It's been a while since the last time I posted an actual review, but this product seems rather controversial, and I certainly have an opinion about it, so yeah, let's go!

The Last of Us Part I is a Remake of the well-known legendary game from 2013. It's the same story everyone knows, but with enhanced visuals and other cool stuff. The whole problem around this game is the fact, that it had a remastered version, so yeah, was this game necessary? Well... I would say "Yes, but actually no".

Let's not make this too long, at first, I played in fidelity mode with VRR, so the game opted for the best visuals. The game is absolutely stunning, it pushed the possibilities of PS5, and is the best looking game I've played on this console so far, excluding MW2's Amsterdam mission (not a fair comparison, as it was a really short and small segment, but Sweet Mother of Jesus, was it spectacular) and Horizon Forbidden West (it seems to be a popular choice for the best looking game, but I haven't played it). Reflections in this game are beyond me, water, mirrors, surfaces, even blood splatters, everything is top-notch. The game offers the pinnacle of interior design, and it will leave you with an open mouth. Nature segments with lots of grass, vines and everything are also really spectacular, one mission in the storm was super climatic and amazingly done.

Everything that I described above worked perfectly in fidelity VRR mode, that offered 30-35 fps gameplay that was absolutely smooth. Everyone prefers 60 fps, but I went for visuals and I don't regret it, after all that's why you're buying this version of the game. The fps were as smooth as they can get, not like in some other games, where 30 fps feel like 15 (looking at you, AC: Valhalla).

Animations in the game are a work of art, wounds and gore are both super realistic, they're at the level of RDR2 or TLoU2. The game also added new stuff, like modding your weapons in gunsmith, everything is great to look at and adds to the immersion.

The game utilizes dualsense's haptic feedback just fine, it adds the next layer of immersion and is simply fun.

It doesn't have multiplayer, but I'm pretty sure no one will miss it, at least the platinum trophy isn't a chore now.

The game includes the "Left Behind" DLC, that's pretty... Cute. It's short, it's quite fun, but I would be pretty disappointed if I paid for it separately, it doesn't really bring that much to the table.

They added bonus content like different filters (8-bit mode for example), 3D models showcase, making off and more. It was pretty fun to go through all of it once.

Everything else is the same, legendary and incredible story with rather boring gameplay that has its better moments. The game always had a cinematic feeling to it, so it's no surprise it has a TV-show now.

So yeah, is it worth it? For the full price? Hell no, even for these awesome visuals that will make you fall off your couch. For discounted price? Depends on the price, but if you haven't played it before, I would go for it, 35$ seems fair. Retail copy to resell, or trade with a friend? Absolutely, if you haven't played the game before, or you played it long enough to want to relive it.

9/10

"It can't be for nothing."

~Wo

They took one of the greatest games ever made and simply made it better, simple as that. The graphic updates don't necessarily detract from the age of the game (especially in Boston) but they're still gorgeous and bring the game right in line with Part II. The new/updated character designs especially are INCREDIBLE, just adding that much more emotion (and pain) to the cutscenes with the more advanced mocap tech. When Ellie and Joel are in the truck driving to Pittsburgh it FEELS souch closer to scenes from part II like the space museum because it's the SAME Ellie.

Where I think this remake really shines though is the implementation on the DualSense. You can FEEL when it's raining, the adaptive triggers are done extremely well (especially on the bow), and it all just further immerses you in the game. And it's still at it's core just a 10/10 game. To me.

Long story short: does this remake NEED to exist? No! No video game ever needs to exist we're just here to have fun! But I'm sure glad it does. And if the price is bugging you (which, to be fair I'm not gonna justify. This is one of 5 games I would be willing to pay any price for any version of but if people were paying $70 for a remake of Skyrim I would judge them relentlessly), it's a PlayStation game and Black Friday is 2 months away. If it's not down to at LEAST $40 by then I'll eat a hat.

A study on the illusion of choice, told through a medium that turned it into a mechanic and built entire genres around it. An indictment of the belief that your present shapes your future and not the other way around.

Revisiting this story after years of think pieces and impassioned rants, what struck me most was the inevitability of it all. With each kill, Ellie and Joel form a bond through shared trauma; with each loss, they grow into one another, compensating where the other falters, each becoming a crutch for the part of the other’s soul that has been torn away. By the end, there is no choice—not really. They are two halves of a whole, but where Ellie is willing to sacrifice that wholeness for something greater, Joel—a man far more familiar with death and the existential finality of everything—sees nothing “more.” To him, what they have is the only thing worth anything at all.

