My Enemy, Myself: The Weaponization of Player Agency in The Last of Us Part II
Charles Jensen
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(This essay contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part II video game and seasons 2 and 3 of the HBO Max Series)
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Despite their (unproven) reputation for inciting real-life violence, video games are, like all forms of narrative art, empathy machines. Unlike literature, cinema, theater, and that ilk, video games offer a unique lever that deepens the player’s relationship with their onscreen avatar: the ability to make choices that redirect the narrative to different outcomes. In narrative design—the field name for video game writers—this is called player agency.
In one of the earliest arcade games, Asteroids (1979), player agency was limited to rotating your spacecraft in a circle while timing your shots to destroy the titular space threat. Platformers like Super Mario Bros (1985) gave players more options—stomping on koopas and goombas while pursuing power-ups or ducking into pipes with secret rewards inside—while limiting their movement forward to the stage’s end goal (players could not return to portions of the level that disappeared behind the left side of the screen). The Legend of Zelda (1986) flirted with the idea of an “open world” with few restrictions, but required players to complete dungeons in a specific sequence in order to locate items essential to the game’s forward momentum.
Grand Theft Auto III (2001) showed that open world gaming gave players the most agency, and therefore the most investment in the game’s outcome. In fact, Grand Theft Auto V (2013), with the most expansive open world elements, is the second highest selling console video game of all time. Three of the top five selling games are explicitly open-world or contain an open-world game mode.
In truly open world games, players determine their paths toward the game’s climax. Discovery rewards exploration. Players inhabit their character for far longer in these games: closed-world games run between 6-15 hours of playtime, while a fully open-world game averages 40 hours, with 100 hours of “completionist” playtime a realistic investment for some titles. All of those playtimes assume players do not die, suffer setbacks, or run around in confusion while unsure of where to go next, which would extend an individual player’s total investment of time beyond these averages.
While The Last of Us Part II feels like an open-world game, in part due to its cinematic graphics and semi-open stages, it is, at its core, a level-based action/adventure game closer in spirit to Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda than fully open titles like Skyrim and Elden Ring. Why, then, does The Last of Us Part II take 30 hours to complete (and an estimated 40 for a completionist run), a playtime roughly equivalent to Skyrim and close to Elden Ring? What are we doing with all those extra hours?
The Last of Us games reward curiosity and exploration, like all open world games do. The scarcity of in-game resources draws from the tradition of survival horror games like Resident Evil (1996), where careful inventory and ammunition management is essential to making it out alive. Blueprints for new accessories or materials to upgrade weapons are stashed in drawers, closets, and shelves, and most stages feature hidden areas or locked doors requiring some puzzle skills to open. Rooted in stage-based play, both games plop the player into a maze-like environment they can explore as much or as little as they want, depending on the game experience they want. That’s an open-world philosophy draped over more linear game progression. But once you enter a stage, you can’t go back the way you came. The only way out is through.
The Last Of Us Part I’s action had us playing as Joel for the majority of the game, with brief interludes of controlling Ellie. In The Last of Us Part II, we get about 5 minutes of playtime as Joel. We’re then seeing the world through two sets of eyes: Ellie, the teen girl Joel squired across the country in the first game, and Abby, a previously unknown character.
To put it briefly, we become our own enemy.
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The Last of Us Part II opens with roughly two hours of low-stakes gameplay intercut with immersive cinematic cutscenes before the story’s inciting incident occurs. It’s four years since the events of the first game, and Joel and Ellie have settled into life in the fortified encampment called Jackson in the Wyoming frontier. Ellie’s asserted her independence as a nineteen-year-old by moving into Joel’s garage—close, but not supervised. Jackson is a tight-knit community where folks mostly get along—except Joel and Ellie, who have an undisclosed friction between them.
The cinematography in The Last of Us Part II is among some of the best on PlayStation, its native console, or any video game, really. These detailed backdrops for the action capture the rewilding of human settlements, their dilapidation as about 20 years have passed since infection day. But it’s the dialogue and story that hook players. One of the brilliant artistic choices in both The Last of Us games is the weaving of well-acted dialogue into stretches of exploratory gameplay. Characters tell stories, share confidences, and tease each other while the player walks them through non-threatening environments. In the first game, we saw and experienced how Ellie and Joel’s bond deepened on their journey—when they lied to each other, when they chose to be vulnerable, how they joked. The second game picks this up, and we quickly intuit how character relationships have developed between titles.
Dialogue strays from plot reveals most of the time, and instead approximates normal conversation. This helps us as players understand the depth of the relationships between Ellie and the folks in Jackson. Each line also deepens character—Dina’s resilience and ambivalence about fitting neatly into a role prescribed for her immediately jump out, while Ellie’s attraction to her—and her discomfort with where they stand after a surprise kiss at a town party—endears both characters to us.
