Here's what key moments from The Last of Us 2 look like from the other character's perspective

The Last of Us 2
(Image credit: Naughty Dog)

A creative The Last of Us 2 player has created a series of images showing key moments from the game from the perspective of different characters. 

*Major spoilers for The Last of Us 2 incoming*

The Last of Us 2

(Image credit: Naughty Dog)

Perspective, and how it affects the way we interact with stories, is one of the key themes in The Last of Us 2. Was Joel right to save Ellie at the end of The Last of Us even though doing so doomed the development of a potentially world-saving vaccine? Well, objectively no, but it's a whole lot easier to sympathize with him when you've spent a whole game in his shoes, losing his only child and then slowly finding a surrogate daughter in Ellie.

The Last of Us 2 shows what happens when Joel's actions are seen from a different perspective, namely that of Abby, daughter of a scientist working on the vaccine who Joel brutally murdered. Controversially, the sequel literally flips your perspective and has you play as Abby through large portions of the game, even throwing you into several vicious fights with Ellie herself. Those can be uncomfortable scenes, but they force you to see Ellie in three dimensions, faults and all, and they ask you to consider Abby's motivations for killing off the first game's main protagonist early on in the sequel. 

Here, Redditor h1pster9 uses a mod to move the camera behind the non-player character in several pivotal scenes from The Last of Us 2 - including the absolutely agonizing confrontation at the end - again giving players the chance for some introspection. Have a look.

"I understand the Naughty Dog's intentions with making us play a certain character at a certain story beats. And it's quite brilliant when you understand those intentions. For example, when I got to the Theatre Confrontation chapter for the first time I was very mad but on consecutive playthroughs I kinda liked it. It shows how truly scary Ellie is," H1pster9 writes. "But nevertheless, It was still fun to shift the perspective and wonder how it would play out if it was real."

Expectedly, the pictures prompted a lively, though largely respectful, debate about the morality of Ellie and Abby's actions in the Reddit comments, which we're pretty sure is precisely what Naughty Dog and Druckmann were aiming for.

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Jordan Gerblick

After scoring a degree in English from ASU, I worked as a copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. Now, as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer, I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my apartment, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.