We rarely discuss how parasitic love can be, almost addictive in the way it hijacks your senses and asserts itself as the highest priority, even above self-preservation. This remnant of our instinct to build community is something we have built entire cultures around, honed entire art forms in celebration and dedication to. Can anything that powerful ever be wholly good?

I hear they retconned this version of the game by changing some subtle face animations but I'm gonna be honest: It's a tropey game made by a Zionist who cares.

Do I respect The Last Of Us? Only in the sense that I respect it more than the other video games that have suffered for it's plague on the industry of making everyone set themselves up for a cinematic experience. The Last of Us is like the reverse Earthbound, everything inspired by it is somehow worse than it (Earthbound often inspires things greater than it because at best it's just an okay RPG)

The last of us is like the anti-auteur game, where as something like Earthbound or Death Stranding are games that will give you artistic intent overdose, while TLOU shows you what happens when some 200 people who are all completely and utterly both artistically AND morally bankrupt make a video game by committee.

Okay so what is also interesting about The Last of Us is that it is technically the most concrete example of video game equivalent of Oscar bait, and in the spectacular fashion of the video game medium, the oscar baits for video games are a lot worse and basically rely on things everyone loves, video games and it's demographic aren't exactly known as highbrow society, to do Oscar bait for gamers is easier than doing Oscar bait for self-centered actors that yet again wanna see a movie about what it means to be an artist, I assume this is how the direction of the game went: Oh man what do nerds who want their video games to be taken seriously want? Zombies? Gotta put zombies in there. Father relationships? Well some video game hobbysists did forget to pull out so that will pull at their strings.

You are working on a demographic that grew up shooting zombies and now some of that demographic are now fathers, so maybe you gotta make something for them now. I really can't shut my brain off when playing The Last of Us because everything feels so forced and pandering, but I guess the video game medium is special more than other mediums because you get to do shock content and gore and what not and still be the equivalent of "Playing it safe", isn't that wonderful in itself?

Violence has been so normalized in the video game medium that a video game like The Last of Us is considered "playing it safe", matter of fact The Last Of Us is playing it more safe than Call of Duty sometimes! You shouldn't be shocked about that statement because at the end of the day what you are looking is a pretentious zombie game that kinda honors the survival horror genre but also bastardizes it. I respect the video games that do not go out of their way to be taken seriously and are a thousand times more genuine than anything this surface-level B-Movie pretending to be an Oscar Movie with a Frankenstein of game design ideas it thought it was cool and stole across the video game medium, done usually better by game designers who first and foremost wanted to make a good video game and not do a legal loophole were they get to do a big budgeted video game instead of a movie on the basis that they would have to pay their union workers!!

With that said, they literally burned A LOT of money to make sure that the game is fun and engrossing enough that you go through a lot of it with not much complaints.

No really, what's here is GREAT, I kinda wish they just removed all of the weapon upgrading system because it's kind of pointless, apparently you can reap the benefits of having all of your weapons upgraded in an NG+ but I'm gonna be honest, this is not the type of game I want to replay at all, this game is not Resident Evil 4 by NO MEANS. The upgrading weapons animations are cute at first, I can appreciate seeing someone take care and handle their guns, but it just becomes absurd. Things like moving your hand around a weapon and suddenly it has higher capacity now?

...Okay nevermind I have complaints.

Do you like the walking simulator segments? Or do you think they get in the way of the actually kind of fun shooting sections that are well thought-out? Well I'm gonna be honest, it was THAT alone that made me decide to go from a 4/5 rating to a 3/5 rating, because any moment in TLOU that is not about shooting a guy is a moment that can be cut without meaningfully impacting the game in any notable way, It really depends if you respect The Last of Us honest attempt at trying to make Half-Life 2 puzzles but is more or less a glorified walking simulator segments that get in the way of the good combat, also I say that in a very loose way because most times when a game tries to replicate Half-Life Physics puzzles chances are it is entirely prepacked canned animations, "is this actually a physics puzzle, or are all of the allowed interactions predetermined?" But are you sure you don't want stupid ass scenes that all of the budget go to? (Please say yes we are SO ADDICTED To doing Uncharted cinematic interaction set pieces, all we need is one more fall, one more QTE)

You know fundamentally I don't know what to think of Last of Us outside of it essentially being a commodified roller coaster through utter hopeless and comical levels of despair and depression, but all of those attempts fall really flat, this is like a kid's idea of what is fucked up which I guess is expected because zombies media is by all accounts still an infantile genre that will always be limited to sci-fi exaggerating ideas of what people would act like in the apocalypse, and at the end of the day these video game developers got an action video game to sell, so let's make something that is basically: SET UP, action piece, set up, action piece, rinse and repeat. More on that later considering what you saw there was actually a description of the award winning "Plot".

