Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio.

This is part two of our ongoing analysis of the Last of Us.

Part two.

It's a beautiful fall afternoon.

The air is crisp, the birds are chirping.

I'm a little cold, but I've got my cup of coffee here, and I've also got my friend John here, who is going to continue talking about this game with me.

How's it going, John.

It's going well.

It's actually closer to summertime here as I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, but nonetheless happy to be here and really really excited to dive into some of the stuff here we're going to talk about.

For part two.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's so much to talk about in this game.

Yeah, that's cool that it's the summertime down there.

It makes for a warm Christmas, which last year was my first one and so I'm still not really ready for it for this year.

But I got to like ninety degrees on Christmas here last year, which is very different than what I'm used to.

Are there any summary Christmas tunes, you know, like we've got dreaming of a White Christmas and all that stuff.

Let it snow.

Are there any equivalents for the Southern Hemisphere folks.

There's got to be.

There's gotta be, but I don't know any the closes.

I think I can come to as a couple that are in Hawaiian and that's about it.

Hey, that's cool.

Well this has been our podcast on Christmas time.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

Patreon dot com, Slash, Pixel Project Radio.

Let's pick up the Last of Us Part two again.

So we left off last time right at Seattle Day one with Ellie.

That's where we're going to start here.

I know we talked about it, but I just want to say one more time how much I really love the design philosophy of the levels for the Last of Us series.

It really does make a great effort to make it feel to trick you into thinking that you're not on rails, even though you pretty much always are.

And I know last time, John you had mentioned the naughty dog yellow thing that that's in here too, and I have noticed a couple of those going through later on in the game.

Yeah, but more often than not, they really do trick me, like they pull the wool over my eyes fairly often.

I really always do feel like I could get lost, but you never do.

I think they're very good at that.

It's honestly, it's probably one of the strongest suits of this game.

I might say, oh yeah, wholeheartedly agree.

This first section we get into here is just it shows all of that in spades, and it's a pretty wide open area that you can explore here.

There's like twelve or maybe fifteen areas that you can explore here, and only two of which are actually required for the story, and so you can kind of go at your own pace here, which I really really dig.

Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up.

That's a note that I have down here, is that I think, you know, when you talk about this game, you get a lot of the criticisms we talked about last time, people being mad about women, you know, that whole ridiculousness.

But you also get a lot of talk about the pacing of this game, and especially compared to Part one, this game is not quite twice as long as Part one, but it's significantly longer.

So the pacing is something that's brought up a lot.

And I think this here is like the first point where you might start hearing talk of the pacing, and I totally get it this time around.

As opposed to my first play through, you know, a year and a half, two years ago, I spent like two hours just exploring around here.

And don't get me wrong, I love it.

That's what I enjoy doing in the in this game.

I think exploring in the Last of Us is probably my favorite thing to do.

But it's a tight it's a tight It's a narrow tight rope to walk.

I got there.

It's a narrow tight rope to walk.

As game designers, you know, do we go with the contrived, compressed version of the story events or do we sort of prioritize the very similitude of wandering at the expensive story pacing, you know, because if this were actually happening in real life, they wouldn't be beholden to, you know, a narrative arc pacing of you know, whatever journey they're on.

It would be seemingly random.

But of course, you how far do you want to go to prioritize that very similitude, right?

It is still at the core of video game.

It is a story.

I don't know.

I think it comes down to personal preference.

I think in some ways it's a dan if you do Dan, if you don't.

For me, I kind of prefer that more languid pace.

That not languid, that's not the word I'm looking for, but that more explorer as you go kind of pace, you know, not necessarily a drama movie like, but just a kind of leisurely thing.

What do you think.

Yeah, I love your note here that your mileage may vary is what you have in the show doc which I think that really speaks to perfectly as to how this section plays out.

Like I said, you only have two areas that are a necessity.

Everything else is just optional.

There's a couple cool little story beats things that really bring out the life of the world.

It tells you the story of what happened here in downtown Seattle.

Where is Fedro, where are the wolves, what's going on?

There's some really cool set pieces within this.

You have a pet store, a coffee shop, a bank as well, and it's pretty cool.

If you go into the bank, there's a whole story that happens within that you can kind of collect from the collectibles and the bodies that you find there, Like people were robbing that bank on the day of the outbreak and then they got stuck in there.

Yeah, that little micro story is so cool.

They just happened to pick the wrong day and they got what happened, the one guy got locked in there and he got started to turn.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, and you know, Elli and Dina can go in there and they're surrounded by I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, and it's just completely useless at this time, you know, like we're, yeah, twenty four years into this fungal outbreak and no one's got need for cash.

So it's little things like that you can find in this area.

It really is go at your own pace.

The Naughty Dog started this with Uncharted four, the kind of whole volcano sequence there.

They carried it over into Uncharted Lost Legacy too.

There's a whole section called the Western Ghats where you can explore at your own pace.

There's only one or two places you need to actually explore in all of those cases.

But the more you do, the more you find out about the world.

And I'm totally here for it.

The way that they do set pieces and just the Naughty Dog polish they put on everything, it really behooves you to go and explore these things.

And it may just be for collectibles, maybe some more ammo things in the.

World like that.

But I love it just for the extra story you get, which is which is why I'm here.

I want to enjoy more of the story and learn more of the story.

I agree, man, there I have this somewhere later in the notes, but you know it's it's relevant now.

It's just the older I get, the more interested I get in how a world is built out in and of itself.

You know, I still don't get me wrong.

Yeah, Like, I'm still here for the story, but I love seeing what this world is like and how it lives outside of my perception, you know what I mean.

A lot of JRPGs are pretty good at this.

I'm playing through Trails right now, the original, not the remake, you know, because I'm that kind of a hipster, and it's very good at doing that.

Xenosaga was pretty good at doing that, and I think The Last of Us is really good at doing that too.

You do, like you said, get a lot of these micro stories.

I'd completely forgotten about that bank one.

What I love about that too, is isn't that where you get the shotgun from that corpse?

You can get one there for sure?

Yeah, Yeah, that's that's pretty cool.

It's it's cool seeing you know, a discarded gun very clearly having blown the brains out of the person of the corpse next to it, and then seeing that little note like, you know, I'm turning, I feel sick.

I'm not going to let them take me like this.

I'm going to go out on my own terms.

It's very cool.

It's just you know, and different game designers too, getting back to the idea of balancing acing versus gameplay.

Different game designers are going to have different philosophies on that too.

It's like their mark of penmanship.

And I think the Last of Us, whether or not you like it or not, I think they have their own identity here and they do it well.

You know, like we both said, your mileage may vary, but this is the Last of us, and you know, meet them where they're at.

You're going to have a good time or just blow through everything and you know you'll still get your story.

Yeah.

Something that I did not mention last week was collectibles, and much like Part one, where you could find extra story exhibition within collectibles and find more out about things that happened in the area, this area is certainly no different.

There is a wide variety of collectibles.

Ellie has her own set of collectibles in this game, where in the first one it was comics, this time you're collecting these kind of like U gi oh Pokemon cars that you can find in all the different vire superheroes, right, Yeah, they're all superheroes.

And in this section you can actually find one that is called doctor Uckman, which is doctor Uckman, Yeah, which is Neil Druckman, which, according to interviews from him post the launch of this game, he had no idea that that actually was inserted.

One of the art designers put that in as like a last minute joke and then put it in the game, which I thought is really funny.

But yeah, it's cool to find some of the collectibles in this area.

You find out more story insofar as like there's a Federa truck and the wolves blew it up, and so there's a bunch of dead corpses and stuff inside, and you find a note about the whole planned attack and stuff.

There's a pet store.

As I mentioned, we're kind of served as like their base of operations where they plan this attack, and they also had like apparently means to print banners and flyers and stuff like.

There was some sort of printing operation that was happening within this pet store, which is kind of neat to think about, because again, this whole outbreak in story happens in twenty thirteen, so it's kind of cool to see what technology was still around at the time of the outbreak and post the time of the outbreak.

Yeah, that's something that a lot of folks wouldn't think about the ability to print that would really hinder a society like that.

Yeah, that's neat.

I agree.

The pet store is really cool.

Barcos is its name.

It's kind of nice.

The synagogue is a place that I think you have to go.

Yeah, but I like that locale quite a bit.

What else here there's you know, you get a lot of the Last of Us sort of areas.

There's like a schoolhouse.

It's either a schoolhouse where a courthouse with like a lot of desks and stuff that's always fun to take care of.

Infected through the Last of Us.

Puzzles that you know and love make make a return.

You're gonna be plugging in generators, You're gonna be pushing dumpsters.

You know, it's it's the hits, the greatest hits, they're all coming back.

But as you said, John, we're looking for the wolves.

W l f's the Washington Liberation Front.

We're gonna learn more about them and how they came to be, their relationship with Fedra, et cetera, et cetera.

Spoiler alert only not really nobody likes Fedra.

You know nobody does.

Why should you?

But for right now, speaking of Fedra, there's a big gate that says fuck Fedra, which is pretty cool, and we've got to find some gasoline to power it, well, specifically to power a generator to open the gate.

This is where you go to the synagogue.

I think that's where you either try to find gas or you find the canister.

No luck there.

There's a parking garage though, that has tons of infected.

You find this out through some of the clues, and that's where a separate gas stashes.

This is the ticket.

But like I said, there's a huge fight, huge show down with some infecteds in the bottom.

The bottom is flooded, so your movement is impeded a little bit, and it's also very loud, so stealthing is not really something you're going to be able to do here.

I ran out of AMMO pretty quickly.

Yeah, so this was a long I had to play the long game here.

Yeah.

So the order of whether you do the courthouse or the synagogue is non consequential to you.

Wherever you go first, the gas is going to be in the other location.

I looked out.

I think, oh my very yeah.

I looked out on my very first playthrough of this game where I went through the courthouse first because it's the closest locale to you once you get into this open area.

So it's like, okay, I'll go here first, and I'm so glad I did because I got through that fight.

And then the synagogue portion there are infected, but it's not nearly as many.

But in the synagogue you get a really cool, like sweet dive into Dina as a character where her Jewish heritage and background come into play.

So there's talk about the Menora and you get to find like an intact Torah there as well, and she talks about the Jewish holidays and she talks a lot about her sister there, and you get these really sweet moments within the synagogue portion, and I was like, oh my god, I'm so glad I looked out and got to experience that second, and I've done that now for each of my subsequent playthroughs.

Is to the courthouse first and the synagogue second.

It's something I know.

There are one or two notes in the synagogue that sort of speak around this.

I didn't take them down.

If I go back and read them and they seem relevant, I'll put them in.

But that's something that I do kind of wish was explored just a little bit, the idea of faith in this post.

I don't want to say post apocalyptic, but this destroyed world because you know, the philosophies of life as we're going to see is strictly self interest, right rational, not even rational self interest, just self interest at the cost of all And wondering.

I do wonder how faith in a god where gods would factor into this world that certainly wouldn't need to be its own standalone game or even have a section of a game devoted to it.

But you know, I kind of do wish there were a little more documents talking about this kind of thing.

It's neat to think about.

Yeah, it really is.

I am in agreement with you.

I kind of wish that there was more exploration within faith.

Dina does mention here though, that she prays sometimes.

She prayed for their journey, she prays for Joel, which is kind of neat to see another little story bit here as you're wandering around.

When you first get into this section, Dina is asking, what's kind of happened here?

This is an old q Z and it's been clearly bombed, as was Boston and Pittsburgh.

Dina lets it be known that she did not grow up in a QZ.

She's her and her clan that joined Jackson is from New Mexico.

We really know next to nothing about how she got up into Jackson.

But Ellie being brought up in a QSY and recognizing like how oppressive a regime Fedra is and Dina really doesn't know much about that.

It was kind of cool to have that interplay between them because it kind of calls back to Joel and Ellie's conversation when they're in Pittsburgh and the kind of hole we bomb these people because dead people can't get infected thing, and Dina, I think, has kind of taken aback here.

It's kind of explores more of her story, which I really like.

Here, did you have any thoughts on that or did you notice that at all.

I wasn't thinking about it consciously, but now that you mention it.

One thing that's interesting about that is it further solidifies the idea of Ellie sort of taking on Joel's role if you think back to the first one.

As listeners might remember, Joel was obviously alive before the outbreak.

Ellie was born into it, either born into it or she was so young when it started that you know, functionally she was born into and in that way, he is sort of teaching her what the old world is like now too, we've got Dina, who I mean, this is years later.

Dina wasn't a part of this area.

