The dogs in The Last of Us Part 2 are, frankly, a pain in the backside. “In the past had sight and sound, so what’s another way they can detect you?” asks Druckmann. "Well smell is another sense, which is why we introduced the dogs.”
The game’s creative director, Neil Druckmann, explains that changing the player character to Ellie forced Naughty Dog to rethink their combat mechanics from the ground up. The introduction of verticality in particular proves transformative, taking encounters to new levels in all senses of the word. She’s lithe and lively, able to squeeze through small gaps in the brickwork, drop down to a prone position in the long grass, dodge melee attacks and, crucially, able to jump. Stepping into Ellie’s sneakers as she searches a suburb of Seattle for her friend Tommy, who has been captured by local militia group the Washington Liberation Front, offers more than a mere costume change. Ostensibly combat in The Last of Us 2 is more of the same from the first game but it’s at once entirely familiar and completely different. Of all the philosophical questions around the subject Naughty Dog are hoping their game will provoke, perhaps why something so plainly wrong can feel so paradoxically right is the most pertinent one of all.
And the uncomfortable answer is it feels grisly, grounded and, actually, kind of great. Much has been written about the violence in The Last of Us Part 2, about how it looks and how it sounds, but only now do we know how it feels.
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