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A few months ago, OnePlus introduced a whopper of an Android phone with the OnePlus 7 Pro, but we never got its smaller sibling, the regular OnePlus 7, here in the states. Well, now OnePlus is announcing we’re all getting a new OnePlus 7T complete with a 90Hz screen, triple camera setup, and a new processor.

The OnePlus 7T really is a better OnePlus 7 Pro squeezed into a smaller package. The phone has been upgraded with 90Hz Fluid AMOLED display that also hits a 1,000-nit peak brightness to meet the latest HDR10+ certification.

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Naughty Dog didn’t intend to make its biggest game ever with The Last of Us Part II, back according to Creative Director (and co-writer) Neil Druckmann, the ambitions of the story necessitated it.

“We didn’t set out to make the biggest game we’ve ever done, we set out to tell this really ambitious story that became the biggest game we’ve ever done. And that’s why we took as long as we have,” Druckmann told me after my recent hands-on time with The Last of Us Part II.

“The story we laid out four years ago is really complex, has a large cast of characters. The core of it is simple, but where it goes and the twist and turns are complex,” he said. “We needed more time for cinematics, we needed more locations, we needed more types of enemies. So the scope of it kept growing.”

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The Last of Us Part II’s release date trailer gave us our first proper look at the first game’s protagonist, Joel, as he appears in the upcoming sequel. And given Joel’s relative absence in footage so far, as well as in the more than two hours I played of The Last of Us Part II, I was curious if that implied a downsized role or importance in the sequel.

So while speaking to Neil Druckmann, Naughty Dog Vice President and Creative Director of The Last of Us Part 2, I asked whether we should take Joel’s smaller role so far as indicative of his importance to Ellie in the sequel. Watch the video above to see his full response, plus some new gameplay from the sequel.

“Their relationship is strained. Some of it is because teenagers will be teenagers, and some of it is because of their history, which is why you haven’t seen them together a lot,” he said. “So much of The Last of Us is about this duo and their dynamic and how they are together, how they play together. I will say Joel plays a major part of this game.”

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After just over two hours of my first hands-on time with The Last of Us Part 2, I finished my last encounter, and let out one of the longest-held breaths of my gaming life. Following many tense battles with clickers and humans alike, I’m absolutely confident in Naughty Dog’s impressive, brutal combat, set in a richly-detailed world. And I’m equally intrigued by the teases of The Last of Us Part 2’s story I glimpsed throughout my demo, including a knockout performance by returning lead Ashley Johnson as Ellie.

This preview for The Last of Us Part 2 will clearly mark story-focused elements, for those who wish to know nothing about the narrative content shown in our demo. Also, be sure to watch the video preview above, which features new gameplay from The Last of Us Part 2.

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If you’ve seen a trailer or any preview footage for Code Vein, the elevator pitch is clear: It’s an “anime Soulslike” – an action-RPG that promises the steep challenge and cautious combat that we’ve all become very acquainted with in recent years. Code Vein doesn’t simply layer generic anime style and storytelling on top of a Souls clone and call it a day, though: its unique post-apocalyptic sci-fi-meets-anime horror atmosphere stands out, and its flexible class system and an AI partner distinguish it from its peers mechanically. Some of those ideas make things more frustrating than they need to be at times, but in this kind of game, a healthy dose of frustration comes with the territory. Code Vein deserves some credit for experimenting with this firmly established formula in ways others often don’t.

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Jake and Phil provide their in-depth impressions of The Last of Us Part II after getting hands-on with the PS4-exclusive.

The original Last of Us didn’t shy away from making you reflect on your actions. In the sequel, developer Naughty Dog aims to hit that theme even harder. The Last of Us Part II has a new, seemingly small detail that could add a lot of weight to each kill: Every human enemy has a name. And they do not like it when you kill their friends.

During a pre-release event, we interviewed The Last of Us Part II co-director Anthony Newman about the upcoming game. What we’ve played so far is incredibly intense, and a lot of your victims are healthy humans, not just infected. How this brutality affects Ellie’s humanity is a core aspect of the sequel, Newman explained.

“I think a big part of the theme of the game is the parts of your humanity that are lost or potentially stripped away when you pursue justice, or the lengths that you go for justice can potentially have, again, a very high human cost to you personally,” he said.

A big part of this is the emphasis on the humanity of the enemies you face. Every single one has a name, Newman told us, and they’ll often refer to each other by name when coordinating. “Not only does it show how intelligent they are that they’re able to coordinate, but by naming them they become that much more of a real human,” he explained.

“One thing that happened to me was I was fighting a couple of enemies. I grabbed one as a hostage to protect myself from another one. I shot the other one and the guy in my arms yelled, ‘Steven! No!’ Just showing … this very real concern for his compatriot that just fell. I was taken aback. I had never seen that particular confluence of our games’ systems and it really–it makes the enemies you’re fighting against feel more human, more deadly. It makes the combat situations that you’re in–it makes you just really realize how high the stakes are.”

From what we’ve played of The Last of Us Part II so far, it’s shaping up to be thematically heavier even without the guilt of killing someone’s friend and being forced to think of it that way. Dogs also have names and must be killed, which is also quite upsetting.

The Last of Us Part II is set to release on February 21, 2020, for PS4. If you haven’t played the original yet, it’ll be free through PS Plus in the month of October. We also learned a lot more about the game from the event; check out our full preview for The Last of Us Part II.

