10 Horrific Moments In The Last Of Us Part 2, Ranked

The Last Of Us Part 2 is developer Naughty Dog’s masterful swan song for the Playstation 4, earning several game-of-the-year awards and accolades. It didn’t release without its controversies, as some players felt the plot didn’t measure up to the first game, but it nonetheless proved itself as a technical achievement in gaming. Releasing during a worldwide pandemic, it’s dark and dire storyline along with visceral gameplay made for some uncomfortable playing in a very strange year.

Naughty Dog was sure to stuff the title full of disturbing and sad moments, but there were several downright terrifying moments for players to experience throughout the tense adventure.

10 Every Dog Death

Less terrifying than it is horrifically upsetting, the idea of introducing dogs as enemies (and in some cases, allies) into the game instantly made fans dread the interactions. It makes the game more thrilling to have animals following players’ scent during encounters to keep them on their toes, but the expectation to kill them had some players refusing to harm them at all. Eventually, as the game gets harder and more intense, there will be some situations between life or death where a dog will need to be killed in order to survive, and knifing them in the throat as they try to bite you is the only way to go.

Even a crucial story moment has Ellie murder a dog that Abby later has as an ally in a flashback mission. And the less said about the sounds they make when they are hit with Molotov cocktails, the better.

9 Hanging Bodies

When Ellie and Dina enter the Seattle TV station after an arduous journey through the downtown core, they stumble upon the terrifying sight of several hanging and mutilated bodies dangling in a large open room. The bodies belong to the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), a militia group who are the antagonists of Ellie’s side of the journey, but that doesn’t make the moment any less horrifying.

This is around when the game starts mentioning the “Scars,” another mysterious faction that hasn’t been introduced in the story yet, but the players are given a full introduction to their murderous tendencies through this ghastly sight.

8 Escaping The Forest

From one hanging scene to another, Abby is eventually caught and hung by the Scars, whose real name is the Seraphites. They hang her from a tree, threatening to gut her with a knife, and are very close to outright killing her before the attackers are killed by a young ex-Seraphite, who has left the group and is there to rescue their sibling, who was being tortured alongside Abby.

The two siblings are on the run and tell unarmed Abby to follow them through the pitch-black forest and to avoid the “demons” along the way. It turns out the demons are hordes of infected, and if Abby strays from the light of the torch held by her rescuers, she’ll be eaten to death in the darkness of the rainy trees.

7 The Haven Fight

Abby becomes quite protective of the Seraphite siblings, Lev and Yara, and travels with them as they try to survive together. Eventually, Lev leaves to find their mother is on an island that the Seraphites have taken over, containing a settlement named Haven. Abby and Yara follow in pursuit and arrive just as the WLF launches an attack on the island. Yara is heroically killed saving Abby and Lev, and as the two escape, the entire village burns to the ground as an all-out warzone erupts.

The final moment of the sequence is when a tall Seraphite member attacks the duo, and Abby is fighting for her life in a brutally bloody encounter. The man wields a large sledgehammer with a sharp pick on its end, and the fight is an anguishing exercise in terrifying gratuitous violence. It ends with Abby repeatedly stabbing the man in the face, and players all collectively stopped to take a moment to breathe after the horrifying event.

6 Shimmer’s Death

When Ellie and Dina set off to Seattle at the start of their journey, they bring along Shimmer, a horse from their home settlement in Jackson, WY as their mode of transportation. Players begin to form a bond with the animal as they explore all of the vast buildings and large open areas of downtown Seattle.

When Abby and Dina are casually trotting along, their guards (and the players) completely down, a jump-scare of an explosion occurs as Dina is knocked over the edge of the street railing and Ellie lays on the ground hopeless as the WLF approach her and the mortally injured horse, planting a bullet in its head.

5 First Seraphites Encounter

Ellie first stumbles upon the Seraphites in a fern-covered overgrown segment of Seattle, where strange whistle patterns cut through the air and the player is forced to hide in the vast shrubbery from an unseen enemy. This is the first formal introduction to the “Scars” as Ellie has known them by, and as players creep through the bushes, a sudden shrill whistling is heard and an arrow fires out of the trees and into Ellie’s shoulder.

At this point, the game is telling you that you are being hunted, and you are in their territory. The communicative whistling only adds to the intensity of their encounters.

4 Shamblers In The Tunnels

The first The Last Of Us game had a large, grotesque infected enemy named the Bloater and the sequel introduced a new variant that has become affected by much more fungus growing around its head and upper torso. The enemy sprays poisonous acid from its disgusting body and has white glowing eyes that hunt the player through dark areas.

The first encounter with this enemy is when Abby and Dina are in the tunnels beneath Seattle, and the horrifying beings ambush them in a room full of other infected. The game does a great job in causing immediate panic when the Shamblers quickly shuffle their way towards players, knowing their immediate course of action is to get as far away from them as possible.

3 The Skyscraper Bridges

If any players who are utterly terrified of heights reached the “skyscraper bridge” part of The Last Of Us Part 2, they surely had to constantly wipe the sweat from their hands while playing this section. Abby and Lev are trying to reach a building that contains supplies, and Lev assures Abby that there are bridges to cross between the massive skyscrapers. They end up being rickety, wooden structures that the Seraphites built, and would absolutely not pass any safety inspections due to how open and unprotected they are.

Players can feel the sheer height of how high they are when they look down as they slowly inch their way across narrow beams and railings, and the sequence ends with a crane that needs to be tiptoed across during high winds. It’s vertigo-inducing and absolutely terrifying.

2 Joel’s Death

Joel and Ellie were the main characters of The Last Of Us, and it would be an understatement to say players grew very fond of Joel as a character. His and Ellie’s relationship became more loving as the game went on, and you knew they truly cared for each other like a family. When Part 2 begins, their relationship is strained, and Ellie has distanced herself after revelations of Joel’s actions from the first game.

His actions come back to bite him in the form of Abby and her WLF crew, who capture Joel and his brother and unmercifully beat him to death with a golf club. Ellie stumbles in just to witness the final blows and is left staring at Joel’s crushed face as he barely acknowledges her through all of the blood. Players were more than shocked and terrified during this scene, which has become one of the most divisive and controversial deaths in gaming ever.

1 Rat King

Of course, it has to be the Rat King at number one, the absolutely terrifying abomination waiting for players in the “Ground Zero” segment of the game, which sees Abby exploring the lower levels of a hospital to restore power. The area is dark, flooded, full of infected, and genuinely one of the worst areas in the game, and, because of course there is, a massive hulking infected is waiting at the end of the sequence, comprised of multiple infected that have fused together into one putrid amalgamation.

It chases players relentlessly through hallways, charging like a rhino, and can instakill Abby if it grabs a hold of her. The whole sequence is running away from the thing while desperately searching for ammo in a claustrophobic and dark maze of hallways, and ends with another battle against smaller infected that have fallen from the monstrosity and scuttled away. In the end, the return to killing normal infected in the fresh air outside felt all too welcoming.

About The Author