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After 30 minutes of exposition in Jackson, the game cuts to a series of unfamiliar faces dozing in sleeping bags, knives and guns close at hand. One of them, a young woman with a long French braid, wakes from a bad dream. She finds one of her companions, a man around her age, standing at the window. He invites her to follow him outdoors to see something.
We take over control of her, this anonymous woman, as she parkours with her guide through the mountainous terrain. Eventually, they name one another: Owen and Abby. We discover they’ve been searching for Jackson, and they’re probably looking to do harm. We spend the next 18 minutes saving her from a horde of infected until we cut to Ellie on patrol with Dina. More exposition here enlightens us about the tension between Joel and Ellie, which they’re on the verge of repairing. After they take shelter from a winter storm in an abandoned library, we’re back to playing as Abby, following a set of horse tracks we assume belong to Ellie and Dina. But another swarm of infected find Abby, and we have to outrun them through unfamiliar terrain. The sequence is thrilling, heart-pounding. She finds a fenced building and, as the infected tip chain link over her, she crawls on her belly to escape them. A hand reaches out to help her. We know the voice. It’s Joel. He introduces himself and his brother Tommy, and they press on.
It’s a relief to be among familiar faces while playing as Abby, and to see Joel’s heroism on full display. They fight off the infected together. Abby tells them they can take shelter from the storm with her friends in the lodge. But Abby didn’t invite him there to rescue him back. She shoots him in the kneecap and tortures him. When play cuts back to Ellie searching for Joel, we’re distraught. Will she/we make it in it? We find a hidden way into the lodge and, hearing Joel’s cries of pain, make our way to the lower level, just in time to watch Abby crush Joel’s skull with a golf club.
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How could she have done this? How could we have done this?
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This, at last, is the inciting incident of The Last of Us Part II, the narrative event from which all the story’s dominoes will tumble. Most films would reach this point anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes, but the game, with an epic canvas, can take its time, develop its characters, interweave their relationships, and train the player with tutorial-style gameplay, on screen prompts, and skill-building set pieces.
After its methodical start, The Last of Us Part II finds new ways to stoke the quandary of player agency. The story jumps ahead six months as Dina and Ellie chase after Tommy to Seattle, where Abby and her people live. This is the main arc of the story. It takes two full hours of gameplay to get there. The story now breaks into days, with “Seattle Day One,” “Seattle Day Two,” and so on as on-screen titles.
Ellie wants to find Abby to take revenge for Joel’s murder. The main narrative arc of the game takes shape as redemption for Ellie. She couldn’t save Joel, and she didn’t love him right when she had the chance. In Seattle, Ellie encounters two warring factions: the Washington Liberation Front (WLF, or “wolves”), a paramilitary group that overthrew and expelled the federal martial law forces controlling the city, and the Seraphites, a fundamentalist religious order who interpreted the cordyceps pandemic as a sign to eschew modernity for a life of simplicity on the land. Wolves call them “Scars” for the ceremonial cuts they take to their faces when they reach maturity. By the time Ellie arrives, the two groups have been fighting over territory and resources for quite some time. Both groups will shoot non-members on sight. Finding Tommy—and finding Abby—is going to be much harder than expected.
Playing as Ellie, we feel her righteous thirst for vengeance. The Wolves and the Scars die at our hands, but we rationalize it as self-defense—if we didn’t kill them, they’d kill us. We sometimes overhear their conversations with each other—defensive strategies in one scene; surprisingly vulnerable confessions in others. Infected lie scattered around the city, in increasingly gruesome forms. For three days of play, we guide Ellie toward information, items, and resources that make her stronger, more resolute. She locates members of Abby’s Jackson squad and assassinates them one at a time, sometimes trying to pry more information out of them first. It’s one of these ill-fated women, Nora, who reveals to Ellie why Abby pursued Joel. The trail leads her to Abby’s friends at their hideout in the Seattle Aquarium. Ellie kills Owen and his girlfriend Mel, realizing after the fact Mel was pregnant. These deaths feel different to her, and to us. Identifiable. Personal. Ellie retreats to her hideout in the city. Abby breaks the tranquility and, just as she seems to shoot Ellie for killing her friends, the screen goes black.
On the black screen, the words “Seattle Day One.”
Abby, in a barracks, wakes from a bad dream.
We play the same three days all over again, but this time from Abby’s perspective.
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The first time I played The Last of Us Part II, I didn’t realize the dual perspective would be the crux of the gameplay. I thought the early stints as Abby from the exposition of the game were merely to introduce her character. But now, inhabiting the body of the woman who murdered Joel—Joel, whom I inhabited for the first game in the series—I felt betrayed. I felt angry. I felt sick.
