10 Most Depressing Things About The Last Of Us Part 2

If there’s one thing that’s lacking in The Last of Us universe, it’s innocence.

The harsh reality that the population faces means that even younger characters have a dark cynicism about them. When Ellie and Dina are discussing their first kills, we discover Dina slaughtered her first non-infected person aged only ten.

In the first game, Ellie hadn’t had an easy life. She wasn’t naive to the horrors of the world and in that sense, had already lost her innocence. But there was a goodness to her that brightened the dark situations of the game – she told jokes, she wanted to help the two survivors, Henry and Sam, and she found joy in petting giraffes. She was still very much a kid.

In Part II, we still recognise that goodness in Ellie. Although there’s an anger brewing under the surface, she cares for the people around her, and those that she kills are always the “bad guys.”

That is, until she finds Nora.

In one of the darkest parts of the game, Ellie finds a dying Nora and decides she needs to get information out of her regarding Abby’s whereabouts, no matter the cost. She does this by torturing her. The mechanics of the game even make it so the player has to press a button to carry this out – although the game will never progress until they press the button, it feels as though it’s their decision.

This means that on the player’s command, the good part of Ellie that fans have always admired is lost as she tortures a woman in her dying moments.