The developer is at its best the less it’s focused on escalating drama. You can see the same dynamic in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted franchise over the years too. This observation isn’t only exclusive to The Last of Us series. That might make the game feel less like a high-stakes Hollywood blockbuster, but that’s ultimately to its benefit.

There are less crutches like that in Part I, as complications aren’t as mechanically induced. Several moments of the game involve a character walking toward a location, only to have the ground collapse under them and send them on some roundabout shortcut into a combat zone. Naughty Dog tends to reuse the same tropes and scene setups to create artificial conflict.

That repetition is more noticeable in the actual game design. We continually see “bad guys” reframed as “good guys,” something that’s already effectively established by the two-protagonist structure of the game. Several beats in Abbey’s story tend to retread already established ideas about the moral gray zones of violent conflict. However, I don’t always get the sense that every scene is indispensable as Naughty Dog tends to repeat itself much more. Part of that is a necessity, as it’s telling the story of two different characters whose journeys run parallel to one another. Clocking in at around 24 hours, the sequel is twice as long as its predecessor. I don’t quite feel the same way about Part II. I walked away from my replay wondering if it’s the single best pound-for-pound game the studio has made to date. Every single moment is memorable, as it naturally develops the relationship between Ellie and Riley with each scene. That’s even truer of Left Behind, a tight DLC that tells one of Naughty Dog’s most succinct stories in two hours. My mind wandered once or twice during my 12-hour playthrough. For instance, the winter-set chapter where Ellie takes charge serves as an important way to show how Joel’s ruthlessness has begun to infect her. From its tense opening sequence to its gripping final hour, most scenes play a crucial role in the story. What I immediately noticed in my replay of The Last of Us is that there’s barely a wasted moment.

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