You get to know Abby as a person, as she turns against her own people to try and save two young siblings from a rival group. You get to know her friends, the same ones that you hunted down and killed in the first half of the game. Playing through the next half of the game as Abby, you get to know her father via flashbacks and see firsthand how his death affected her and still haunts her. So Joel killed them all and rescued Ellie, saving her life but effectively destroying any chance at a vaccine to the virus that has ravaged humanity. AbbyвЂ™s father was the doctor trying to develop a vaccine from EllieвЂ™s immunity, but the process would have killed Ellie. The narrative here fills in the gaps as to why Abby traveled so far to kill Joel, as we learn Joel actually killed her father in the climax of the first Last of Us seven years ago. This sets up the next half of the action, which finds Ellie working her way through a hit list of sorts, once sheвЂ™s tracked down the group that traveled from Seattle to Washington to kill Joel.Д®llieвЂ™s quest finally comes to a head when her target Abby gets the drop on her, gun drawn.ДЄt this point, the game resets, in a sense, and you once more play the events of the past few days, but from AbbyвЂ™s perspective - essentially turning the young woman youвЂ™ve been hunting the past 13 or so hours into the gameвЂ™s second protagonist. JoelвЂ™s brother Tommy does the same, with Ellie and her girlfriend Dina close behind. In the sequel, fresh off JoelвЂ™s death, the game shifts to a tale of revenge, with JoelвЂ™s surrogate daughter of sorts, Ellie, setting off across the country to exact vengeance. Video games have increasingly been a venue for complex, admirable storytellingВ - and few titles have done so much to elevate it as a whole as The Last of Us franchise.

Instead, we got to watch the first gameвЂ™s main protagonist, Joel, be brutally murdered in the gameвЂ™s opening prologue - and that was just the first surprise of many.

**Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us Part II.**Д¬onsidering the first game has sold more than 20 million copies and counting, it wouldnвЂ™t have been a surprise for developer Naughty Dog and director Neil Druckmann to return to this world with a bigger, louder sequel focused on the same fan-favorite characters that made Part I such a hit. But, it was only a precursor to the kind of complicated story to come in the recently released sequel, The Last of Us Part II. It was textured, nuanced, and unflinchingly brutal. When The Last of UsВ came out for the PlayStation 3 seven years ago, it told an ambitious story set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic America.

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