Abby’s character arc is incredibly complex. The first half of the game convinces us she’s a soulless villain, but we join her at her home, with her friends, who have built a community much like Jackson (with more paramilitary flavor) in a stadium. The Wolves patrol their territory, looking for community resources and keeping the Scars from threatening them. Abby’s complex past romance with Owen takes center stage in this section. The Scars—whom we first meet when they ambush Ellie in a park with vicious precision—are not even human to the Wolves anymore. They’re fanatics, lunatics, zealots. Over the course of the next three days, Abby will lose everything all over again: her closest friends, membership in the Wolves and her home, and even her animosity toward the Scars.
Playing as Abby restores her humanity to us as the player. It’s only through inhabiting her skin that her choices make sense to us. If we support Ellie’s campaign to kill Abby for killing Joel, can we not understand why Abby killed Joel for killing her father? The game never asks this question outright, but it’s always there tugging at our conscience while we play. Two women mourning their parental figures, both broken by the losses. Who is the hero? Who is the villain? Yes.
Abby ends up captured by the Scars after trying to save a Seraphite teen boy and girl from a death sentence handed down by their own people. These two characters, Lev and Yara, become Abby’s main companions for the rest of the game. Their uneasy truce solidifies when Abby recovers meds and supplies to treat Yara’s broken arm, and Lev explains he was expelled for expressing his identity as a man of transgender experience. Yara will die helping them escape, and Lev becomes Abby’s only remaining ally as she becomes more critical of the Wolves’ actions against the Seraphites. Ultimately both groups unmask themselves as lacking fundamental humanity, and it’s only after a harrowing escape from the Seraphites’ flame-engulfed base that Abby realizes they have nowhere left to go but away.
That’s when she discovers the cold bodies of Owen and Mel as well as Ellie’s map, marking the location of her hideout.
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The crisis of conscience in this game is unrelenting. Having spent roughly equal time as our antagonistic main characters, whose side are we on? Abby hunts Ellie through the bowels of the theater, but do we want her to hurt her? Do we want Ellie to hurt Abby? This combat sequence is the first time players must act in a way that is counter to all the emotional information we have learned—because only we have been both of these women. They are still trapped in the prison of their own perspectives, unable to see just how alike they are in the way they love and the way they hurt.
Dina manages to intervene in the fight, but quickly falls prey to Abby’s military fight skills. Before Abby slashes Dina’s throat, Ellie tells Abby Dina is pregnant, seeking the mercy she didn’t show to Mel. That goads Abby on, but Lev calls out, and Abby’s conscience returns. Ellie and Dina return home but build their own house away from the protection of Jackson, and Lev and Abby travel to Santa Barbara in search of the last of the Fireflies, the resistance group Abby and her dad belonged to before Joel killed in him Salt Lake City. Ellie and Dina are parents now, and they seem happy. Happy except that Ellie can’t let go of Abby getting away. When she gets intel that Abby’s gone to Santa Barbara, she slips out in the pre-dawn morning, leaving Dina and the baby behind.
We play as Abby in Santa Barbara, searching with Lev for the help they have to believe is there. They follow every lead to find the Fireflies, eventually stumbling on an abandoned safe house, where they use the radio. Seconds later, a violent gang occupying Santa Barbara capture them. Play switches to Ellie as she arrives in Santa Barbara and quickly runs afoul of both the local infected and the gang, who call themselves the Rattlers. Ellie finds their base, infiltrates it, and releases all of their human hostages—except Abby and Lev, who survivors explain have been hung up and left to die at “the pillars,” a grouping of wood spikes by the water where Rattlers leave people to die.
Ellie runs to them, but only because she doesn’t want Abby to die naturally. She wants to kill her. Ellie finds them both and cuts them down. Abby immediately tries to move ailing Lev to a boat to escape. She’s dehydrated, weak. Ellie’s about to let them leave, but we see an image of Joel’s swollen face covered in blood and remember why we’re there. Abby refuses to fight until Ellie threatens Lev’s life with her switchblade.
There, in the shallow water of the ocean, the game makes Ellie try to kill Abby. It makes us try to kill Abby.
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It’s not a fair fight, not even close. Abby’s strength and training are still there, even if diminished by her mental and physical state. Abby tries to brawl. We slash her with the blade, stab her as she tries to push of us. Throughout the fight, the camera is tight on the action. The only sounds are splashing water and the women’s grunts, shrieks of pain, and labored breathing. It’s horrifying to watch, devastating to have to play. Finally, Ellie pushes Abby under the water. To escape, Abby bites off two fingers on Ellie’s left hand. Ellie pushes her back down. We hold Abby under the water for almost 40 seconds, and endless amount of time. Then another image in Ellie’s mind: Joel, alive, smiling with his guitar. She lets Abby live. Abby and Lev escape in their boat. Ellie returns home, but Dina and the baby have abandoned her and left her things behind, including the guitar refurbished for Ellie at the start of the game. The guitar she can no longer play because she’s missing two fingers on her left hand.
