Abandoned storefronts and apartment buildings might hide notes from doomed former residents, scrap with which to fix up Ellie’s weapons or craft improvised explosives and health kits – or dormant infected ready to tear her to bits. Vegetation grows through the cars rooted to the highway and rusting skyscrapers preside over ominously empty streets. The city has been ravaged first by the military, then by the infected, and finally by nature. But a traumatic event drives her to leave the relative safety of Jackson on a revenge mission that takes her to the remains of Seattle. Since the events of The Last of Us (2013), she has been living in a stable community of survivors, making friends, learning the guitar, kissing girls at dances. We play as Ellie, a 19-year-old born a few years after a fungal illness devastated human civilisation, turning the afflicted into shambling, deformed husks and the world’s cities into overgrown relics. It is difficult to explain how exactly it does this without robbing players of the chance to experience it for themselves, but I will say this: no video game has ever gone to these lengths to humanise the enemy, or to interrogate the violence that it asks the player to perform. ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” So goes the saying popularly (if spuriously) attributed to Confucius – a proverbial truth that The Last of Us Part II explores, unflinchingly and sometimes gruesomely, for 30 hours.

Last of us face models