Like in order to even sell your product you're like "Oh it's Half Life 2 but instead of one alien police faction it's all factions" you could imagine that they wanted nothing but to make the most MOVIE MOVIE game there is but couldn’t advertise it so they had to make it into a Resident Evil 4 clone of sorts. In the end the limit of the video game medium is: how can we monetize this big project?

And usually in the past the way to get by this while telling a good story is by selling a fantasy game and going to nerds like: “ooo you can cast spells in this”, while the writer that has been looking for a breakthrough for their story is basically making a gnome explain to a demographic of nerds what the meaning of life is, The Last of Us has no such thing though, this isn't Planescape Torment.

I think what is so funny about The Last of Us as a game is that it isn't quite like Call of Duty where it knows it wants to be an action movie, I’m gonna be honest how many action movies do you know that go on a tangent like this? Most action movies want to operate on comic book logic, while this video game that has come from a medium where everything usually operates on comic book logic decided to operate instead on Oscar bait logic, resulting in something very whiplashy.

It's getting inspiration from every critically acclaimed apocalyptic story but the story it tells is VERY BARE-BONES, and people always say: "oh but what about the characters? Surely you like the characters?" WHAT CHARACTERS? All I see is TROPES, literally this whole game is just cliche after cliche. The "PLOT" is simply moved by you going through multiple post-apocalypse tropes. The Last of Us is actually something unique in the sense that it really is inspired by schlocky shock content horror media (as is common in the zombie genre) but is trying to be HBO about it while also still trying to be Half-Life 2 where every 10 seconds of build up is rewarded with: You're not gonna believe it! You're gonna have to kill a lot of people.

This game was a critical and commercial success, but you need to ask yourself: is it only successful because they had the means to be successful though? That’s the real question, you can make anything popular with enough money! It’s successful because they advertised its massive budget pre-launch, everything about this game screams one thing: BUDGET. And yes I will admit holy shit this game LOOKS BEAUTIFUL these are some of the best post-apocalyptic sets I've seen ever in gaming, it's a pity it gets wasted on things that could have easily been cut out.

The days of subtle art in video games are long gone, and Sony is massively funding the cinematic game formula, i will tell you this though, this is a thousand times better than the god of war reboot, I think The Last of Us has a lot of karmic imbalance because it inadvertently showed Sony that every game has to follow a cinematic formula of kind, even if the first Last of Us is really just what happens if you put Resident Evil 4 + Half Life 2 and Uncharted in a blender.

I know for a fact this medium is not respected as an art because you can just do the most pretentious underwhelming act and act like art more than the true care and passion that goes into designing the art that is game design, you can throw a thousand cliches and tropes on the wall and people will eat it up, they'll act as if it is the very first movie they've ever played through. There's a lot of ways in which games can be seen as art but I don't think OSCAR BAITING IS QUITE THE WAY TO DO IT.

Games are art [naughty dog]: we must appear as refined as rightly as possible, in order to convince the masses that this is a valid artform games are art

[kojima productions]: don't look up the pigeons will shit in your eye and then youll slip in it and die lol

naughty dog: we would take a bullet for this medium

kojima: this medium will die with me if it is foolish enough to undervalue me

That is only one crude example! I'm sure you can think of more in which the video game medium is not limited to this game. But then again who cares! Who even merits the value of something based off it's relation to the medium that much? You can do whatever you want and still be criticized on those own merits rather than be compared to the whole medium, but The Last of Us is a special case where it is LITERALLY chained to it's medium. It is not an outcast, far from of it, like I've said this game plays it safe, but it has sort of a Stockholm syndrome towards the medium in a way?

Video games are a silly medium.

Let’s stop a moment and think about how far the video game medium has gone: from the developer that has brought you Crash Bandicoot, Jakk and became bold with the creation of Indiana Jones-like, opening new doors to adult-themed video games! But let's no limit this to the developers, let's also give a shoutout to the humble beginnings of artistic integrity in the medium found in those Sierra point and click adventure games that are HORRIBLE IN EVERY SINGLE WAY, it was a long way until finally, the APEX OF ARTISTIC GAMING CAME: Zionist Children of Men. Like they were thinking "Wow Uncharted was so successful let's pivot to post apocalypse!"