Ellie is now taking the role of Joel.

She's shepherding Dina through the history that what it was like here before.

I think that's very interesting.

We see a lot of Ellie sort of taking on Joel's mannerisms and trains of thought throughout here.

One very pivotal scene that we'll get to later that again, gamers really don't like, yeah, but I think it's really good.

It's very cool to see.

Yeah, thank you for catching that.

I totally forgot to write that down.

One of the optional places you can go to in this section is the music store, and this is one of the things I was talked about in last week's episode about commercialized music.

You get Ellie and Dina have a sweet scene here where Ellie plays guitar and does a cover of AHA's take on Me, and it's completely missing.

I totally missed that.

Yeah, it's completely miscible.

It's not part of the main game.

You don't have to do it.

But it's actually a very sweet and kind of romantic undertones on this and it's very well done.

Ashley Johnson really truly is amazing voice, actor and singer.

As it turns out, that.

Song gets memed a lot, but it's honestly very very good.

Yeah.

Appropriate for the world of the Last of Us, I think so.

Our destination is the Saravina Hotel, which is right through the feder gate.

We get our gas, we get the gate open, and there's the hotel.

This is supposedly where we're going to find someone named Leah and some other WLF members.

Hotels make great Last of Us maps based on their you know, based on Naughty Dog's design philosophy.

Like we said, yeah, it's great to just be able to explore these rooms.

As soon as you come in here, there are a group of them just chowing down, sort of ring the cow bell, y'all come to dinner sort of moment with this WLF.

Course, they're just chowing down, and that's always fun because they generally won't notice you if you're sneaking around, and you can.

What I like to do is throw a molotov at them.

That's what I've been doing again.

I have this later, but I have been playing this play through much more with crafting, and whenever possible, I like to do that above using guns.

I love throwing a bottle and getting them all into one place and then setting them on fire.

I love a weapon we get later is the bow and arrow.

I love that weapon.

It's one of my all time favorites.

I'm not playing with trap minds so much.

I did that once.

I just I find it a little too difficult to lure them in a way that makes those trap mines lure the zombies, that is, in a way that makes those useful.

But yeah, I don't know.

I like crafting a lot more this time around.

Yeah, I'm with you.

I think Ellie also has the proximity minds, which I remember using a handful of times.

But yeah, being able to chuck a molotav or something like that is totally right up my alley, and I don't remember if we mentioned it last week or not.

Ellie also has her switch blade from part one, so she has unlimited Shiv capability, which comes in handy a lot, at least for me, because I'm trying to kind of stealth as much as i can until I'm seen, and then I try to just run around and hide if I can and try to go back into stealth.

But to have an unlimited shive where I can kill humans if I need to, or the infected because she can't take down clickers stealthily, which comes into play a lot for me.

So that was a cool thing for me as well.

And that unlimited Shiv use is part of a criticism that I hear many people saying, and by many people, I just mean me.

Many people are saying everybody's saying Ellie feels a little Opie in this game.

This is one of the things that I think the Last of Us Part one did a little better.

Is Joel felt a bit more like a guy, you know, just in this world Ellie, and you could argue that because Ellie was steeped in this, she was born into this, that this, you know, is feasible because she had to learn out of necessity.

But Ellie does kind of feel like a superhero almost like she is powerful, she's quick, it's she feels a little Opie.

I never feel totally scared for my life playing as Ellie, where sometimes with Joel I was a little bit you know, I was a little bit scared.

I don't know, is that sensible, like or am I just thinking too much about this and being a tryhard critic.

No, I think you're onto something.

I didn't really ever think that I felt like kind of invincible or like a superhero.

I know, just because I've been Naughty Dog games a lot, I bumped up the difficulty for me and that was a little bit more challenging where resources are a little bit more scarce and limited on some of the higher difficulties, and that made me feel less like a superhero.

I think Ellie's dodge mechanic, which I think we talked about last week, is another thing that I just completely abused in this game, where being able to dodge attacks was really fun.

But I remember you to hear something funny about the dodge mechanic.

Sure you remember last time I mentioned that the out of the box keyboard bindings for this are really terrible.

Yeah, well, I thought I could get away, and there's so so many because they're trying to emulate a controller.

Controller has two sticks plus directional buttons you can click them.

There's just so much you can do, so you have to dedicate everything to one key, so there's not a lot of wiggle room for reassigning.

So I thought, okay, I'm just going to bind the jump key space bar too.

The going to bind the jump key, which is face, and the dodge key together because you know, I never have to jump while I'm dodging, and vice versa.

It makes perfect sense.

It doesn't actually make perfect sense because when you try to dodge a zombie then all I did was do a little bunny hop in the air, which didn't help anything, and it got me killed like twice before.

I was like, now forget this.

I think now I have it bound to the same key that does shake flashlight, which I assure you neither of those will ever happen at the same time.

Yeah, anyway, Sorry you had mentioned the dodge, and I was like, I want to tell that little anecdote.

There were definitely moments where I could feel like a superhero, as far as like I come across an area, you know, definitely when I'm looting and I'm in a place that has like a cash register, I'm in one of the many coffee shop set pieces in this right and I can I'm like, oh, okay, cool, there's half a half a shive or half a knife, half a rag, but I'm full up on molotovs.

I'm full up on rags inventory, so it's like, well, I can't pick anything up because I'm completely maxed out.

Those were the moments where I could feel like, oh, I'm kind of invincible or like a superhero here because I have three in my inventory, and I have enough in the rest of my inventory to make more if you know, I need to use a health kit or a molotav or I'm crafting a pipe bomb or something.

So I think from that standpoint, I can get behind what you're saying where I kind of feel invincible in a way.

But again, on higher difficulties, I ran into that a lot less, and.

That makes sense.

Yeah, that's what they're there for.

So inside of here, there are lots of infected, as we said, but that means that they were also a problem for the WLF.

And that's what it seems like too.

There are a lot of wolf members here that were clearly done in by the infected.

However, there are some that were clearly taken out by a gun more human measures, you know, shot to death.

Ellie has a nice line here.

She says, if those fuckers that killed Joel got taken out by some random infected, it chimes in, then they'd still be dead, right, And Ellie replies, I'm not sure that's justice.

Oh, more on that later.

And I again the descent into joel territory.

It's understandable.

I can see where she's coming from.

I don't think if I were in her position, I don't think i'd view that as justice either.

It'd be tough to do so.

Oh for sure.

And this is one of the three or four times that I had written down a note to the effect of Dina is kind of being the voice of reason here with Ellie.

There's several moments up to this point where they come across infected or wolves and you take them out, and Dina will say something to the extent of like, hey, maybe this Wolf operation is bigger than we anticipated or that we think and they can cover more ground.

Does this change anything for you?

And each time Ellie rebuffs her and just says no, we press on.

We're trying to Ultimately, we're trying to find Abby right, and this is another one of them those moments.

Yeah, at every turn, it doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't matter how big they are, how well armed they are.

Even once we start finding these notes as we do here that sort of paints them in a light that's not entirely antagonistic, doesn't matter.

We're here for the folks that killed Joel.

And speaking of those notes, we start to see those quite a bit moving forward, we find notes from every side basically that basically paints both sides, that is Fedra and the WLF and eventually another faction.

It paints all sides as being both good and bad.

I don't think this is heavy handed, you know, like BioShock Infinite, for example.

I can maybe see an argument, but you know, we see a lot of notes that make it seem like the WLF were not the monsters that Ellie seems to think they are largely that they were opposed to Fedra, which makes sense.

We've seen how Fedra was the ones monitoring the QZ in the last one, right, the ones with the food rations, and they were kind of keeping those to themselves.

Yeah for sure.

Yeah.

So so the WLF opposing what was functionally a fascist regime in this time period, it makes you know, it makes sense.

Maybe they're they're they're good guys.

Remember Fedra were opposed in the first game to the Fireflies, who, although Joel thought them to be terrorists, they ultimately had They ultimately had a valiant goal at hand to save humanity.

So maybe it follows that the Wolf here might be some sort of resistance in the spirit of the Fireflies.

So we're slow, We're being drip fed this idea that Ellie has her blinders up to the point where she is pursuing her version of justice and no amount of further information or things coming to light will change her mind.

And what I think the game wants players to keep in mind is the question, at what point does that become a problem.

At what point does Ellie become unredeemable because of this something we've got to think about and we're going to be confronted with it pretty soon for sure.

And some of these notes that you're finding in this area too start to mention.

A character whose presence we feel and only see for a very short time is Isaac, who is kind of the de facto leader of the WLF.

But it's kind of interesting to read a lot of the stuff in the notes where it'll say, Okay, Isaac wants to move the medical supplies here, Isaac's calling all of these soldiers and troops back to this place.

Isaac saying we're going to attack this FEDERC convoy.

And it's like, Okay, this Isaac guy is not fucking around, and he's clearly someone to you know, you need to be on your toes with because he's kind of the leader of this huge operation, of which at this point we have no idea how big the Wolves operation is.

Right, there's this note that says he ordered a group execution right after he took charge, and folks were like, I don't know about this guy, but he kind of rules with an iron fist.

It sounds like, let's see, this is where I have that note of the Internet's favorite buzzword environmental storytelling.

But we talked about that already, so let's move on.

This coffee's got me feeling some kind of way, so it's time to push forward.

Ellie and Dina.

They come upon a room with a scene that returning players are going to be very familiar with.

There are two men in here, one of whom what Ellie recognizes as being with the group that did Joel in the other one apparently being his comrade, but we don't recognize him.

They're both duc taped the chairs on either side of the room.

Ellie knows this is Tommy's move, but the players know it is Joel's.

Call it a family tradition.

Here's what happens.

The two of them are kept on opposite sides of the room, duct taped in their chairs.

Person as asked a question and told to write the answer down like someone's whereabouts.

Maybe Person B is asked the same question and made to answer out loud.

If the facts match, they're telling the truth.

If not, they meet God.

Either way, they're going to meet God.

Honestly, you know, there's no situation where they're getting out of that alive.

Seems like this just happened Dina said, so Tommy and the wolf can't be far behind.

And I have a note here that I wanted to touch on.

Imagine the psychological torment that that would do to person A.

You know, the first person asked, not only you have to wait those mere minutes that feel like concurrent eternities while person B is approached and ask the question.

But one of two scenarios will play out.

Either they lie and you realize as it's being said like syllable by syllable, that your death is seconds away.

Whereas the other scenario, the truth being told.

You get this building terror as you come down from this very brief relief, as you realize that nothing can save you, like you're gonna die either way, only this time you've died giving up information.

It's got to be hell to be person A in that scenario, right, total psychological torment.

That's awful.

Whoever ca if this was Tommy that came up with this man, he's a vicious soov.

Yeah, he's a vicious son of a bit, shouldn't he.

Yeah, we don't know whether it started with Joel or Tommy, but we've now seen, I mean, we actually saw Joel performed this act in David's village from part one, and now we're seeing the remnants of Tommy doing it here.

It's interesting to note here how Dina is kind of taken aback by this, and we have a little kind of brief conversation right after this where Ellie tells Dina like, hey, please don't think less of Tommy for this, and Dina has a great response in that, hey, if I had my sister's killer tied to a chair, I do a hell of a lot worse.

So Dina kind of like silently is like, okay with I guess the level of violence here, But man, is it brutal because the blood is pretty fresh at least how it's kind of animated here, it's still wet, so this is pretty recent, maybe within an hour or so, so they kind of just missed Tommy.

But man, would a gruesome scene.

It's really terrific.

Dina and Ellie want to get out of there, you know, like you said, it's fresh, So they're probably close by.

Off of one of the earlier corpses.

We got a gate code, so we take that and off we go on the horse horse named Shimmer.

Then the game is an asshole to me and delivers the loudest jump scare I've ever heard.

This is so fucking loud.

What happens is, you know, there's this log with razor wire, which is not an uncommon thing to see out here, you know, barricading against the infected Shimmer jumps over it as normal, but it was rigged.

The log was with a bomb, and it just blasts us to help as as we jump over it.

And it's so loud.

It got me real good, Like I did not remember that, and it gave me a real good spook.

Dina is taken independently of Ellie.

Ellie gets knocked out herself and the horse Shimmer gets shot right in the head.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, I remember my first play through this.

This functionally acted as a jump scare for me too.

The loudness of that kind of bomb going off was like a holy shit, what did that?

I do something wrong?

I thought that like I had gone the wrong way or something on the map, but no, it was actually a story beat.

Dina kind of falls off the back of the horse down this hill and then Ellie gets knocked out.

