HBO announces The Last of Us Season 2 release date: April 13

Pedro Pascal as Joel in The Last of Us Season 2 — (Image credit: HBO)

HBO has finally announced the premiere date for The Last of Us Season 2. Back in January they told us it was coming in April, but today they got a bit more specific: The Last of Us Season 2 premieres on April 13.

Season 2 will reintroduce us to sad dad Joel (Pedro Pascal) and tough teen Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they continue fighting to survive an apocalypse full of, well, mushroom monsters. The new season jumps ahead to five years later and adds to the cast with Kaitlyn Dever as Abby and Catherina O'Hara in an as-yet unknown role that didn't appear in the games. Jeffrey Wright is also returning as his Season 1 character, Isaac Dixon.

There's another option: don't wait for the show at all. As Morgan said recently, good as the show has been so far, you should really play The Last of Us 2 and experience the whole story yourself before watching the 10-episode version of it on TV. "Season one was a worthy interpretation of the game, but HBO's Joel and Ellie had drifted far away from their originals by the finale," Morgan said. With an even shorter run in Season 2, I think the likelihood is high that the show cuts even more story corners this time around.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.