The event also solidifies Ellie’s relationship with Joel. “And if every bit she experienced takes her on this spectrum, that was a big jump because of how horrible that was.' “With David, it was definitely traumatic,” Druckmann says. It’s a terrifying wake-up call, one that shows Ellie how she can be manipulated. When she drops her guard, he traps her in a cell until she escapes and kills him.

A man named David, insinuated to be a cannibal and pedophile, at first protects her from an attack of infected. Tess, Joel’s early traveling companion, dies at the very start of a journey that also includes the deaths of a 13-year-old boy, Sam, and his older brother Henry, who commits suicide shortly after Sam is killed by infected.įor Ellie, trauma also comes in the form of betrayal. She loses her best friend Riley, before she meets Joel. While the sequel is centered on Ellie, the story puts several characters in her close orbit, each present at different, pivotal junctures in a painful metamorphosis.Įarly concept art of Ellie from “The Last of Us” ()Īs Druckmann says, it’s a “world that normalizes death and violence,” and Ellie experiences loss and trauma time and again. The game is not so much a tale about finding happiness as easing pain, and weighing the cost of that quest. The death of Joel, her guardian and traveling partner from the first game, has set Ellie’s moral compass spinning as she struggles to find purpose. “The Last of Us Part II” chronicles Ellie’s descent from innocence to match the darkness of the post-apocalyptic hellscape around her.

Her optimism is dimmed, her humor muted - her pun book, once filled with jokes, has been replaced by a journal. Driven by revenge, the girl we knew from “The Last of Us” has morphed into something more sinister. The murderer, standing amid their bodies, is not the little girl you remember.įive years after the events of the first game, Ellie is cold, brutal and often merciless. Now they’re dead because a woman needed information. A pregnant woman falls, fatally stabbed in her neck. Note: This article contains major spoilers for “The Last of Us Part II” and 2013′s “The Last of Us.”Ī man is shot in the chest and chokes on his own blood. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript.

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