And this next scene here is kind of interesting and in so far as one of the people that has now taken Ellie hosage is Jordan, who was part of the crew that came to Jackson, and he is the one that Ellie slashed in the face with her switchblade that day, so he recognizes her and they kind of have a cool interplay here where it's like, oh, yeah, how did you find us?

And she goes, well, I was asking around for some guy with a bitch scar across his face.

Yes, yeah, Ellie.

ISM's coming out the ass here.

Ellie is just she is full full on jol at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah, she's a firecracker.

She's got spunk.

Yeah.

Ellie wakes up mostly hunky dory, which is which is insane to me.

Like for as for as often as movies portray getting knocked out as just being normal and then you just wake up, it's like, if you got knocked out that way, you're not waking up totally fine.

You're not gonna be okay.

It doesn't work like that.

Yeah.

She she got a rifle, like the butt of a rifle to the to the side of her head.

Like that's gotta hurt, right, Yeah, that's how hemorrhages happen.

Concussions at least yeah, but she wakes up okay, because you know it's it's a movie.

That guy has a knife to her throat, like you were saying, she's he's interrogating her.

How do they find him?

You know, the bitch scar thing?

How many are with them?

And then a new fella comes in, you know, he breaks up the interrogation right when you think it's gonna get messy, and he says, well, we've got new orders from Isaac kill all trespassers.

I mean, he's got a gun to your face.

But the other guy is arguing, what did you say?

His name was Jordan.

Jordan's arguing with him.

He's saying, what are you doing?

We can't kill her yet, we could get information out of her.

We don't know who's here.

That whole town is gonna come up.

We need to speak with her.

And he's like, nope, rules or rules, orders or orders?

What are you doing?

And right as he's about to shoot Ellie Dina, who is like above there's this like sunroof window, sun window on the top, eylights through, yes, skylight, thank you, and she shoots down through it, hitting the guy with the gun to your face.

This also makes her fall through the top, though you're still bound with your hands behind your back to that support pole.

You can't so you can't move.

You watch the other guy, Jordan, because this is a movie, and you know in movies, he wouldn't just kill Dina immediately, even though that's probably the smartest thing to do.

He starts wrestling with her, you know, kicking her.

They're a struggle ensues, and this gives Ellie some time to grab a piece of glass, a shard of glass that's nearby, with her foot.

She gets herself free and runs over and slices him in the throat with it.

That's how Dina gets out of that sticky situation before a wlf firefight ensues to get the heck out of here.

Yeah, and all of this is happening within an elementary school, so there's a lot of like, yes, desks and chairs and like a little library set piece within this too.

So you fight through some people here and then you eventually make your way to like a I guess what would have been like the recess area and where their cafeteria is too.

You're like, oh man, it's so sad to see this elementary school now is like this area where you're having a firefight and it's a little bit of a tough one here.

It's probably about a dozen people you fight across all of these different areas here, but it's shown you how well organized one that the WLF is, because as soon as one of the groups goes missing, you see another group come in one of the four by fours and they're constantly talking to one another on the radios and things.

So they're a very competent group, and they're seemingly got, you know, unlimited numbers of soldiers or people that are scouting for them.

Yeah.

I love the fact that this is an elementary school.

I love when movies and games do stuff like this.

I think I noticed it whenever I was aiming to shoot somebody and I just saw out of the corner of my eye, like on the corner of the screen a little like welcome sign that had the letters spelled out a little sunshine with a smile.

Yeah.

I love when I love when horror movies especially do things like this.

Like I just rewatched the remake of Texas Chainsaw Mascer from like two thousand and three.

Have you seen that.

I have not?

Actually, it is as far as remakes go, it is actually pretty darn good.

But there's a there's a scene early on, like and you know, it's not really a spoiler, they tell you at the beginning everyone dies, it's just finding out how.

But there is a there's a scene early on when one of the first person, one of the first kids to die, gets killed.

He like peeks his head in a room and he sees like old timey cartoons playing and that's when he's killed.

And I love stuff like that because you know, in the movies and stuff like this, when you see the you know, happy stuff.

You're outside, you see you know, kids talking cartoons on, you're not expecting something horrible to happen, and then it does and you're like, oh, oh my god.

Nothing is safe, nothing is sacred, you know.

Yeah, it's it's too good.

Yeah.

There's a part of this too where you get to finally go on top of the elementary school and you can kind of hide underneath like the air conditioners and like the vents and stuff that are on top of the roof, so you don't necessarily have to engage with the wolves here.

You can just kind of you know, solid snake like stealth crawl around here if you want, which is pretty fun.

So I like that you have that option in a couple of places.

Yeah, the area before the rooftop, I was not able to steal through that one.

It just turned into the wild West.

Uh.

The area up top I was that was a lot of fun.

You and Dina.

Ellie and Dina end up escaping by jumping from the school roof into the apartments next door.

Like that complex, there's like a balcony of one of the rooms.

You hop right onto it.

This is, you know, a staple of the last of us environmental design.

Really good.

Go through all the rooms, get some supplies you need it.

The note that Ellie got from the guy who took her captive Jordan, is from a woman named Leah.

You know.

She sent him a little suggestive photo.

It's not really suggestive, it's just, you know, a nice little selfie.

She's like, I hope this will tide you over.

But it also mentions that Isaac has her in a group of them stationed at the TV station.

So that's our next goal, from the Saravina Hotel to this school to the TV station.

I don't remember where this happens.

I just took down the quote.

Dina says, I can't believe they just attacked us like that, and Ellie says back to where these people are not like us, and I just wrote, excuse me, what have we been doing this whole time?

Yeah?

I mean, by this point, you've probably killed a couple dozen people, and two of them are from Abby's party, and everyone else is just kind of, you know, not associated with, you know, Joel's murder.

But she's not satisfied at all, but she's you know, Ellie, You as the player and as Ellie are the aggressors.

There are some forced areas of combat, but everything else is on you as Ellie.

So it's that cognitive dissonance where it's like you've got to tell yourself that it's okay, because if you don't and you actually confront it, you're going to have a mental breakdown.

It's like a self preservation kind of deal, you know.

It's very much, oh hey, Kettle, you're black, so kind.

Of a situation.

This is also where we start to hear about scars from the WLF members.

More on them in a little bit.

There's an interesting conversation here after Ellie talks a little bit about Bill.

She tells about the town that Bill tripwired and stuff like that, and they get into this little conversation where Dina says, it's not like you have to choose between being alive and being close to people.

In regards to Bill choosing to live alone.

She says, it's not that black and white, and Ellie says, you take a risk, though, don't you.

Dina replies, you take a bigger risk by being alone.

What if he got hurt?

What if he got sick, to which Ellie replies, what happens if someone else gets hurt or sick, then you have this added burden that puts you in a worse position.

I don't This is something that I think a lot of folks when they're watching zombie movies, stuff like that Walking Dead, they don't really think about it because they're reoccupied with who's going to get eaten, you know, how they're going to get away, which is totally valid.

But I think this is maybe one of the most unsettling things to me about these sorts of futures, just how thoroughly stomped out empathy and care for others has been just totally eradicated in favor of self preservation, and like, I get it, this line of thought keeps you alive right in the future.

Empathy and care for others.

Looking after others might not get you to the next day.

I get it.

And trying to place morals of our society in which we live now into this hypothetical society that does not resemble ours in most ways, I get it.

That's like forcing one piece of a puzzle into another puzzle.

So I do get it.

On the other hand, though, I don't think it's a coincidence that every post apocalyptic world, every hellish society that we see in fiction.

I don't think it's a coincidence that, without fail they all have this self interest above all mentality.

They all just do not care about empathy.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think that's the mark of a society that has failed.

One hundred percent.

And I agree with everything you just said.

It's interesting to see people care for one another.

I mean, Joel was one of the most hardened badasses because of the impact of Sarah's death and then this fungal outbreak, But we see by the end of the first game how much he truly cares for Ellie, and that wouldn't have happened if, you know, he didn't start to care by the end of it.

So I love that through both of these games, we see characters switch from either caring for someone and then kind of growing apart, or we see people who are a part at the beginning that come close together.

And that empathy for wanting to care for someone and love them I think is played out very very well across both these games.

It's something, you know, I wonder if this isn't a universal experience.

It's just something that I think about more as I get older.

You know, the idea that maybe it's not super cool to just be totally reclused from society, and the idea that, you know, interpersonal relationships and looking out for your neighbor is pretty darn important, you know, like not saying literally your neighbor, Like you don't have to be friend best friends with the Dnkelbergs across the street, right.

Sure, the odd parents taught us that, but I think in general, like viewing your fellow human, your fellow man, as as your neighbor, I think that's important.

You know, it goes back to mister Rogers.

I don't know, I think about that a lot more, and it's it's it frustrates me too, given the current political and social climate in America seeming to want to other a lot of folks, which I know, I say, America.

I know you're not in the States anymore, John, but you're pretty you're still pretty in tuned to the politics because I think you have friends and family up here.

But it's it's very frustrating seeing empathy and care for others being kind of stomped out by some people and laughing in the face of those that say this isn't okay.

Yeah, it's we're not on a good road.

There's whether it's in the world of the Last of Us or in real life, there's a lot of people that are like Bill, where it's just fuck them, It's got to be me and no one else.

I'm so glad that, you know, I'm raising my kids in a way that I'm not teaching them that.

And it's very easy to fall into that mindset, whether it's people like I said, within this game or just in real life where it's it's you know, what does Bill's line?

I realize it's got to be just me.

I wisen the fuck up, and that's in my point of view, that's the easy way, that's the cowardice, you know, way to kind of go about that.

So, man, I'm glad we talked about this and kind of purse this out a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah, how profoundly easy and cowardly it is to say, well, you know, it's my freedom to say this, so you just have to be okay with it.

Well, you want to tell yourself that that's fine.

There's some other stuff that happens on the way here.

Dina gets sick and pukes, which seems like nothing in the moment, but turns out it's not nothing.

We start to see cult propaganda, which comes up a couple of times, so it's probably going to play into the story, particularly of this matern figure saying that she you will feel her love or something.

To then feel her love.

Yes, the kind of like religious graffiti that we find here to feel her love is very interesting because, like I guess we'll talk a little bit more about this in a little bit, but like it's never really stated what that means and who this lady is like she there's no name ever given, and we really don't ever know what her full like meaning of feel her love is, which I like that.

It kind of to me.

I love that ambiguity where it can mean anything you want it to be, or it's just completely left undefined, which I dig.

What were your thoughts on that, Rick, My.

Thoughts were, it probably doesn't mean what I wanted to mean.

You know what I mean?

You know what I mean?

Yeah, up top, No, I think it's pretty cool.

Cult stuff is generally very hit or miss for me.

I I don't know.

I'll be honest with you, John, I don't remember a ton about the parts of the story from here basically until the end of the game, like a lot of it has been a lot of It's just very fuzzy.

So I don't remember the particulars of this cult.

I know seeing it around, you know, and it's so funny, you know.

Earlier I was like, why did they do more with faith?

And then here we are with a faith based cult.

So so you know, if you're typing up an email, don't hit send.

I get it.

I am excited to explore more and remember what I have forgotten about this cult.

Yeah, I don't.

Sorry, I don't really have any cojin or intelligent thoughts on it.

No worries.

I mean, we'll definitely get to talk about it more once we're they're kind of more in the story.

There are moving forward.

There are some trip wire sections that are, you know, fun.

I blew myself up here by accident.

If you get too close to these trip wires and you, you know, try and trip them with a brick or a gunshot, they're gonna blow you up.

There's one section where you hop a hop onto a landing of concrete stairs and there are just tripwires in front of you and behind you, and it's like, oh shit, what am I gonna do?

Now?

This is fun.

I ran out of bricks, not at that area because I think the bricks actually respawn there no matter what, but an earlier area I ran out, so I just started shooting them, which made me feel like a cowboy badass.

Pretty cool.

Yeah, that was something that carried over from part one, where you could hit them with the brick or shoot them.

They're basically function as clay mores with trip wires, is kind of what they look like.

But they're strewn about all across this area, so you've really got to just be on the lookout for them.

There were definitely a few times where I blew myself up as well, so you're not alone.

Ellie and Dina.

The two finally make it to the TV station.

I love this area.

This is such a cool area of the game.

Inside they find something really unsettling and is another reference.

I know I did this a couple of times in the first episode.

Another reference to specofs the line.

There are corpses strung up and hanging from the ceiling, not infected like people strung up, hanging from the ceiling, lots of them.

