-review-511292998
Davidâs men track Ellie down, but not before she gets a chance to administer medicine to Joel. Sheâs knocked out and kidnapped. Upon waking up, she realizes that, ew, Davidâs group of bandits are cannibals. She takes out one of Davidâs underlings and escapes. David, enraged, sounds the alarm, swears to kill her, et cetera, et cetera.
Back in townâthe game bounces between our two main characters for a bitâJoel wakes up. He captures and mercilessly tortures two cannibals for Ellieâs location. When he finds her, sheâs in a burning building, hacking away at Davidâs lifeless body. Joel pulls her away, embraces her, and calls her âbaby girlâ (Sarahâs old nickname).
Together again, Joel and Ellie begin the trek to Salt Lake. All the bullshit theyâve gone through âcanât be for nothing,â she says.
Is Ellie okay after that?
Not in the slightest. When the duo reaches Salt Lake, their ostensible goal, they come across a family of giraffes, alive after all these years, hanging out in a zoo. The animals cheer her up in a heartbeat. It all sounds silly on paper, but in 2013, the scene blew everyoneâs minds
Soon enough, Joel and Ellie find themselves in Firefly custody. Marleneâwho made the cross-country trek from Bostonâexplains to Joel that doctors could create a cure, with one, Ellie-sized catch: his newfound daughter figure wonât survive the surgery. Joelâs not having that, so he kills the Fireflies, kills the doctors, kills Marlene, and escapes with Ellie.
Words also donât do the final minutes justice. You should just watch:
If itâs not clear, let me spell it out plainly: Joel would trade the world for Ellieâliterally. A heart of gold? Maybe. A total jerk move? Most definitely.
https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-ended-perfectly-and-it-doesnt-need-a-s-534296961
Wow. Did Naughty Dog answer things up with any expansions?
In 2014, Naughty Dog released The Last of Us: Left Behind, a short, standalone expansion. (For PS4 players, it was included in 2014âs The Last of Us: Remastered.) Left Behind cuts between two plotlines. The modern-day portion takes place shortly after Joel is gravely wounded. Ellie searches an abandoned mall for medical supplies, dodging (or killing) cannibals and Infected all the while. Itâs tense and atmospheric, but not terribly important to the larger story.
All the good stuff is told through flashbacks. Left Behindâs main plot takes place three weeks before The Last of Us begins. Ellie and her old friend Riley (the same one she mentions in that ending speech) head off to an abandoned mall, because symbolism. There, they play like normal teensâdance, ride a carousel, shoot each other with water guns. Ellie begs Riley not to leave with the Fireflies. They kiss.
https://kotaku.com/how-left-behind-gives-new-insight-into-the-last-of-us-1527966923
Itâs a lovely moment, until Infected totally ruin it. In the ensuing struggle, both Ellie and Riley are bitten. Once out of immediate harmâs way, they sit down and have a chat about accepting death, which Riley wraps with a punch to the gut:
âThere are a million ways we shouldâve died before today, and a million ways we can die before tomorrow. But we fight, for every second we get to spend with each other. Whether itâs two minutes or two days, we donât give that up. I donât want to give that up. My vote: letâs just wait it out. You know, we can⌠be all poetic and just lose our minds together.â
Riley turns. Ellie, as you know, does not.
Youâre telling me this game is fun?
I am not. No reasonable person would tell you that. Even in his review of the game, Kotakuâs Kirk Hamilton went out of his way to describe The Last of Us as ânot a âfunâ game.â Kirk is correct: The gameplay isnât âfunâ by any meansâbut it is terrific.
In the barest terms, The Last of Us is a third-person shooter, though it might be one of the more stressful third-person shooters in recent memory. You donât automatically snap to cover. You die from just a couple of hits. Your health doesnât recharge after a few seconds of safe harbor. Youâre no tougher, in terms of hit points, than your opponents.
You also donât do much shooting. In fact, ammo is so scarce in The Last of Us that, more often than not, your clip for any given weapon will have just one bullet in it. Taking out human enemies is more a game of sneaking and planning than running and gunning (as you would in a certain other Naughty Dog franchise). Sneak up behind them, choke them out, smack them with a brick or a two-by-fourâwhatever you need to do to get the upper hand.
Fighting Infected requires more careful strategy than fighting humans. Joel and Ellie are emphatically not superheros, though both are blessed with one superpower: godlike hearing. Itâs not as cool as invisibility or superhuman strength, but it is life-saving.
In The Last of Us, you can go into âlisten mode,â in which you crouch down and can make out the shapes and locations of nearby enemies. Deploy it correctly, and you can see through walls. Listen mode is essential for fighting the Infectedâparticularly clickers, who canât locate people unless they generate noise.
Iâm assuming youâre telling me this because itâs important to the sequel.
Correct. The Last of Us: Part 2 doesnât reinvent the wheel because it doesnât have to. The sequel plays much the same, with a few tiny tweaks that youâll pick up as you play. Weâll have much more on how to master gameplay in the coming days.
Cool. What else should I know before diving into the sequel?
Most of the surviving major playersâJoel, Ellie, Tommy, and Mariaâshow up in Part 2. The sequel kicks off in Jackson, four years after the ending of The Last of Us. I canât really share much beyond that without spoiling things, but know youâre in for a very different game.
The Last of Us is a story about grit, perseverance, and survival in the face of Vegas-grade odds. But above all, itâs a story about love. The sequel, meanwhile, couldnât be further from that. As creative director Neil Druckmann revealed in 2016, The Last of Us: Part 2 is a game âabout hate.â Steel yourself for a tonally different narrative. Iâd (surprise!) like to direct you toward the Kotaku review. Like many others, I enjoyed Part 2 quite a bit. Riley, our reviewer, wasnât exactly a fanâsomething weâll hash out on the page soon enough.
https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-part-ii-the-kotaku-review-1844006193
Awesome. I think Iâm ready.
Well, no amount of prep can truly make you ready for Part 2, but, hey, have fun anyway!