The Last of Us Part 2 is adding a lot of tweaks and changes to the formula established by its 2013 predecessor. But probably the most startling is the amped-up brutality you’ll see on-screen as Ellie shoots, stabs, chokes out, and hacks various other humans to death. Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic stealth series is about the horrific things you’ll have to do to survive and, in addition to murdering a lot of people, you’ll also be murdering a lot of dogs.

We recently spent about two hours playing The Last of Us Part 2 at a press event in Los Angeles, where Naughty Dog introduced us to its smarter, more dangerous human enemies. Joel and Ellie fought (and killed) truckloads of murderous human survivors in the first game, and Ellie faces more of them in the second–but this time, they’ve got scent-tracking attack dogs to use against you.

The dogs add some new wrinkles to stealth gameplay. If they cross the scent trail Ellie leaves as she moves around, they can track her, which means you have to worry about being rooted out on top of staying out of sight and being quiet. Often, you’ll have to keep moving or use a distraction to throw a dog off–you can’t just chill out behind a piece of cover to stay safe. Ellie’s increased mobility and new capabilities, like crawling through tall grass so she’s tougher to spot, help a lot, as do larger encounters with interior and exterior locations that give you plenty of options to keep moving and avoid being caught.

Stealthing through every situation and keeping out of combat is very tough, though, and it likely won’t be long before you’re forced to kill someone to keep yourself alive. If you get into a pitched battle with enemies, you’ll find attack dogs running you down, trying to knock Ellie down and rip out her throat. That means you’ll be shooting dogs, stabbing dogs, and sometimes slamming melee weapons like axes and machetes into dogs.

Of course, fighting attack dogs isn’t really anything new in video games, but Part 2’s focus on the savagery of fighting for your life makes these moments particularly harrowing. They’re amplified as well by the reactions of the dogs’ human companions when you kill one. After finishing off a dog, it’s common to hear its owner screaming out in anguish about the situation.

Hearing those pained cries is a horrific addition to an already awful situation–and a purposeful one. Co-director Anthony Newman said Part 2’s detailed kill animations are “meant to be unsettling,” and that goes for those times when you’re forced to fight and kill animals, too. And yeah, “unsettling” is definitely a good way to describe the whole situation.

Our play session featured a lot of humans roaming around with dogs, making the animals a serious threat, whether you’re in stealth or in combat. More often than not, we had no choice but to dispatch them, causing dog lover after dog lover to loudly mourn their canine buds–and loudly curse Ellie.

The Last of Us Part 2’s thematic focus is on pushing you to feel the impact of your actions as you work through its post-apocalyptic world. Ellie is on a crusade for justice (or vengeance) in Part 2, and Newman said the game is about humanity, and what you might have to sacrifice of it to stay alive in its brutal world. For animal lovers in particular, it seems like The Last of Us Part 2 is going to make that even harder to grapple with.

Note: This post contains some not-safe-for-work sexual language and a minor spoiler for The Last of Us 2.

Naughty Dog often slips self-referential Easter eggs into its games. Uncharted 4‘s playable version of Crash Bandicoot that Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher fire up in their living room might be the studio’s most memorable–until you discover the not-safe-for-work ones hiding in an early level of The Last of Us Part 2.

We played about two hours of The Last of Us Part 2 at a preview event in Los Angeles, which included an early mission featuring protagonist Ellie and her companion Dina out on patrol to search for the zombie-like infected. During the mission, the pair find themselves trapped in a bookstore by a snowstorm, and they discover a hidden room that another member of their team, the late Eugene, turned into a marijuana grow house.

Eugene’s hideaway includes a bunch of other personal items that Ellie and Dina discover as they wander around, like a gas mask bong, among other things. And then the two women discover Eugene’s stash of videotapes. Turns out, they’re old VHS porn videos.

Ellie finds that two of Eugene’s tapes aren’t family-friendly by reading their labels, which is where Naughty Dog makes two great jokes. Like in our world, somebody living in the universe of The Last of Us, before the game’s 2013 outbreak of the Cordyceps fungus that basically turns people into zombies, made some porn movies with pun titles to riff on existing media. In Eugene’s video collection, Ellie finds the phenomenally titled “Smash Brandi’s Cooch”–a play on Naughty Dog’s own beloved PlayStation platformer, Crash Bandicoot.

The second parody is more for eagle-eyed fans of The Last of Us. It’s called “Dong of the Wolf,” which is an in-universe reference rather than a callback to a Naughty Dog game title. Back in The Last of Us, you might have noticed billboards and posters for a movie called “Dawn of the Wolf Part 2,” which featured a man with wolfish features embracing a woman. Find a specific billboard and Joel and Ellie have a conversation about the film, which looks like a werewolf take on something like Twilight. Apparently, there was a market for a more hardcore version.

While those Easter eggs were the most ridiculous and outwardly hilarious of the ones we saw in Naughty Dog’s hands-on demo, they weren’t the only ones. Near Eugene’s porn stash, we found an in-game PlayStation 3 system with a stack of Naughty Dog games beside it, including Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3. The interesting implication here is that Naughty Dog existed within the fictional universe of The Last of Us (at least until the outbreak in 2013). Maybe the pornographers of the game’s world only coincidentally landed on a Crash Bandicoot-like name for their movie–or maybe it’s now The Last of Us canon that somebody making porn in that world was just a really big fan.