It's definitely not Tommy.

But what we don't know is even more unsettling.

Who did this and why?

You know, it's clearly to send a message of some sort, but to whom and why it's It looks like it's maybe the WLF guys, so it's probably not them.

I mean, we've read about Isaac being a bit of a hard ass, but it doesn't seem like he'd kill so many of his own and string them up like this, So what is going on?

Yeah, and it's not that they've just been hung, but their stomachs have been sliced open too, so you see like they're intestines and stuff hanging out.

It's a pretty gruesome scene, and it's like six or seven of them hanging from there.

And then as we turn to our.

Left, you can't say those two numbers in modern day John, you can't say they're a mean Now.

Yeah, I know there's seven or eight of them hanging from there.

But we turned to our left and we see, you know, this kind of cult like symbol we've seen a handful of times as we've come across the notes here.

It's kind of like this sideway's Jesus fish almost, but it's written in blood on the wall, so seemingly from one of the people that's hanging from the rafters here.

It's pretty gnarly sight.

Yeah, at this point, you know, we've seen the cult stuff around and we've heard the WLFS mentioned scars several times, so perhaps this is them.

We don't know quite yet.

Moving up in the building though, Leah is already dead.

She's been shot through with arrows, I believe, right.

Yeah, Ellie finds photos on her corpse of the rest of that crew.

All of them have names, and we can't stay around too long.

Leah's got a little radio for Calm's communication and it's going off.

She obviously can't answer it.

She's a bit predisposed.

Right now, the radio is saying that they're coming to help.

They haven't heard back.

They're coming for help.

And this is where you get into a firefight in the office setting, where the bodies were all strung.

I really tried my best to sneak around here, but I got flanked on both sides.

I got spotted, and then it just turned into the wild West again.

It just keeps happening to me.

So before talking about the firefight, I know one of the complaints, and I mentioned this last week about just how some things happen within the story that can just be leveled up to convenience, and Leah having just like these polaroid photos of everyone that Ellie is seeking to kill could be considered one of those things just for convenience.

I wanted to get your thoughts on that, like, is this kind of like, in your mind lazy story writing, or you know, did this make sense for you or did you have an opinion on this one way or the other.

It definitely comes off as convenient, right.

The same thing happens with the audio logs and the diaries.

People leave, Yeah, I mean maybe I'm just somebody that doesn't fundamentally get the benefits of writing and diaries, but it seemed a lot of it seems like, oh, that's so convenient that they would say that.

I think, you know, writers have to make concessions all the time, Like we were talking about earlier of how real do you want this to be?

Versus how how real do you want this to be?

Versus how much can we make something serve the narrative and make this feel like a movie or a game story.

Yeah, I think that this is just that, you know, it's giving the plot a reason to move forward.

It's fine.

I don't think it's lazy.

I think it's just, you know, it's just the thing.

Yeah, And it kind of was set up before because how we know that Leo was going to be here was that she had a photo that was given to Jordan.

Jordan and Lea are boyfriend and girlfriend, or they're at least fucking, and so it was on the back of that photo that you know, she disclosed, Hey, Isaac put me and my crew up at the TV station for two weeks, So that's how we found out that Leo was going to be there.

So I was like, okay, cool.

They at least have access to a polaroid camera, so it doesn't seem like that far like out of left field for me.

But I was like, okay, I guess I can kind of understand the complaint of like, oh, this is a convenience thing, but to speak about the firefight here, I like you, my first couple of times that I've played through this was, yeah, it was just the wild West.

This most recent playthrow is actually like kind of excited that I thought of this.

I was like, okay, there's clearly an area where they come through, like it's kind of a set of double doors that's cordoned off until they, you know, until the fight is initiated.

And so I put two of Ellie's proximity mines down there, went and did the story beat with Leah and came back down, and then as soon as the door opens, everyone's just obliterated and I didn't have to fight anybody.

I was like, man, I'm glad I thought of that because I just completely avoided the firefight there.

Yeah, and there are a lot of them too, So if you in this game, lets you make those choices.

If you want to play like Buster scrugs guns out the whole time.

You certainly can, or you can do the stealthy approach or the tactician approach.

And you know, on a first play through, would that have been possible without a lot of luck.

No, probably not, but you know, replays for the purpose of a little bit of creativity.

I think that's super cool that you were able to do that.

I personally, I don't like doing the guns out approach all the time, especially because AMMO is fairly scarce in this game.

I just sometimes I can't avoid it, and you know, I find myself thinking, man, this sucks.

Sometimes I just let myself get killed so I can reload the checkpoint and oh yeah, try it again.

Yeah, I've definitely done that a few times.

Yeah.

After this whole section, we get a pretty like Naughty Dog esque escape sequence here as we're running through the rest of the TV station, which is fun.

So we're bob and weaveing and dodging, you know, people shooting at us, and it's a really cool and fun, you know, like Uncharted esque escape sequence here, which I really dig I think this is very well done.

Yeah.

Yeah, running through the station, out of the station and into this like dilapidated subway area, all while they're still shooting at you and trying to get you.

It's a lot of fun.

It's very exciting.

In this subway section.

There are spores, you know, so masks on.

There's a really easy solution for taking care of the wolf down here, and that's just by alerting the infected with a bottle or a brick, by throwing it at the WLF and letting the infected take care of it, which is what I did.

You know, the enemy of my enemy is well, in this case, still my enemy because they want to eat my throat too, so but let them fight it out.

Man.

This subway sequence I think is probably my second favorite set piece in the game.

Well, it'll probably be next episode that we get two that i'll disclose what my first one is.

But it's something just about the lighting down here.

It's dark and it's spooky, and the WLF for using like red flares and there's like the red emergency lights on here, and it's one of the There are a couple other areas within the game, but it's one area where they kind of also just want you, like as you were saying, interact with the infected and the human enemies here, so you can alert the infected to the humans and just watch them destroy each other.

But as I mentioned last week too, this game also is going to keep you on your toes.

You're not able to be stationary because the clickers and the infected are going to be running around searching for people, and you're not able to stay stationary.

So you have to be kind of with your head on a swivel too, making sure that you're not alerting anyone.

But it is kind of fun to just like throw a brick or bottle, even a molotav I'll throw out just to get a clicker, but it alerts everybody.

Oh my goodness, what a fun set piece.

It's like, it's it's the ambiance of it, and the lighting with the just the red and the kind of dark, gritty like background is just really really memorable to me.

This was one of those set pieces.

Right when I got to it the first time, I was like, holy shit, this is naughty Dog level naughty Dog stuff here.

This was really fun to play through.

Yeah, it is.

The ambiance really is on full display here, You're right, and those red flares really give an unnerving sense to things.

It is really cool.

You're right.

When we're down here too, we encounter a new infected called a Shambler.

We first see them as we're crawling through some vents up top.

We can see them down to the bottom, causing havoc to the wolf folks.

What do you think about the Shambler?

I really like that they thought of Okay, so this is taking place in Seattle, Pacific, Northwest, and the Shambler basically is the Shambler is like another mutation within the Quarterceps virus because of the rainfall and stuff.

It's like bloated, porous kind of infected type now, which I really love.

They have this kind of like acidic gas that kind of comes out of them as an attack, and I really thought it was cool to have a new infected type within this game.

And they are absolutely grotesque to look at, like, they are very sickening to look at.

Their sounds are very like low and guttural.

They have like these you know how you kind of have that kind of sound right before you throw up that.

They kind of sound like that, and it's very creepy.

It's very well done.

The sound design, the look of them.

I'm totally on board.

I thought it was really cool to have a new infected type.

What are your thoughts.

I do think they're cool.

They're not my favorite, but they can be a pain to deal with.

They're yeah, kind of a mixture of being fast and strong.

You know, they're not necessarily a one hit ko like if a clicker grabs you, but they're pretty strong.

They can lay the beat down, they can charge you.

And they're also like they're not fast, but they're quicker than you would expect just by looking at them, and they will chase you and it can be tough.

And don't they also have a mild ranged attack too.

Yeah, yeah, they do.

I like that.

It's they're not quite as big as a bloater, but they're they're kind of size wise in between like a clicker and a bloater.

But yeah, they are kind of strong and fast, like they kind of have a pretty good balance between them.

But yeah, it's definitely like, you know, two shot gun blasts or maybe two or three shots with the rifle to get these guys down, or like a molotav plus a shot with like the revolver or something like.

It's there's a couple of different ways to get them down.

But yeah, they are strong, and there are several moments throughout the game where you might have two of them, sometimes even three in a given area, and they can be a problem.

Oh yeah, yeah, there's there's an upcoming section.

I don't know.

I don't think we're going to talk about it because it's pretty short, but there is one section where you have to deal with a couple of them, and you know it, it can be really difficult.

You get another really great chase scene getting out of here, drew some more of the subway ruins.

As that's happening, though, Ellie's mask breaks her gas mask, which really freaks Dina the hell out.

She is she's going crazy.

She's going to take her mask off and give it to Ellie.

Ellie the whole time is like Dina, calm down, calm down, you gotta stop Ellie.

Your mask here, we can share your mind.

Stop what no, Ellie, I'm not infected, I'm immune, I'm not coughing.

You see.

It's when she goes to take her own mask off to do that sacrifice that Elle is like, yo, stop it right now.

She rips her mask off, She's like, look, I'm fine, I'm cool, but We've got bigger problems right now, because we've got to get out of here or else we're gonna, you know, get caught and eaten, and I can't survive that.

Yeah.

So she finally, she finally believes Ellie.

You know, at first, remember she thought that Ellie was just fucking with her, But now she cannot deny it.

It is proof in front of her.

So you make it out of there, You make the run back to overgrown Seattle.

You find this rundown theater, it's been abandoned, and you take refuge in there.

Yeah, and Dina is completely winded at this point.

She is like hunched over like she is just she's full on, like sixth or seventh week of pregnancy, like she's in it.

Man, I remember my wife feeling and looking the same at this point throughout her pregnancies as well.

And oh my god, you have the dialogue written here in our doc too.

I'm pregnant, what, Tori?

It's not yours?

What are we what are we supposed to do now?

Nothing?

I just need to rest, Firs.

You're fucking kidding.

How long have you known?

I was late a few weeks ago, a few weeks we could have we could have still turned back.

I didn't know.

I wasn't sure, Okay, I didn't want to.

Be a burden.

Well you're a burden now, aren't you.

Holy shit, Like she's just full on blinders at this point, not even able to have an ounce of respect for Dina in this moment where she's completely vulnerable and not herself and feeling like absolute shit.

Yeah, and that's directly what she was saying earlier too, right when they were talking about Bill, about folks becoming a burden.

And to her credit, she does feel immediately bad about it.

She was speaking before thinking.

But you know, a lot of the times that will show somebody's true intent.

But anyways, Yeah, you're right, man.

You really threw that surprise in there with with some nonchalance.

Dina is pregnant.

That's why she's been getting six she's so winded, So we're dealing with double surprises here.

Ellie's breathing spores, Dina's got a baby.

What's going on?

You also find a guitar in here, just at the back of the theater, because it's a theater, you know, that's not all that's surprising theater as in the theater arts, not like a movie theater.

You find a guitar and this is where you get to do some playing.

Like you had mentioned last time, John, it's horribly out of tune.

Ellie tunes one string and it magically turns completely in tune and she sings her Pearl Jam song that her and Joel bonded over.

Yeah.

I don't know if you wanted to talk anymore about the guitar stuff.

I don't remember everything you've said last time.

I know that you brought it up.

I don't mess with this any more than I have to.

I just I don't really want to.

Yeah.

Sure, Yeah, the guitar thing is a pretty cool mechanic.

I never really found myself using it in a way where I was like experimenting.

I felt like some of the tabs, cause you're tabbing over left or right, and some of the chords and things that are within each thing, I'm like, okay, cool, I can play this, And as someone who plays guitar, I thought it was kind of cool.

But as I mentioned last week, there's plenty of videos of people who are far better at moving their joystick and stuff faster and actually playing real songs like there was a guy who did like Master of Puppets and some other stuff like, there are people who have mastered this mechanic, and I, outside of just doing what the game wants me to, only fiddled around with this a handful of times, and I wasn't very good.

So anytime I see those videos of folks like doing the Last of Us guitar stuff, it always makes me think of that South Park episode with Guitar Hero.

Oh my goodness, when.

Stan's dad pulls out the guitar he starts playing Kansas and they're like, Dad, stop, that's not cool.

What's your dad doing playing that old people music?

Oh it's so funny.

