I am one of those people who was a little confused as to why The Last of Us Part II Remastered was launching with a roguelike mode. You could argue that the nature of Part II’s story and its analysis of the cyclical nature of revenge and grief lends itself to the structure of a roguelike, but the remaster’s new No Return mode is devoid of the storytelling of the main game. Instead, it offers an avenue for players to reacquaint themselves with and master Part II’s excellent combat mechanics. That’s not nothing, but it certainly feels like an odd addition to a franchise that primarily leans on its storytelling. And so my first question for The Last of Us Part II Remastered game director Matthew Gallant–who served as lead systems designer for the original game–was fairly straightforward: “Why do this?”
“When we were looking at making The Last of Us Part II Remastered, we were looking at what were some of the cool things we could do with the game and combat AI–those kinds of systems–are really in my blood and my background,” Gallant answered. “And in The Last of Us, yes, the combat connects to the larger themes of the story and the narrative of the game but it’s also just a really great, really robust system that is really fun and it’s designed in a way where there is a lot more to it than we thought we could do with it.”
Having now played about three hours of No Return, the biggest transformation that the roguelike structure has on Part II’s gameplay is the way it raises the stakes. Unless you’re playing Part II with the permadeath modifier enabled, death in combat is only a minor setback where a few minutes of progress is lost. My biggest issue with the permadeath modifier in Part II is that it makes death a huge setback where potentially dozens of hours can be lost. No Return is a nice in-between option, encouraging you to approach each fight with the wariness that a mistake can ruin a run but the comfort that each run lasts only about an hour at most. A loss hurts, but it’s not going to make me put the game down in frustration and never touch it again.