The Last of Us Part 2: Virtual tourism in the reclaimed nature of Seattle

I hear traffic moves along I5 about as quickly here as it did in the Old World.

Video games often make for surprisingly great tour guides. Massive Entertainment went to painstaking lengths to recreate its barely-fictional version of Washington DC for The Division 2. There are numerous tours in Italy themed around Assassin’s Creed II’s faithful recreation of Florence.

I’ve played hundreds, if not thousands, of video games in my lifetime, but I've never had the experience of being familiar with a game space that was trying to emulate real life.

This is largely because I've spent 93.0255 percent (That’s real math!) of my life living in a godless meadow with no internet. What do you know about LANing your laptop to your Xbox 360 to play Halo 3 online with one of these? (Yes, I was THAT teleporting wizard Spartan terrorizing you in ranked, but you still won’t 1v1 me on Guardian.)

Anyway

All of that changed when I moved to Seattle, a city that doesn’t require people to be locals to have heard of it.

The Last of Us Part 2 dropped a little more than a week ago and, while the internet has proven that there is a lot to discuss, today I have chosen the one topic that would net me—empirically—the fewest page views.

You guys are foaming at the mouth for Cyberpunk 2077, but I’m here to talk about Seattle 2038.

Being a Seattleite who generally dislikes coffee is almost as much of a cursed existence as The Last of Us Part 2.

Almost.

OK, so when I asked for that experience earlier of being intimately familiar with a game space, I’ll concede that The Last of Us Part 2 threw a hurdle or two in my way. For starters, Mother Nature is reclaiming her time, so to speak.

Rent is still $2,400 a month.

Also, a number of factions like the Washington Liberation Front (WLF) have carved out a slice of the city for themselves, though that is a bit closer to Seattle’s reality than I care to admit.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

So it’s not exactly a 1-1 recreation of Seattle. No developer, not even one with ostensibly infinite resources, could deliver that.

Instead, Naughty Dog has done what I imagine most other studios do—they pick and choose famous locales, landmarks, etc. to recreate within reason and fudge the rest.

Hotel Sorrento, IRL, vs. Hotel Serevena

In the early goings of Ellie’s adventure, I was a little bummed that I recognized so little of their far-flung future vision of Seattle.

But as I skulked my way through Capitol Hill, I noticed the very same rainbow crosswalk that I’ve used dozens of times on my trip back from Phoenix Comics and Games.

Tolerance not included.

Several engaging, miserable hours later, I would instantly recognize the first major area of Seattle I ever committed to memory, a full four years before I moved here—the Washington State Convention Center, home of PAX, Emerald City Comic-Con, Sakura-Con, etc. etc.

This really blew me away. I was pretty lucky to find a photo that was so in line with my in-game screenshot.

I didn’t need them, but The Last of Us 2’s maps are pretty sweet.

It was here where I realized that I didn’t need an in-game prompt, maps or clever camera tricks to navigate toward Ellie’s destination, the Seattle Aquarium.

Speaking of the Seattle Aquarium, underfunded-but-still-appreciated water jail though it may be, it’s actually a little charming how much love it receives throughout The Last of Us Part 2.

There’ll be a mess, all right…

This game takes several choice inspirations from previous Naughty Dog works, including Uncharted: The Lost Legacy’s pseudo-open-world structure and The Last of Us: Left Behind’s walking-sim-like elements. The former was a nice surprise, but I find that it’s the latter inspiration that left a larger impression on me.

Back in the Before Times, I used to take a bus downtown (Remember buses?), pick a direction and just explore this new city that I call home. The Last of Us Part 2 recaptures some of that magic, albeit with several zombie-shaped caveats.

Much like IRL, anything can pop off on 3rd Avenue.

Neil Druckmann, director of The Last of Us Part 2, has already made it pretty clear that there are currently no plans for DLC. But I would kill (a lot more) for a Discovery Tour mode similar to Assassin’s Creed: Origins.  Until then, I guess this still beats going outside. (Remember outside?)