The Last of Us Part II: Long Live Rat King
Though The Last of Us’s premise is built upon an incurable virus turning people into shambling fungus zombies, the Infected only provide the backdrop to classic tales of love and hate, sacrifice and revenge. People, The Last of Us argues, are the real monsters. This is reiterated time and time again throughout The Last of Us Part II, as Ellie slaughters her way down the West Coast to find the people who murdered her father.
The Last of Us Part II offers a bigger world than the first game, and with arguably two protagonists it’s less linear than the first, but it feels limited by that scope. Neither of the games ever interrogate why society has fallen into violent and territorial groups. The violence is an inevitability; humanity, when challenged, will bare its monstrous underbelly, a commentary that never seems to genuinely engage with humanity or monstrosity. The world is violent and cruel because it has always been violent and cruel. Violence is currency; each cruelty is repaid in kind.
If anything, the abundance of violence undersells what might be the most interesting aspect of the game, Rat King, by never letting it be anything more than a mid-story boss fight. Rat King, as its name sort-of implies, is a particularly monstrous Infected. Rat King is the Infected: the first patients responsible for the outbreak in America. After twenty-odd years it has mutated into a nearly indistinguishable conglomerate of flesh and limbs. Rat King is an objectively horrifying reminder of a universal event — Outbreak Day — in a world that is usually only concerned with the personal.
Part of the reason I think The Last of Us worked was because of its hyperfocus on Joel. His and Ellie’s journey was linear in such a way that I never really thought about how the rest of the world handled the outbreak because I didn’t have to. I had a harder time accepting the reality of their world when its response is largely at odds with our own in real life. Part II offers so much more to explore, but there was a tension between the tight focus of the narrative and the wider scope of the world in which it exists, and Rat King exemplified it.
In the end, Rat King was only an obstacle between deuteragonist Abby and some supplies, but the horror of the descent into Rat King’s basement and that point of connection to a narrative larger than Ellie’s desperate revenge tour was wildly compelling. I only wish that both Ellie and Part II could have moved past their bloodlust in a way that better embraced the game’s scope.
