The day after completing The Last of Us Part II, I was recounting the ending for my wife, Marissa, and spontaneously burst into tears. Something hit me and I started full-on sobbing, to the point that Marissa had to step away from the work on her laptop to comfort me. While I may not have shed tears when playing the game itself, I was clearly moved by it. The story greatly affected me, like a play or novel or any dramatic art aims to.

Now just to put a disclaimer up front, I must say that this is a brutally violent and disturbing game. The violence isn’t particularly over-the-top or cartoonish either, it’s generally pretty grounded and realistic. And that, in combination with the supremely well-realized and three-dimensional characters, this violence is appropriately shocking and intensely disturbing. Even some of the actions you have to perform as the protagonist in the course of the story are repulsive. Please take the game’s Mature 17+ rating seriously.

That said, for such a bleak and depressing game, The Last of Us Part II actually has a surprising amount of beauty and joy and...dare I say...love in it. While the plot mainly turns on people’s darker motivations, and acts of vengeance, this is a distinctly human game. There’s just so much heart, so much care invested into the production of this sprawling AAA epic. It manages to create something both large-scale and yet deeply personal at the same time.

TLOU a particularly stressful game. It's basically stealth combat gameplay, against fungal zombies and murderous human enemies alike. It's also really f#^king scary, with the sequel being far scarier than the original, in my opinion. This game is downright terrifying at times.

While "Survival Horror" has been a game genre for a while now, it has rarely been done with this level of seriousness on the "survival" part. TLOU is all about slinking around the crumbling ruins of civilization, scavenging for food and supplies, and turning the scrap you can recover into various weapons and other survival tools.

Along the way you go through peoples’ homes, rummaging through their possessions for anything useful. Considering this game takes place in the year 2038, cities are usually overgrown with vegetation and buildings are in pretty rough shape. At times you feel like an archaeologist studying a long-dead society (from 2013), and that’s pretty awesome. I especially love the era-accurate laptop computers, DVDs, and PS3’s you come across in Seattle homes.

Handwritten notes to loved ones—or in some cases, to reviled betrayers—can be read here and there, occasionally painting a revealing picture of the lives unseen characters led after the pandemic. The stories conveyed can range from mildly amusing to absolutely heartbreaking. But the way these tales unfold naturally to you—and the fact that engaging with them is usually entirely optional—is extremely impressive.

These notes also provide a way of setting up clever safe code puzzles, hints at how you can use environmental details to figure out combinations to locked safes. My favorite one of these involved working out the date of a fall wedding anniversary, using the husband’s note and the family calendar on the wall. Since my own wedding anniversary is in the fall—and we got married in 2013, no less!—it was ironically super easy for me to figure out.

A large portion of Part II is set in a post-apocalyptic Seattle and, as a Seattlite myself, I absolutely loved it. The care put into recreating recognizable Seattle landmarks—though with aspects or each location tweaked to fit within game design constraints—is truly masterful. Never before in a video game have I found myself so completely enthralled by the environment, having ‘uncanny valley’ callbacks to my own day-to-day life, and being compelled to explore basically every inch of the landscape. I found myself saying things like, “OK, well this store is clearly Nordstrom…” and “Haha, The Paramount Theater is called ‘The Pinnacle Theatre’…” and “Wait, this bookstore on Pike is actually The Cheesecake Factory!”

Clearly the game takes place after the massive earthquake inevitably hits Seattle, because there is a truly insane amount of flooding, with swift flowing water all throughout the city. Between that, a massive thunderstorm, and the Puget Sound swelling like the high seas, Naughty Dog has taken some considerable creative license in imagining the Emerald City circa 2038. Despite some of this being quite a stretch, it’s all so cool that I fully approve.

Much like Naughty Dog's Uncharted series, TLOU features some truly compelling storytelling, with incredibly well-acted performances from the entire cast. The stealth and scavenging gameplay is good fun, sure, but the narrative is the real reason to play this one. Plus the story and its pacing have clearly been prioritized in development, with plenty of pure character moments, told in mostly violence-free flashbacks, interjected throughout the campaign. The Birthday Gift level, for example, was a genuinely lovely and tender moment, showing the player a little more of Joel and Ellie’s relationship in the absence of mortal threat. It’s precisely the kind of storytelling-for-storytelling’s-sake that only this studio would dare to create.

Joel teaching Ellie to play guitar is also an incredibly nice touch. Maybe it’s just because my own Dad is a classical guitarist (and amazing musician overall), but the passing down of musical skills to the younger generation really hits home for me as the most fatherly act possible. I especially love that the game lets you play the instrument—similar to playing the Ocarina of Time in that one Zelda game—utilizing the PS4 controller’s touchpad for intuitive strumming. You can even take a break from the chaotic violence to practice your guitar every once in while. Simply beautiful.

I dare not say much more as, again, the story is the main draw here; I really don’t want to spoil any of it for you. But I feel compelled to mention that the game has two playable characters: Ellie (who you know from the first game) and Abby (who’s new). Now Abby is a very muscular and physically intimidating woman, and I’ve heard that a certain segment of the gaming population did not care for her design. All I will say is that Abby absolutely kicks ass, and if you don’t like her character, you’re just wrong.

If you enjoy zombie movies/post-apocalyptic survival stories and stealth games—and you can stomach a lot of blood, gore, and violence of the non-glorified, intentionally off-putting kind—then you really must play The Last of Us Part II. I would actually recommend playing Part 1 first and then Part 2, just to get the full effect, though you technically could just jump into the sequel if you wanted to. While the intensity of the this game might not be for everyone, the powerful storytelling deserves to be played by as many people as possible. Highly Recommended!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel compelled to practice some guitar….