Yes, Getting into the flashback with Joel and Ellie.

This is a flashback I think three years earlier or so, and it's on Ellie's birthday.

Joel has a surprise for her and he takes her through some water because he taught her to swim through some brush, and eventually they end up at a dinosaur museum, Dinosaur and space museum.

It's interesting too.

They have a little dialogue here where Joel is one hundred percent certain in that Jesse and Ellie are going to become an item.

He's like yeah, I see how he looks at you and you look at him like, you know, I as a as a father, I recognize these things.

And Ellie is like, no, dude, your your radar is completely off.

It's not that way.

And of course, as the player, if you played the DLC and you know anything else about the story, like Ellie has been you know, she's out and out gay and has been for a while now.

And Joel is just defiant in this and go, no, I think you guys are gonna be a thing.

It's really yeah, this is naughty dog shoving it down our throats.

Am I right?

Yeah?

I really like following Grums on Twitter.

Okay, I can't.

I'm not gonna.

I don't want to get taken out of context.

I'm not going to keep up that character.

But Ellie is like asking Joel throughout this whole sequence, like okay, is it a space ship?

Is it another guitar?

Or is it you know, she just is asking.

And once they get to the Dinosaur Museum, you see this huge t Rex statue outside and then she climbs it and she has like one of the most Elle lines ever where It's like I'm on a motherfucking dinosaur.

So it's like it's very Ellie.

She's still like thirteen or fourteen at this point, maybe fifteen, and still has that like kind of youthful like the side of her still like her innocence hasn't been fully taken away yet at this point.

Yeah, and you that's really highlighted in these flashbacks where you go back and forth, just how much changes in such a little time in this world.

It's really crazy.

They, like you said, they go through and look at all the dinosaur exhibits.

Do you have a favorite dinosaur?

Were you a dinosaur kid?

I was a dinosaur kid.

I mean I was always partial to the t Rex.

My next favorite would have been the stegosaurus, just because I was like, oh, it'd be cool to ask some cool like plates coming out my back to protect me.

So yeah, between the t rex and Stegosaurus.

But then you know, Jurassic Park was nineteen ninety three, and so that got me into veloca raptors.

So I guess now I would say t rex and veloci raptors.

I like a Stegasaurus.

I Triceratops was always my favorite, but Stegasaurus pretty cool too.

Oh and of course Tarodactyl because of Kimberli from The Power Rangers, the crush of every school boy in the nineties.

Yeah, her and then Tapanga from Boy Meets World.

Those were my.

Two, right, Yeah, this is cute.

You can engage with this as much as you want or as little as you want.

Going through here and looking at all the exhibits, it eventually transitions into space stuff with like astronauts exhibits showing the different rockets that have launched to the Moon, from Russia, from China, from the US space suit.

It's a little dune buggy and eventually you get to this what would you call it, like a shuttle shuttle, yeah kind of deal.

Shuttle works, yeah, yeah, and the two of you get an Ellie and Joel hop into the cockpit.

It's like seated such that your back is to the floor, you know, and you're facing up and Joel's birthday present.

Tor isn't just this museum.

He has this cassette tape that he gives to her.

He said it was very hard to find of like audio from a space launch.

Yeah, Paolo eleven, Yeah, yeah, yeah, he gives it to her.

Here she puts on the helmet astronaut helmet.

She puts her headphones in and before she starts it, he's like, no, no, no, close your eyes, and she does.

It's an amazing, uh scene.

It's very touching.

Yeah, she and she's imagining it so much that she's like, you know, feeling the heat and seeing the flames, you know, of the launch in her imagination.

And it's a it's a really sweet moment of well, like you said too, showing that she hasn't lost her innocence yet.

And this, I mean, there are a couple of functions to this flashback as well.

You know, it's showing how important those two are to each other, Joel to Ellie and Ellie to Joel.

It's also showing that things can always get worse as time goes on, so no matter how bad things seem now, in the future, you might look back and say, well, those were the good old days, right, you know, they're having this moment in an infested world, but that was the good old days.

And of course, functionally, it you know, helps disrupt player fatigue.

You know, it gets fatiguing on the player, on the watcher, on the reader, if it's just constant stress high octane, high octane, especially in the last one.

I think it fits here.

This is a really this is a really touching scene.

I'm glad that they put this in here.

I'm glad that they didn't also include fighting in this.

Yeah, I think in some of the other flashbacks there are fighting, and I think those are much less effective because, like I'm imagining following this scene up with what comes after this, you go into this zoological area of exhibits, I mean, you think that you're going to get into a fight, but you don't.

It would it would cheapen this whole thing drastically if they added in a firefight section with infected or whatever after this.

I'm really glad that they didn't.

That would have made me so mad.

Allow it to be sincere, like, let players sit in that it's okay.

Yeah, to have this be a non combat area for sure, really helps with the story moments here.

Going back to like Ellie and the imagination thing.

I love that they animated this so if you're paying attention around Ellie's head, like the whole scene transitions into space and you'll see like stars than the moon and the sun kind of come across the visor of her helmet too.

It's just it's such a beautiful moment.

The music here is just light enough but effective as well.

It's so well done.

And then they have this exchange right after where Joel's like, all right, kid, did I do okay?

And Ellie's like, are you fucking kidding me?

Like this was awesome.

So they have this like as if we didn't already you know, have this father daughter moment, like you know that this is fully solidifying, like their relationship at this point.

And that's about as vulnerable as Joel's going to get too, Like putting your imagining Joel for who he is, this rough and tumble Texas man is not one to express emotions.

He's very taciturn him looking at her and sincerely asking hey did I did I do okay?

That is for Joel, that is extremely vulnerable.

Oh, they have never been closer than they are in that moment.

And I do.

I do keep thinking back to the innocence thing and how striking it is to go back to present day and the last of us two and see Ellie that's completely stamped out of Ellie.

I mean that Ellie is basically dead, and it's such a tragic thing to see.

It's something that you it's something that I think happens to most everybody in the world, and some folks try and reclaim it, but you never you never really can.

And it's one of the worst things about growing up is that innocence, that playfulness of a child.

Just you know, for one reason or another, we lose it, and you know, you can always get some of it back, but it's never quite the same, you know, And to see it happened to Ellie's so young really sucks.

Yeah, And you know, I'm a parent of two kids.

My son is ten at the time of this recording, and like there definitely been moments when he turned since he's turned ten where I've you know, tried to do something nice and sweet for him and it's like, hey, hey, man, is is this okay?

Is this cool?

Like always trying to seek that that's satisfaction, and like, hey, did did I do something that you love and appreciate?

Did I you know, did they do this thing for you that you find this joy in?

And so to have Joel have this like real, like very sincere moment with Ellie here, like as a parent playing that part, I was like Oh yeah, I totally resonate with how he's feeling in this moment like that.

That was one of those like not necessarily heart wrenching or gut wrenching, but it was like, Okay, yeah, I totally get this human side coming out through the game here.

Yeah.

And they punctuate the story.

I mean again, like I had said, for pragmatic reasons for the fatigue thing, but they punctuated at moments where I think it's important for players to reflect on not just how much Ellie has changed, but how much she's lost, both in terms of her relationship with Joel, but in terms of her relationship with herself too.

You know, these aren't randomly placed throughout like you're just sprinkling it over and you know, seeing where it sticks.

Their placed with intent, and having that placed here right after you know, what Ellie said to Dina, right before what's about to happen up here.

It's good to keep this in mind.

It shows you how the pursuit of revengeful justice and revenge and being tainted by anger can really poison you, and can degrade somebody's morality and character to a point where they're just totally unrecognizable Yeah, it is corrosive to the human spirit, and you know, Ellie has fallen prey to that.

And while I think we can all perfectly understand it, it's still, you know, you kind of can't argue with it.

She is she's a different person, she's lost who she was.

Would Joel even recognize her right now?

That's something that I think players should ask themselves too.

Who knows?

Yeah, and we explore a little bit more here of this museum.

There's a part that Joel says, well, I haven't checked this area out.

I don't know what's here.

And there's a little bit more swimming here too.

But you get to a door where Joel has to kind of hoister up and get inside, but there's a bunch of stuff blocking the other side of the door and she can't get Joel in.

So now we get separated.

And it's really kind of creepy, at least to me, like this section here because no lights are on, so you're kind of traversing these like exhibits.

It's kind of more animals.

There's like wolves and bears and things a couple little like not necessarily jump scares, but like things that are like, oh, you first come to this area and you see like these eyes staring at you, like you know, if you've ever seen like an animal at night, like a raccoon or something, or a cat, and you see like their eyes like lighting up from the light.

It's kind of that thing.

But you find notes in here that will say like I killed for them and things like that, and you end up finding a wart hog that's kind of been I think it's a wart hog, right, that's kind of been making noise in this whole section.

Again, you're on your own as Ellie here, and you find this very important piece of graffiti where it's the firefly logo and underneath of it has been spray painted lies.

Oh boy.

And Ellie sees this, but Joel doesn't.

Joel eventually kind of makes his way in right and doesn't know that Ellie has seen this, or if he recognizes what's on the wall there.

He just kind of quickly goes all right, let's leave.

I'm going to get a fire started before the sun goes down, like doesn't acknowledge it whatsoever, but it clearly has an effect on Ellie here, and as the player, seeing that, you're like, oh shit, we just kind of maybe ruined this great birthday experience, this great day.

Now these questions are swirling back up inside of her again, and she's not going to be able to let it go.

And it can be multiple things too, right, of course, it can be referencing that and the end of Art one, But as we've seen too, a lot of the folks within the Fireflies started to get disenchanted with the means by which they are trying to justify or trying to get to their end.

But so we also find a note here on I can't remember if it's on a corpse.

I think it is on a corpse, and it says we wanted to end the suffering, We wanted to restore humanity.

Each time we sacrificed part of ourselves, our leaders kept saying it'll be worth it.

Now we've disbanded with nothing to show for our sins.

Yeah.

So, while yeah, it can definitely be about the end of part one, and probably part of it is, we also see a lot of these internal members being totally unsatisfied with how things have been going, feeling like they've been committing, as they said, these great sins with nothing to show for it, and their leaders are just sort of stringing them along.

And I think this is notable to think about too, because we've already been primed to wonder about the wlf's origins.

This very well could be them.

We could be seeing the WLF being born in real time via these graffitis and notes.

It's interesting to note too, like the fireflies have.

You know, while they were labeled, especially by Joel and people within Boston, when we first see them as like terrorists, right, we also know too that other members, people that we know, characters we know and love, also committed some horrible atrocities.

We didn't mention it last week, But when you come across Eugene's weed farm there it's a missile, it's a non missible interaction.

But before you go kind of downstairs, there's a little picture of Eugene and Tommy and you actually can collect Eugene's firefly pendant from there.

And Ellie will say to Dina like, oh, yeah, they serve together in the Fireflies, and they were in Denver.

And there's a kind of a short little thirty second story here where Ellie tells Dina like, oh yeah, they gott into some in Denver and blew up a school.

I think it's a school or maybe it it was some kind of building where there were people inside, and it greatly affected Tommy and Eugene and their beliefs within the Fireflies.

It kind of is hinted at that that's why Tommy eventually left the Fireflies was due to that incident.

So they had numerous sex throughout the US where they were doing things that they were not proud of, and people were coming kind of having their coming to Jesus moment in a way.

So it's it's cool to kind of see this in context here where this person unnamed is just reliving his trauma here or their trauma, I should say, And and was it worth it?

What was the ship that we were trying to do worth the things that we did?

And it's it's a great like theological debate happening here.

So I totally dig this, and it really makes me feel sad for Elie because now it functions as the that's going to drive her through the rest of this story.

Right, We're gonna see more about those flashbacks here soon.

But even though we the player are thinking about the WLFLI wouldn't have been in that moment, She's kind of been suspicious over Joel's last days there since they happened.

Yeah, and she presses on him.

She presses him on it more pretty soon.

But for now, we're back to the present.

Dina, while we were sleeping, that's when this whole flashback took place.

I'm pretty sure we kind of nodded off.

But while we were out, Dina fixed the comms and we're picking up some WLF signals.

From those signals, we get some numbers on the map in locations, and that's what's going to take us to these wolf members.

Site fourteen has been reporting casualties and one lone male trespasser, so that's probably Tommy.

Ellie does persuade Dina to stay behind.

She's still very sick, and she heads to Woodcrest.

It's actually Hillcrest, Hillcrest, My bad, no worries.

This section is pretty long, maybe a little bit too long.

I don't know, what do you think?