This is very likely "We need to sell a zombie apocalypse game" so they basically threw all of the tropes they could into the blender and gave it good action set pieces and it WORKED, it worked so well that we got people defending writing that isn't even there! I don’t know how to say this but I feel as if Bioshock Infinite is more art than The Last of Us is and they both came out around the same time too. Bioshock Infinite got that Disney movie charm going for it, this game has… Not much outside of showing the bare minimum of how humans interact, which I guess was HUGE for 2013.

Is good acting and good graphics really all gamers care about in the end? And the game just has to have a passable grade on top of that to elevate itself into stardom? MAYBE. It is also interesting to think that the last of us came right at the cusp of the zombie genre before everyone got tired of it, because people really do not give a shit about zombie stuff anymore unless if it's a simulator it seems. People were tired of characters making dumb emotionally-based decisions and took it upon themselves to live in a zombie infested world, no one wants to see Zombies and plot mix up ever again, that is if you consider "plot" to be 2-dimensional characters who literally went through SO MUCH shit just to throw it all away at the very end.

What a wonderful premise for a plot: What if we had a guy in an apocalypse killing everything, leading up to bringing a girl to a hospital, only to repeat the cycle of violence and SHOOT UP THE HOSPITAL. Pure vibes no substance, and then people act surprised when Part II doesn't have as much as a positive reaction towards it when it leans in even more-so in the pretentious aura, from what I've heard the second game had virtually 0 interest in being fun, so the franchise's bad writing was hypervisible.

What do I think about The Last of Us Part II? ...Find out next time! Honestly? I can't wait to play through that game.

The first time I played The Last of Us, I thought I was done playing video games. As the credits rolled on Joel and Ellie’s story, I realized I had never played a game quite like this before, like I had seen the pinnacle of what video games as a storytelling medium could be. As I sat in shock of the events in the game’s third act, I couldn’t fathom playing another game. What other game could move me this way? What video game could give me this type of experience again? Had Naughty Dog finally made the game that narratively, for me, simply couldn’t be beaten by any other game? Had the team who once made Crash Bandicoot ruined games for me forever?

Almost a decade later, Naughty Dog has released The Last of Us Part I, the second remaster of this already iconic game—a reminder that after all these years, nothing has been released since that comes close to the emotional impact and powerful story that was crafted with Joel and Ellie’s journey. Playing The Last of Us Part I on the PlayStation 5, it becomes even more abundantly clear that this is one of the best games of the last decade, and therefore, one of the greatest games ever made.

My full review of The Last of Us Part I for Collider here.

Having already watched season 1 of the TV adaptation, I knew the story beats to come fairly well.

It is a testament to how enjoyable the game is, that even basically knowing the plot by heart (as someone who plays games eminently for their plot) I was still wholly captured by the experience.

Part of it, I think, is simply how beautiful the world is (both technically and in terms of design), both the natural sections (maybe specially the natural sections?) but also the ruins of the human world, the abandoned houses, the deserted malls, the dusty university dorms. Not all but most places succeed in feeling naturally lived-in, to the point sometimes you cannot help but wonder, as Joel does on one occasion upon reading the journal entry of one past resident:

"I wonder how long you held on."

Another aspect that certainly contributes is the combat. The combat feels really satisfying. Its gory and bloody in a way that is raw and that I was never totally comfortable with, but it really adds meat to the situations explored in the game. It was also incredible when enemies, upon spotting you, would often call out to others not just shouting 'over here' but pointing out exactly where you were in term of nearby cover you might be hiding or near to. It added a layer of verisimilitude to the hostilities that I am not sure I've seen in any other game.

At the same time, thought, I couldn't help but think there was not much variety to enemies. Maybe this was a little unfair, as in survival horror there usually isn't much variety to begin with: Here at least we had humans in both ranged and melee variants, as well as zombies in runners, clickers, bloaters and stalker variants. Maybe the 'scarcity' was more noticeable for me because while the atmosphere is suspense a lot of the time, it lacks the immediate horror other games billed as survival horror. There were no rundown mansions explored in the gloom of night filling you both with a desire to explore as well as trepidation.

The characters and the story, such as it is, were all excellent. Its a very human story, with very human characters that are perfectly portrayed both in terms of physical appearance as well as voice acting. The deviations between the live-action adaptation and the original game were minimal, but they were still always interesting to spot here and there.

I think thats all I have. Its an extremely engaging game, one that rewards exploration, and where you can tackle encounters in a variety of different ways in a world that is not always classically beautiful but still captivating. I give it a four out of five only because I think the ending could have offered at least a wee bit more closure. I know there's a second part, and I know what happens in that second part, but as far as 'part 1' the ending feels not so much cliffhangerish as just... abrupt.