After a heartrending performance from Gustavo Santaolalla, Academy Award-winning composer for film and master of the haunting score for The Last of Us, Naughty Dog showed off a pretty great trailer for the upcoming sequel.
The trailer, set in a church that looked an awful lot like the conference begun in, featured a noticeably older Ellie overseeing quite a rambunxious shindig and sharing a few moody words with Jesse, a character played by Stephen Chang. Ellie then shares a pretty tender dance with a new character named Dina, played by Shannon Woodward of Westworld fame.
A sweeping camera pans around the couple sharing a kiss only to reveal Ellie in the woods, puncturing the neck of some poor dude in brutal fashion.
We then enter the gameplay portion of the presentation and the game looks utterly stunning. The locations are photorealistic and the lighting looks second-to-none. Ellie navigates a nice linear slice of the game, rustling through ferns before witnessing a rather gruesome disembowelling.
We get a look at the game’s stripped back UI and it’s inventory system which seems even more streamlined when compared to the original. As Ellie’s cover is blown we get a look at hand-to-hand combat which is as gritty and full of throat stabs as the original title. After fleeing we get a look at the game’s ranged combat as well as some of the game’s context-sensitive commands as we see Ellie grabbing bottles from ledges at full sprint.
Words can’t describe how good this game looks in action. Naughty Dog’s ability to craft a grounded and horrifyingly real world ravaged by a pandemic is fantastic. It looks seamless and satisfying to play, which has become a staple of Sony first-party in recent history.
The trailer didn’t feature Joel, the protagonist from The Last of Us, so we’re not sure how he’ll feature in the game, though his absence is bound to encourage speculation from the gaming public at large.
The Last of Us: Part II still doesn’t have a release date, but rumour suggests 2019.