I think because this is a neighborhood, and so it's a lot of like streets and neighborhood like there's houses and stores that you go to.

It kind of is a lot like Billstown from the first game, but on a much bigger scale.

I don't necessarily know if it's too long.

I think that there's just a lot of combat encounters, and a lot of them are ones that you can't necessarily stell.

There's one in particular where it's just damn near impossible.

I don't even think it can be done, but I could.

I could understand the argument of someone saying, like this kind of drags here.

There's just a lot happening within this neighborhood.

One of my favorite things though, that you can do here.

Again, going back to collectibles, I don't know if you found any of the collectibles in this area, Rick, but there's a whole story within the story here that I absolutely love.

Post the outbreak, this kind of community here of Hillcrest rallied around a guy named Boris who was like an archer, and you can actually go into a store right from the beginning and you find like his He won like medals and trophies for being an archer, and he kind of led this community and was kind of a leader until Fedrick came in.

Fedra ended up killing him or actually I'm sorry not feder The wolves came in after they kind of obliterated Fedra and the community of Hillcrest did not like how the wolves kind of took power and took control of the city.

And Boris's daughter, I forget her name, it's Lily.

Her name is Lily was the one who actually spray painted fuck the WLF.

It's one of the graffiti things you write down in Ellie's journal in this section.

And so they executed Lily in front of the community, and then Boris goes on a killing spray killing Fedra.

Here you find all of this.

This is all done through notes, and the very last note that you find in this section, they're kind of all addressed either to Boris or another guy named Yulie, which I think is short for Ulysses.

The community kind of makes a deal with Fedra to turn in Boris, and Boris finds out and there's a set piece in here, like an old mechanic garage that if you open it up, there's like four or five infected in there.

Those are all the people that were going to turn Boris in.

He actually, oh, no, he.

Put them in the garage.

You find that out with the last note in the section.

He was like, oh, they were going to turn me in, So he like set up a gas mine in his house, got them all inocuated with the gas, not enough to kill them, but he puts them in the garage for them to sell.

They but surely get infected.

And it's like a brutal last story.

And then the very last infected that you encounter in this area kind of a sort of a jump scare.

You're kind of going through this last house and you get attacked in a garage, and if you are looking at context clues here, this infected looks very different from everyone else because he's got like a bow and arrow like satchel like thing on his back.

This is boris kind of has the long hair.

Yeah, Like it's a whole story within the story that I was like, holy shit the first time was playing through this game, and I knew I wanted to try and collect as many collectibles as possible.

I was like, God, damn, this is this is a brutal story within the story here.

This whole neighborhood is just completely like like Shakespearean tragic level of stuff that happened here.

So sorry, from a little anecdote, I just didn't I didn't want to move forward without kind of talking about that story.

It's just a neat little thing that you can figure out with the game and the collectibles in this area of Hillcrest.

No, dude, no need to apologize at all.

This isn't a Wikipedia summary style podcast.

We're here for the conversations I found.

I want to say I found one or two notes that mentioned him.

I definitely did not find everything, and I did obviously because of that, I didn't make the connections with the infected.

That is so wild, dude.

That's Oh, I'm sure I'm going to piss off a lot of older gamers in particular, but that's like, that's the kind of stuff that makes Fallout so special.

Is this sort of story within a story, and then you see the ramifications of that in the world that you are in right now.

That's like Fallout levels of world building.

That's very cool.

A Naughty Dog deserves to pat themselves on the back for that.

Very very cool, Doctor Rockman.

Yeah, man, very cool, Doctor Ruckman.

You find all of that throughout this area.

As you're going through, you can loot stuff as much as you want.

Getting out of here eventually happens.

You're you're kind of overwhelmed with all of the fighting that you're doing here.

Jesse ends up surprising you by showing up.

He kind of saves your ass.

This happened in Part one at some point too, but he grabs you from behind, like puts his hand over your mouth.

He's like Shusha, shusha, shush, and you turn around and boom, it's Jesse.

You as the player, you think it might be Tommy because the way the cameras positioned you don't see who this is.

But it's not Tommy.

It's Jesse.

You and him gun for the WLFS truck, you know, he does that thing.

He looks at the truck and you look at each other.

He's like, you're thinking what I'm thinking.

Yeah, I mean they don't actually say that.

I think Ellie says that's pretty reckless.

But that's what you're doing.

And this exit scene out, which is very very cool, is like a very close over the shoulder shot where you're controlling Ellie as a Jess is like backing into the infected and some of the wolf You have to shoot out your windshield literally, like shoot out your windshield so you can shoot out of your windshield at the other wolfs that are chasing you as well as the infected as you're driving off, a clicker gets like lodged into.

The windshield or window.

Yeah, oh my goodness.

Yeah, it's crazy.

And then you drive the car the truck into a body of water, just goes out of control and that's where you end up going.

Yeah, it is pretty cool.

This is video game ass video game stuff.

You have unlimited ammo here, it's a pretty cool section.

I don't know if you know this about the Jesse scene.

Are you aware of the backlash on this scene where Jesse first shows up here?

Do you know anything about this?

Let me let me try to replay the scene in my head.

I'm trying.

I at this point, I know gamers will get mad about everything and anything, so I'm trying to figure out, like, what could they have possibly been upset about here?

No, I got nothing, so specifically when Jesse shows up and pulls her in and goes, hey, you know, you really think I let you do this on your own.

So the very first like actual game trailer we got of this game was Ellie playing the song through the valley and you see like a bunch of corpses around that she's actually killed, and Joel kind of comes in and it's very like white and ethereal around him, and it's like, hey, what are you doing, kiddo?

How far are we going to take this?

And Ellie says, I'm going to kill every last one of them.

And it's how Joel walks and talks throughout this scene that fans of the game were thinking that Joel at some point was going to die.

Now, this was before the leaks happened, and so Neil doctor Uckman saw the amount of people online speculating that Joel was going to die, so they recorded stuff from the game and specifically with intent to like kind of misinformed gamers.

They had like shots of Ellie and Seattle on the horse, but minus Dina.

And they also changed this scene and they had Troy Baker come in and also record the exact same line, and then they put his character skin over Jesse's and so there was a trailer out there that had Joel in this spot and not Jesse.

And this was a way to kind of deter people from thinking that Joel was going to die because so many people even before the leaks happened, Like this was back in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, around that timeframe where people were thinking Joel was going to die, so Neil Druckman had them kind of doctor up this video with a fake out here, like, oh, no, Joel doesn't die, He's actually going to company you on this, you know, you know this mission.

We had no idea what it was at this point.

But this caused some controversy as well within the community of like, oh, we had such high hopes that Joel was going to tag along or we'd have more time with Joel, but they Yeah, they completely redubbed the scene here to kind of throw people off the scent.

But I understand it from the creative standpoint that they had to do that just so that people weren't trying to guess the story of the game a couple of years before it would release.

But it's also, you know, as a gamer, being on the other side of it, was kind of shitty that they had to do it and how they did it.

So I see both sides of it.

I don't I think that's hilarious.

I think that's really funny.

And you know, if if I were, if I had the pleasure of being on that team with Neil and everybody, I would have said, hell, yeah, dude, do that.

That's so funny.

I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm guessing the folks that were pissed about it felt like they were lied to.

Since when do the creators have an obligation to like, let me, let me make sure that I'm phrasing this correctly.

I think there's a difference between misrepresenting what a work fundamentally is and obfuscating the particulars.

In no way is that misrepresenting what the game fundamentally is.

I just do not see it as that way.

That's I'm not surprised that folks got mad about that, but yeah, at the same time, I.

Can definitely see like the the fun within that and just being like hell yeah, man, like, let let's do it.

So Neil Neil Druckman and even Troy Baker to a lesser extent, caught some flak for that.

But going back to the actual like chase sequence here, like I keep referencing Naughty Dog, or keep referencing Uncharted, this kind of feels like an Uncharted like escape sequence here, Like I said, you get unlimited, ammo.

The amount of infected in this area is just absolutely asinine.

But it is again like Naughty Dog, with these sprawling landscapes and these action set pieces.

They just have it nailed down to a t unlike any their studio in my opinion.

And so you you know, you're in the passenger seat as Ellie, and oh my goodness, it's intense.

You get that, as you said, the clicker being stuck in the window.

There, you're shooting out the windshield like at one point you run into like a telephone pole and then you got a backtrack from where you were and you're dodging the WLF plus infected.

Like it is just super intense.

It's so much fun.

And then they just nail set pieces like this, and I'm so glad that they decided to put one in this because like this in the game, because you know, as we were talking about earlier, Hillcrest as a section is kind of just you know, you're kind of bobbing and weaving in and out of you know, stores and houses and things like that.

But to leave this area in like a jeep and be its so action oriented is a lot of fun.

It kind of breaks up the action in a good way, actually brings the action, I should say in a good way here.

Yeah, absolutely, Hillcrest.

Where did I get I think I got Woodcrest from the boondocks for some reason, I don't know.

After you crash the truck, Jesse and Ellie are able to swim out and they make it back to the theater.

Jesse is obviously very injured.

Dina is like doting on him a little bit.

Ellie is super jealous, super jealous.

There's another flashback that we get here too.

I don't think this first one demands tons of talking about.

It's with Ellie and Tommy.

Eventually you get to use his sniper rifle.

Joel comes by to the two of you go out for like looking for guitar strings, but you end up taking out a bunch of infected instead.

The flashback that happens later, which we're just gonna put here because it makes a little bit more sense to has some really impactful writing in it, So let's talk about that here.

This is years earlier.

Ellie goes back into Saint Mary's Hospital from the end of part one where everything went down.

She at this point she still has that small thread of doubt Joel.

I would argue that it's not very small.

She very clearly did not believe him at the end of part one, but so she's going to see things for herself.

She goes back, we find one of those audio diaries that everybody seems so keen on taking keeping, and the audio diary says this, I don't know which.

Group I'm going to join.

I was one of the ones that wanted to go after the smuggler and the girl.

I said, even if we found her, or by some miracle, found someone else that's immune difference because the only person who could develop a vaccine is dead.

She wrestles with this in total shock, because if you remember from the first game, what did Joel tell her?

Joel said that the doctors said, We've got tons of immune people, more than just Ellie, but no dice.

You know, the vaccine doesn't work, so you can take her and leave, very convenient story to tell.

Ellie.

She never believed it from the start.

I don't think now she has confirmation.

She doesn't just have her own inference anymore, her own doubts, the doubts that she probably herself doubted, because how could she bring herself to distrust Joel.

Now she has proof, and Joel rides up.

At this point, they've been looking for her everywhere, like where did you go you left, just like a tiny little note.

We were all worried sick about you.

And he hugs her and she pushes him away.

She lays down the law.

Tell me what happened here.

If you lie to me one more time, I'm gone.

You will never see me again.

But if you tell me the truth, I'll go back to Jackson, no matter what it is.

And you can see him, Joel that is grabbling this in real time.

This is not a quick scene.

Like he takes several beats to think about this, and you can tell that he is working.

You can see it all over his face.

And she waits, you know, she prods him once like, Joel, tell me that, you know, tell me, just say it, I think, she says, and he works through it and he tells her straight.

Making a vaccine would have killed you, so I stop them.

Absolutely brutal, I mean, first off, just hats off to Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson here because the you can feel the weight just like in this scene how it's acted.

The Oh my goodness, just brutal to see this because this now is you know, this begins the tension between them.

She walks away, tears in her eyes and she, you know, she does go back to Jackson, but kind of picks back up not much further from where we start at the game like there is now maybe animosity is probably too strong a word, but now there is a chasm, a huge divide between these two characters now.

And Joel I think probably always knew that at some point he was going to have to come clean.

And man, Rick, you called it out here perfectly that the what feels like probably two minutes worth of time passes between when she prompts him and when he actually answers here, but in reality it's maybe five or seven seconds.

But the way that it's animated and the way that Troy Baker acts it here, you can just absolutely feel the weight.

You feel that gut shot, You feel the sadness and the heartbreak in his voice, and oh my god, man, this is just one of those apps loot like gut wrenching scene here.

Yeah, I fully agree this scene demanded having the time to just sit in.

It needed the time to just sit in and let the scene play out.

And I think a lot of and this goes for you know, probably podcasters too, and writers and everybody.

There's a very natural tendency for folks just starting out to want to rush to the quote unquote good stuff.

You don't want your readers or listeners to get bored.

You got to go, go go.

It's like I mean, maybe sometimes, but you've got to let things sit and breathe.

And this is a great example of that.

And like you said too, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnston, you know it.