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The final fight in The Last of Us Part II is one of the most emotional experiences I ever had playing a video game. On my first playthrough, I set the controller down, realizing what the game was making me do. I didn’t want to kill Abby after seeing the world through her eyes, even though I know how much pain her actions caused Ellie. This was an unthinkable reversal from how I related to Abby early in the game, or when full gameplay switched over to her halfway through. Both times, I wanted to reject her. I wasn’t Abby. I was Ellie. I was Joel. I was on this side of the story.
Narratives that humanize two sides of a conflict aren’t a new invention. As viewers and readers, we’re often adept to this device and, perhaps, find a third position that is outside of the conflict in which to observe the action. But what’s so transformative about The Last of Us Part II is that the player does not have that safe third position. You are first either Ellie or Abby, but eventually you are inextricably, inexplicably, both of them at once.
And that split means the person the player is fighting is themselves.
I was fighting myself.
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The Last of Us Part II is a revenge story. As the familiar adage suggests, anyone setting out for revenge must first dig two graves. In this story, many more graves (real and figurative) are needed. Abby sets out to right the wrong Ellie did to her, but in the end she loses everything she had left: all of her friends die except for Lev. She risks imprisonment if she stays in Seattle. Her hope of finding new community with the Fireflies evaporates. Ellie’s revenge ends in the death of Dina’s baby’s father, Jesse; her relationship with Dina and, by extension, her home; and most ironically in the last connection she had with Joel: the ability to play the guitar he gave to her. There’s a moment where the game makes us try to strum chords with Ellie’s remaining two fingers. The sound is painful, pitiful.
The price of their justice is everything they once valued.
The extended periods of gameplay as each woman change us as players. As Ellie, we’re fueled by the righteous anger over Joel’s murder and a thirst for justice. Abby isn’t a human being; she’s just an enemy—a criminal—a murderer—who deserves to die. As Abby, we understand the personal consequences of Joel’s actions in the first game. The Last of Us Part II offers parallel flashbacks that deepen our understanding of these stakes. Ellie remembers—and we play through—a memory of Joel taking her to an abandoned natural history museum on her birthday, and another in which the two of them fight through a hotel full of infected in search of guitar strings. Though Joel is a criminal smuggler with a checkered past, his “heroic” “saving” of Ellie in the first game seems like a kind of redemption for him, completing that game’s emotional arc. Abby flashes back to her dad’s survival training sessions, and one in particular when her dad rescued a zebra foal from barbed wire, reuniting it with its mother. All of Abby’s other flashbacks are of the aftermath of her father’s murder, a recurring scene in which she runs down a hall in the hospital to find him dead.
We already know, having witnessed Abby’s revenge on Joel, that a life for a life doesn’t rebalance the scales. It just creates two broken scales. It’s player agency that carries this theme in The Last of Us Part II, though, not just the story itself. As humans, we witness conflicts erupt in our cities, our nations, the world, and often we may feel as though we are either on one side, or occupying that third space, the unbiased spectator. Watching or reading this narrative from a safe distance might reinforce either woman’s justification for revenge. But playing as them, making choices that keep them alive and make them stronger, seeing the way their relationships change and deepen? That’s an entirely different prospect.
We can almost never experience this duality in the real world, and certainly not with this much nuance and complexity. The long playtime of The Last of Us Part II ties our identity to the characters we play. We see what they see. We survive what they survive. Their story is built within us, and if we let it, we can be as moved by it as if we were the figure in the game roving across landscapes and cityscapes in search of resources, information, vengeance.
Player agency in games as well-rendered as this one may be the closest we can come to walking in someone else’s shoes. Embodying their relationships and their griefs. And The Last of Us, in both parts, provided a critical object lesson in how meaningful videogameplay can be.
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Charles Jensen (he/him) wrote Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres (SFWP, 2024), which braids together in each chapter traditional memoir storytelling with discussion of a single film. His most recent collection of poetry is Instructions between Takeoff and Landing (U of Akron Press, 2022). His previous books include two collections of poetry and seven chapbooks of cross-genre work. The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs awarded him a 2024-25 Individual Master Artist Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner, and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, 45th Parallel, American Literary Review, Exposition Review, The Florida Review, and Passages North. He founded the digital literary magazine Villain Era to celebrate literature of revenge.
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