He gets me and Troy Baker in particular, to hell because like, oh, Troy Baker's in this, of course he is.

He plays everything he's got.

He's got a choke hold on the industry.

But it's not for nothing, right, like you earned it.

And it's little scenes like this too that really show you that he knows what he's doing.

It's great too.

And Ashley Johnson of course too.

This scene is incredible the way that they did this.

And I think this is something that I wanted to ask you.

I think there might be a not insignificant number of people that would see this and not understand Ellie's point of view.

Because she got out of it alive.

Joel saved her life.

Why would she be so heartbroken about this and feel so betrayed by Joel?

I wanted to get your thoughts on why you think that might be.

Oh man, it's hard for me not to answer that without kind of spoiling the final scene of the game, the porch scene for those that know.

I think Elliot at this point in her life, throughout her life.

I mean, we don't know how her parents died or necessarily win, but it would have been some time right after she was born or close to.

And so then she gets put into the military like boarding school.

I'm Marlene.

She's been She's had to kind of be a fighter her whole life.

And I think maybe towards the end of the first game and that in that part of the story, she saw this surgery of hopefully being the cure.

Ellie, I don't think is like a selfish enough or like prude enough of a person to go, Okay, I'm gonna be the cure for the world.

It was like Okay, she she's not thinking selfishly at that point.

She's like, Okay, I can I can help other people.

I think she's wrestling with like could she have done something with her life?

Could there be something more?

It's it's still her.

I think for her, maybe it's the last like thing that she's holding on to of that youthful innocence of I can change the world.

I want to do something with my life.

I know I can't be an astronaut because NASA probably doesn't exist anymore.

I know my parents aren't here, so I have to, you know, kind of love this rough and tumble Texas smuggler as a father figure.

I'm gonna try to have like relationships with people when I can, but I still want to try and make something of my own in this world.

And that was probably the last thing for her that she had her own.

Say in.

You know, she had her own agency within that decision, and I think that that's why she's fighting so hard for it.

And wants it so much.

Absolutely, I think that's a big part of it, her breaking down in this scene.

I don't think you can tack just one reason onto it and say, all right, that's why that's But what you just said is a huge part of it.

That agency.

She was born into a world where she, you know, feels like she doesn't have much of a choice for anything.

You just fight to survive.

But she can directly impact that world.

The crying.

I think the reason this is such a traumatic experience for her that ultimately breaks her down is partly because of that, I think, And I think too the fact that she's alive is probably a big part of it as well.

She's looking around the world and every time she sees and infected, she's probably thinking that's because of me.

Every Time she sees somebody that she knows, you know, get hurt or the hardships around town, given the state of the world right now, that's because of me.

And while she is grateful to be alive, there's that dissonance like, I'm alive, but at what cost?

I'm sure that's a huge part of this too, I mean, not totally dissimilar from Survivor's guilt, right, And of course there is you know, the complex feelings with Joel.

Is she i mean, does she feel extremely betrayed by him?

Yes?

Does she also feel grateful that he saved her life on some level?

Yes.

Basically her brain is being torn in a thousand different directions and it's just too much for her to bear.

It's a really tragic scene.

Yeah, I think the survivor's guilt really is another huge part of it.

As you know, the ending of the first game when She's asking Joel like, hey, tell me what happened, and she on her own is bringing up like, hey, first it was Test, then it was Sam.

She also mentions Riley, so if you play the DC, you know what happens there.

She does have a huge chip on her should.

Sorry, she has a huge chip on her shoulder in the form of survivor's guilt, where it's like, I've seen these people be infected.

When is it my turn?

When do I go?

And if I have agency and when I can decide that, and it's this surgery that could potentially have a cure for the world where no one else can get sick or infected anymore, then please let me do it.

So, yeah, I think you're onto something for sure.

With the survivor's guilt.

That's a huge part of it, I think it is.

And it's one of those things too where we behind the podcast mike or behind the controller or behind the keyboard struggling with the bindings.

We can't really ever know what we would do in that position because we will never be in it, god willing, And it's it's one of those things where like even me, I look at this and I think to myself, like, I don't know if I could sacrifice myself like that for everybody, Like I want to live, I don't want to die, but I'm not in that position, so I would never know.

I can never know until that.

And you talk about faith earlier, I mean, I don't think that is totally unrelated here.

Ellie not necessarily faith in a higher being, but faith in what can be done and the amount of good she can cause her neighbors, you know, her direct neighbors, neighbors of humankind.

What can she do for them to better the world.

I think that's a huge part of it.

It would it be?

Is it too cliche to say that Ellie is like a christ like figure in that way?

I don't.

I mean, she's not.

I'm just playing around, But yeah, it's it's a really tough, tough decision to be and I can't imagine what she must have been feeling.

This would be like I don't think this should ever happen, to be clear, but in a novel, if this game or ever to be novelized, like to be put into a novel, this would be a particularly good passage to go through.

I'd be very interested in seeing what's going on.

In that brain.

Yeah, it's interesting to note too now because this is I believe this flashback is two years earlier from the beginning of the games.

So I mean, she's been wrestling with Joel's lie for so long.

They spent more time in the lie than they did, you know, a crossing the country in the first game.

So this has been eating at her for some time.

And so I think it's all of these roads converging into one spot here that have so many different emotions and feelings attached to them, and they all just happen in this one moment.

So again, huge shout out to Ashley Johnson man this, you know, this is just such a heartbreaking scene.

Here we go back to the present.

Out of the flashback, Ellie is stitching one of her wounds with the fish hook that in a way that makes me squirm.

I don't like looking at that at all.

Oh.

I don't like needles, and I especially don't like fish hooks being used as needles.

The next photographs that we have of the Wolf members are Nick and Nora.

It does not show their infinite playlist, thank you, thank you.

It does show their location a nearby hospital.

So the search for Tommy continues, Ellie continues to be more like Joel too.

We see it in just about everything she does, and we get another city segment around route five.

John correct me if I'm wrong.

I think the workbench surprise that happens here is optional.

I don't think you have to have it happen to you.

Is that correct?

Right?

Yeah, you don't have to go into that particular building.

But man, so many cool context things here.

Because it on the surface looks like it's just a workbench.

You've probably come across like a half dozen of them at some point by this point in the game.

But as you're you know, dicking around here doing stuff to your guns or whatever, you get attacked.

And if you're on your p's and q's and you're listening here, you can actually hear two of the four people that attack you here saying we're not going back.

Isaac can go fuck himself, I'm not going back.

And there's a cool note that you find here that is I can't remember if it's written by Isaac or not, but it's descriptions, like physical descriptions of these four people who are called deserters.

So these were people that were leaving the WLF, not necessarily to join the second faction we'll talk about later on, probably next week, but like they were just just the WLF, and Isaac was sending people to go find these you know, was sending search parties out to go find these people because they took you know, guns and Ammo and things from the WLF.

So they're thinking Ellie is with the wolves coming to kill them.

Really neat surprise.

Cool little set piece here again, like proximity minds come into play here.

For me, I was able to put them by the one door that I knew they were going to hide in, so I took out like two of them right away and then just had to worry about a couple others.

But again, cool little story within the story here.

It's showing like, Okay, the WLF could be just as huge and oppressive as Fedra had had people leaving it in pretty significant numbers just by reading some of the other collectibles of note you find in this area, and people would literally kill to not go back under Isaac in a WLF.

Really cool contexts for the story here.

I really love this.

Yeah, you can actually hear about the Deserters earlier too.

I'm pretty sure Ellie can Eves drop in on some WLF soldiers talking and one of them, you know, mentions looking for the deserters and says that you know they're traders.

They're no different from the scars, at least from the scars.

You know what you're getting.

And then the other guy's like, look, I don't give a fuck, so you know, you know, desertion is a big deal, and desertion is happening.

The reason that I love this work bench scene is that it gives you a couple of seconds, like two or three to actually fiddle in the menu, so like it wouldn't have been as surprising if you approach the workbench just as like a cutscene, but it doesn't do that.

The menu comes up, so you have like a couple of seconds to choose what gun before they come in ambush you.

Yeah, I love that, man.

I love when they do that subversion that makes you question, like am I even safe at all?

You know?

Can I pause my game or is that gonna?

Oh that?

What game is that?

That?

If you pause it?

It's pt PT had this feature where if you like, you know, it's that horror game if you pause it and just like sit there for too long, the ghost comes and gets you, and the game's over.

You know, I love stuff like that.

I love subversive little things that make you question if you're ever safe.

This is so cool, man.

I kind of wish they didn't hide this.

I wish everybody got to experience this.

Yeah, it was something that definitely catches you by surprise, and I'm I wish that it was something that had happened earlier, or was something that was actually like scripted and not an optional thing, because this is just really cool to experience here.

Oh yeah, big time, speaking of really cool things to experience.

Continuing towards the hospital, you meet the scars for the first time face to face, and this is such a cool scene.

You sneak up on them.

There's some tall grass you can hide in, and turns out it was them that strung up the folks in the radio tower, because they've got some WLF soldiers here strung up and they do the exact same thing as inside.

They while they're strung up, they cut their inurns out, well, they cut their stuf mix open and the innerts kind of just fall out and they're, you know, speaking about devotion, speaking about you know, they're speaking in general cult like.

The highested with sin.

Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.

What makes these guys so intimidating is they communicate in these whistles there.

It's almost tribal.

Bro It's it's almost tribal and like they can use the different pitches and lengths and articulations to just you know, tell information, convey information, and it's very very cool.

And it's it's particularly cool with them because they're somewhat stealthier than any other human members in the game.

Like they know how to hide, not not to the level of like what are those infected stalkers, not quite to that level.

Yeah, which, by the way, they're still in this game, and oh my god, they pissed me off so much.

Yeah they do.

Goodness, they're not quite that bad.

But they do know how to hide and be light of foot.

And they also hunt, not exclusively, but mostly with bow and arrows.

And it introduces that to you, like right away.

As soon as Ellie like steps on a branch, she's shot right in the shoulder, which introduces the bleed mechanic and you have to like hold a button down to get that arrow out of you.

They do fight with guns like some of them do, but it seems like they prefer their bows and arrows.

And you get into a fight with a lot of them here too, and it really behooves you to be stealthy about it because you know they're no slouches, they're no jokes.

What did you think of this?

I loved it.

I loved every second of it.

Oh my goodness, what an introduction.

I mean, it starts with the brutal like disembolment of these scars, and then as you call it out to, like Ellie getting a hit with the arrow.

I really thought, and I did on purpose.

I didn't mention this in the mechanic section last week because I thought that there were going to be more opportunities for me to do that this bleed mechanic outside of this one like forced area here wasn't something that I had to really mess around with outside of like maybe two maybe three more times throughout the rest of the game.

So I thought that there was going to be more to this.

But yeah, they certainly move more stealthily.

They have torches, they're dressed in like these very like brown kind of tannish cloaks, like they all are dressed the same.

Some of them have these like huge, big ass like hammers or hatchets.

As well, like.

Some of them do have guns, as you called out.

But oh my goodness, what an intense area.

It's it's dark at this point, it's starting to rain, so like the weather.

As I mentioned last week's kind of becoming a side character within this.

What an incredible introduction to this faction.

And oh my god, the whistles, man, Yeah, incredible sound design because it's like seven different whistles.

There's like the hey, I think there's something over here, the hey are you okay?

Hey, I'm going this way like kind of stuff.

It is.

There's like six or seven of them, and oh my god, is it is it?

It's just creepy.

The first time playing through this, I was like, oh my god, whistles are so unnerving.

Just the sound design is so so good with this.

I absolutely eat this up.

Man.

I love this whole section.

Oh yeah, we're unfortunately not going to talk much more about them today, but they play a very big role.

Actually, I kind of can't wait to talk about it.

That's that's one of my bigger criticisms with the game is well, we'll get there in time next episode.

For now, we're continuing on our hunt to find uh Nora and Nick presumably, I think, but we're gonna find Nora here.

You do some swimming through some bogs.

You're trying to get away from the WLF members that are looking for you in boats, and you eventually get inside of the hospital on the lower floor.

There's a there's a lady on guard duty playing PSP, oh my goodness, and I guess she doesn't hear you because she has headphones in because you are splashing up a storm behind her swimming, but you jump out, you like get her from behind with with your switchblade to her throat.

She refuses to give you any Well, no, she does tell you where they're at upstairs.

That's that's all.

Ellie wanted that information.

As soon as she tries to kill you, you put a knife into her throat.

Ellie is just killing completely remorselessly in brutal, brutal ways.

But this fight takes you up through the hospital where you find Nora.

You get her at gunpoint in a room.

You're just saying, like, you know, don't scream, I just want to know where Abby's location is.

She doesn't give it up, but she keeps deflecting.

She'll be like, you know, if you shoot me now, everybody's gonna rush in here.

Ellie says, I don't care.

Where's Where's Abby?

Oh yeah?

And she keeps saying things like that till the end where she's like, do you hear his screams?

You still hear his screams?

What I hear them every night?

Which just completely takes Ellie off.

Do you hear his screams?

And you think she's about to confess, like, you know, just like some of the other folks, like I don't want to do this either, but she doesn't.

She says, yeah, yeah, that little bitch got what he deserved.

This actually stuns Ellie completely and is her first half measure that we see.

We can quote breaking bad a little bit.

Norah runs off, and this is another chase sequence.

As you're running through the hospital, she's calling out for help, You're getting assaulted by shots from some of her wolf friends.

Running through the hospitals.

It's really, really, really cool, but you do catch up to her.

Eventually, you hold her at gunpoint.

There's really nowhere for you to go as three of these other Wolf members come up to you.

With their guns.

You're saying, you know, don't shoot her.

There's nowhere for you to go except for down this hole in the floor, which takes you down into this like spore infested area, which you do.

You jump down there, Noora is like choking on spores, but you you don't and it's another fight.

Are there infected in here too that you can just sick on?

The wolf members?

There are?

Right?

Uh?

Not that I recall or I'm trying to remember now because the wolf are chasing you.

But I think it's just you and Nora and in this section if I remember correctly, But.

There's a there's definitely a fight here.

Oh yeah, there is a fight with some people or I should say some infector.

There's a cool little context like clue here too.

Before Ellie even gets into the hospital and she's still in kind of like in the water section.

Right before this, one of the wolf comes out and says, hey, the woman she's escaped, and Isaac isn't happy about it.

Just hold onto that nugget because that will come into play very soon.

Who that is and why?

But man, the lighting in this next section two, it's kind of like that subway level it's like a red emergency light.

And Nora has come to a dead end.

She can't move, she's just hunched over from coughing.

And Ellie is completely as we know, she's immune, she's not feeling the effects of any of this, and she is repeatedly asking Nora, Hey, where is Abby?

Tell me where she's at.

She has this very brutal jol esque line here, like where's Abby?

I'm fucking dead?

Anyway, Why would I tell you anything?

Because I can make it quick, make it so much worse.

And I want to get your thoughts on this, Rick, because when the camera turns here, as we actually see the camera pan and we see Ellie's face, what were your thoughts here when you saw the square button prompt?

I think this is perfectly executed.

And this goes back to the specops the line where a lot of players will misinterpret this as the game making you do something violent and then criticizing you the player, like, oh, you're so it's so bad of you to do that, where in reality, one, if it's a commentary on anything, it's a commentary on video games doing that, which it's not.

But if you're gonna make that argument, that's what she would have to do.

But two this, I think it's important to make you do this to feel the weight of the action, to make it not just a cutscene you can watch while like scrolling your phone halfway through it.

You know what I mean.

You need to be paying attention because you need to feel the weight if we are to understand Ellie's moral bankruptcy.

And to be clear, this is the point of no return for her character.

This is her character's climax.

She can never go back from this, as she's beating Nora in the face with this pipe to get information out of her.

I think it's great that they make you do it with each button press.

You have to do each and every one.

It's slow, it's deliberate, and it's showing you that your choices, your actions have consequences.

And the consequences here are the total degradation of Ellie's character.

It's so important that they did it this way and not just as a cutscene.

And the players that are so unhappy about that, saying that the game made you do it and then told you you were bad for doing it, I think they're misunderstanding it fundamentally, and they're taking it personally, Like, I think that's what it ultimately comes down to, is they're saying that the game is saying that I'm bad, and I spent money on this, so why would they tell me that I'm bad for playing it?

Which I think is a profoundly shallow take.

Like I'm really again, I say this all the time.

I really try to steal man arguments that I don't agree with, and I know I said this in the last episode, but I have trouble doing that with this because it's just so misguided and it's refusing to look at games as an art form beyond a shallow level.

You have to look beyond what the game is doing and ask why is it doing it, What is it making me feel?

And why is it making me feel that way?

Is it intentionally making me feel this way?

It's almost games are almost never well, I don't want to speak in absolutes.

I'm no sith.

There are some games that intentionally try to like dog the player, you know, control them, middle finger them.

That's not what's going on here.

That was never the plan.

That would be so out of character and context and voice for the last of us.

It's not that it's a brilliant scene because it forces you to do exactly what Ellie's doing and to live in that moment, to live in the weight, because what you do matters, the cruelty of Elie matters, and if you don't understand that, you're not going to understand the rest of the game beyond a fundamental level of like shoot the zombies.

It's brilliant.

Man.

Yeah, I don't think I could say it any better than you did.

That is absolutely how I felt about it, and I think it becomes even a little bit more intense, I guess I would say, because right before that square prompt, Norah recognizes Ellie.

She goes, oh my god, you're the immune girl.

And this basically confirms what we were talking about earlier.

The WLF grew out of the fireflies she and she immediately does.

She's like, oh my god, you're her.

They speak about her like she is a divine entity.

You're her.

Yeah, I'm glad that.

I'm glad that you called that out.

I didn't want to dance past that.

That's an important thing to note.

The WLF are not the bad guys that we're being led to believe that they are, or at least that's how it seems at this point in time.

Yeah, man, for sure.

Now here's something.

This is where we're going to end the episode, and I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this.

I don't remember feeling really much of anything about this the first time I played through.

I probably wasn't paying attention.

But this time around, I like, I stopped to think about this this.

I'm not sure that this next scene worked for me.

We mentioned we keep saying, or I should say, I keep saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, John, I keep saying that Ellie is turning into Joel day by day, his mannerisms, his lines of thought, his cruelty, And that's what I was thinking of here, Like, Okay, the transformation is complete, you know, this is the scene where she becomes Heisenberg, so to speak.

But then I wrote, or is she She returns to Jesse and Dina, she's basically in shock.

She can't look them in the eyes, she can barely speak.

She's covered in blood, and they're like, is that yours?

And when she doesn't say anything, they're like, oh shit, Like we know what happened, and what ends up happening is Dina like dresses your wounds, and all Ellie can even manage to squeak out is I made her talk.

She is so clearly broken by what just happened.

But I'm not sure that it works for me as the player, because we've seen Ellie knife somebody in the neck for no reason.

We've seen her kill countless WLF members.

We've killed dogs, We've shot dogs in the head or lit them on fire.

We have been doing this constantly, and I'm not sure why this one moment traumatized and shocked her so much.

I have one theory that I could think of, but I want to hear what you have to say, John, Did this work for you?

I should say, I don't want to prime you to like side with me.

Did this or did this not work for you?

If it did work for you, I'm curious to hear why you think that I might be wrong.

I think it does work for me.

It's important to note for this scene too, that Ellie has her shirt off.

You don't see anything, you know, explicit or anything like nudity, but you see the literal physical toll that this has taken on her.

You see the cuts and bruises and blood and stuff, and I think that deck comes into place.

She is just oh my god, she's worn down.

It looks like she's been hit by a mac truck.

I think to answer your question though, why this one is different, I think it's because of it being the first time that she's enacted like torture where everything else it's just like we've killed people, some of us have killed dogs because we could.

This was like, I am going to fully embrace drol and who he was as a person and literally torture this person for information that I want and need.

And I think that's probably the thing, at least for me.

Why I think it works is like she's using her superpower here of being immune in a negative way.

She's kind of like Homelander from The Boys in a way where she's fully on just being a dick.

Right, Like, let's face it, Ellie is being a complete dick here, much like Homelander is a dick in that TV show.

And she's fully using that superpower of being immune here and doing it in a way that is torturous.

And I think that Ellie's thinking even though she said, hey, I can make this quick or I can make it much worse.

I don't think there was a single ounce of Ellie's b and that was going to say, I'm going to make this quick.

We don't know necessarily how it ended, but as the player on the stick pressing square, we hit her what is it three times?

At least twice?

Yeah, and it could have been more.

As we see her later, she's got the like trembling in her hands and she's all bloodied and everything, So it could have been a half dozen more times.

We don't know, but we don't even need to know.

Well, we know it's more because what's the first thing that she says to Dina.

I made her talk and we did not hear her talk.

Yeah, yeah, I you know, speaking with you, I mean, maybe it does work for me, because that's the exact thing that I was thinking, like, if I'm going to argue that this works, it's got to be the torture angle.

And that's actually a good point that I did not consider that You brought up the fact that she's using her immunity for ill and I mean this was set up perfectly with the last flashback.

You know, we're we're seeing we're seeing her immunity in the flashback being taken taken away from her in so far as she didn't get to choose to make the vaccine, and how much that hurt her.

We know that she wanted to use that for good, but now she's using it as a way to seem relentless, to appear malicious, and to say, yeah, look look at what I can do.

You're gonna die.

I'm not gonna die, so you might as well tell me what what what you know?

Otherwise I'm gonna, you know, knock your teeth out one by one.

I did not consider that point.

Actually, I think that's that's a great point.

Maybe this does work for me.

Maybe maybe you've convinced me on as I swayed you.

All Right, Yeah, she she is totally totally.

I think being a dick is putting it very kindly.

Yeah, she's she's torturing somebody face to face.

Uh, she's finally, you know, she's been talking about this the whole time.

You know, I will kill him if we have to, And now she is, you know, she has to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

But that's kind of where this ends.

I don't think that we pointed out where Day one turned into day two, But this is the point where Day three starts, which is all we're going to cover today.

I had wanted to cover day three as well.

I just couldn't get that far and it turned out okay.

I mean, this episode is plenty long enough.

So between next time and the final episode, we'll get through day three, we'll get through the next three days that happen after that, and then that infamous ending, which I'm looking forward to for sure.

Man.

But if you're listening, thank you for sticking around to the end, and thank you John for joining again for such a long conversation about a game that I know you know like the back of your hand.

Thanks for stopping by, of course, Man, thanks again for having me back my pleasure.

What's new in the land of the Video Game Lounge?

You want to tell us about what's going on over there?

Sadly, nothing new, and unfortunately it is kind of bad news.

I'm looking it's looking like the doors of the lounge are going to be closed, and this time probably permanently.

Not anything like that or malicious happening in the background.

It's just my co host Elisa and I as we record in different countries and also different time zones.

It's just been really hard to record and actually sync up times just to have an episode between his work.

He's also started online grad school, so his time has been severely limited.

And I, you know, we had conversations before, just like I never wanted the podcast to take over, like us just meeting up once a week and hanging out and shooting the shit.

So we're putting the focus back more on that.

And you know, we were having podcasts before we started hitting the record button anyway, So it's just one of those scenarios where it's like wanting to keep the friendship alive more than having, you know, the podcast.

So totally fine, We're all good.

But if you want to know more of our thoughts on like Last of Us Part two, the TV show, go check it out.

We did like an episode by episode breakdown which was really fun, and we had some other stuff on there as well where we broke down like and or season one and two that was a lot of fun.

And we just like video game topics.

We did like protagonists and favorite stories and things like that.

So if you want to just get more of like what my co host and I think about video games or popular TV shows like Love to Have You check it out.

My plan at this point is to keep the episodes up until the end of the year, so once twenty six rolls around, you won't hear more from the Video Game Lounge unfortunately, but say lovey.

Yeah, at least you're going out on your own terms.

I mean, it's not like, you know, you hate to see when two or more hosts really start to resent each other and that's why it ends, which admittedly and thankfully we haven't really seen that in our friend groups, so that's nice, but it happens, and it's good that you're you know, you're going out how you wan to go out, and that's great that you're prioritizing the friendship first.

I mean, that's how it should be.

You can check out Video Game Lounge.

You can find links to their stuff in the episode description.

As always, in the episode description, you can also find links to Pixel Project Radio stuff, to the socials, Blue Sky, and Instagram, mostly to the free Discord, which would be great if you wanted to join that, to the Patreon if you feel so empowered to support the show that way.

You can find all of that and more in the episode description.

So once again, thank you listeners for sticking around for so long.

Parentheses complimentary Thank you John for taking the time to lend your expertise over here.

And with that, I think it's about time to end the show for this week, but we'll catch you next time, wrapping up the last most part two in a couple more episodes.

Thanks folks, Take care you say about that just begable statement, said Abating.