nothing will ever mean as much to me as this game does. nothing. joel is my father. he raised me. we are literally father and daughter.

but fr, joel is the dad i never got and ellie is the sister i always dreamed of. im a very lonely person. found family you have done it again. GOT EM😆😆😆

in a few weeks its gonna be three years since this game became my favorite thing ever. i need to replay it for the 13th time

Hey gamers


I mean, what is there to say? It's my favourite video game of all time made even better with this, uh, remaster².


Ellie is probably my favourite character in any piece of media. I love watching her and Joel's relationship grow throughout the game. The dialogue and characters are so well-written. It looks amazing, it's packed with emotional gut punches everywhere, Gustavo's music is one of my all-time favourite scores.


I haven't even gotten tired of the gameplay all these years later. I like walking around and collecting things; I grew up playing LEGO Star Wars, after all. I adore the slow paced, strategic gunplay, and the combat environments have so many pathways and directions that I'm still discovering unique ways to tackle each skirmish over 10 playthroughs later. Some of these encounters get so incredibly tense, and your victories become even more satisfying because of it. I'll never forget those two grounded runs.


This newest version is, in nearly every way, an improvement. I mean, it plays and looks better, obviously. It's basically just putting the first game into the engine of the second one, and this upgrades the game in many ways: smooth transitions from gameplay to cinematics, unique workbench animations, and better collectible inspection. The thing I found the most impressive was the overhaul of the facial animations. I do miss the jump, dodge, and prone mechanics from the second game as a result, and I kept trying to instinctually use them, but I realize that these environments weren't built to accommodate them in the first place - well, maybe not the jump and prone, but they could've included the dodge. As for the DualSense usage, the trigger resistance wasn't anything above the average use of them, but the vibration was. It's probably the most I've gotten out of it since Astro's Playroom.


This version of the game is the best way to experience The Last of Us, but only if you're on either extreme of the spectrum of "I haven't played it yet" or "I already love the game and have played it several times". If you've only played it once or twice and still have the PS3/4 copy laying around, you're better off saving your money and sticking with that one for the time being.


Also, Naughty Dog, please put the smoke bombs back underneath the molotovs in the weapon cross, thanks.

2nd time completing Part I, 4th time completing the story of this game.

This time I found the opening 3-4 hours incredibly strong, in a way i've never seen them as before. At one point I even started to ponder if maybe Part I is actually better than Part II. Having completed it, though, Part II is, in plain terms, just a far more ambitious, far more complex and, ultimately, far more impressive achievement.

Still, the original has a ridiculously confident vision behind it and equally gobsmacking execution of that vision. A heartwrenching journey that is 100% the 2nd best game ever, behind it's own continuation. God, what a miracle it is to have these 2 incredible games all for myself until I'm dead and gone.

I debated whether it’s worth writing anything about TLOU given it’s been 10 years since the original release and talked to death about. But this was a special landmark game, one which pushed “mature” grounded writing in gaming to the mainstream. So, I want to praise the aspects I find impressive enough to tie the whole game into a worthwhile experience and the shortcomings I noticed that could have elevated it.

While watching the Making Of documentary included in the remake, I noticed that the devs had a goal in mind of having Ellie and Joel as a dual protagonist, especially after Ashley Johnson’s performance that they started giving her a more active role in the story too. They do form the narrative and emotional core of the story, their relationship and its growth are what the story even is but I have to say that I feel Joel is firmly the main protagonist here. Not because you play as him for the most part but because Ellie is too young to have enough of a say in this journey, it is Joel’s damaged psyche through which we primarily interact with the world and he acts as an antagonist to the themes of story and Ellie’s agency at the end.

Since I brought up the theme, I will say that I don’t think this is a theme driven story unlike TLOU2. It’s a character piece for Joel and an origin story for Ellie. But for the sake of discussion, my interpretation of theme is very simply laid bare by the Firefly’s moto: “When you're lost in the darkness, look for the light.” The world the writers created for this game is quite familiar in broad strokes, thanks in part to insane popularity of The Walking Dead. It is a world of strife, one where cruelty hides in every corner and the inhabitants need to match that cruelty to even have a chance at survival. But with each encounter the game shows the faint glimmer of humanity retained by the people still living in it, that is the humanity that lets the main duo keep going on their journey. That is the light that is worth fighting to preserving in the darkness. Specifically for Joel, we start the game with him losing his daughter plunging him into a life of darkness, a topic he kept avoiding for most of the story but in Ellie he found a surrogate daughter to warm up to. Ellie was his light. But Ellie was also the light for humanity due to her immunity. That is the light Joel stole.

The laser focus on Ellie and Joel’s relationship does come at the cost of story with substance however. There were a lot more details I wanted from the world. I wanted to know how the factions worked like how the Metro series does it, I wanted to spend more time with the side characters so that they didn’t just feel like fleeting encounters built to create a tone for the experience rather than add actual meat to the story. But I will also admit that there’s a beauty to the simplicity of the narrative here. The world is familiar yet just unique enough with the zombie replacement, and you spend time in Joel’s shoes just enough to leave you wondering if or why his action was just.
On a personal note, post TLOU2 I saw a lot of discussions surrounding what kind of person Joel was. I don’t think he’s a bad person from the point where the story starts, his ruthlessness was born purely out of a survival need and rarely if ever he was needlessly cruel. Killing the Fireflies was an unquestionably wrong act but it’s understandable why a man would do anything to protect his family, I would too.

From a game design standpoint, I think the whole experience was paced really well. Every frantic action scene almost always gave away to calmer exploration or story sections. I have heard the remaster tweaks the combat from the original but what’s here works quite well in both stealth and shooting with serviceable enemy AI. I think for loot they might have had a rubber-band design where you get more loot as you start to run out, but whatever the design was it felt just right. I was never so out of resource that I was forced to a playstyle but I was not given enough to be comfortable with only 1 method of playing. It could have been better for sure and the exploration puzzles were too simple but the game didn’t overstay its welcome for me to get annoyed.
Major props to the art and sound department, they did a terrific job at portraying a city reclaimed by nature. Some areas like the college dorms genuinely impressed me with how much environmental storytelling they with the design. And the clicker sounds were especially effective at maintaining a sense of tension. I liked that sometimes not engaging them in combat was the smarter choice.

Back in 2014 when I had just started gaming, I had watched a “game movie” version of this on YT since I don’t play on console. I thought it was a neat story back thwn but preferred Uncharted more. I later came to know that many people claimed TLOU1 to be a masterpiece and I also had the displeasure of encountering an absolute clusterfuck that was the TLOU2 discourse. I was not sure I would enjoy revisiting this but I’m glad it turned out to be a quite positive experience from actually playing it. I hope TLOU2 gets ported to PC soon so I can impart my objectively correct opinion™ on it.

Despite games with more hack and slash gameplay and constant fighting not typically being my thing (ironic as I do love resident evil) … I can push the fighting behind me as to say GOSH. do i love this game to the point I can’t even be overly critical or take away a half star as originally planned.

Without stating all too much, the story absolutely awed me and left me stunned by the end of it. Seeing the development between Joel & Ellie made them both feel so human, and despite not knowing too too much you can understand why they started off the way they did. You can understand their motives, wants, needs…. it doesn’t NEED to be told to your for you to get it. That is what makes a good story.

There was moments that made my heartache, burn, flutter, all of the sorts. The soundtrack constantly had me waiting in anticipation for something /anything/ to potentially occur, it keeps you on edge, breaks you apart. On multiple occasions did I come close to sobbing.

I am terribly miserable and want to re-experience everything alongside picking up missed collectibles. Thank you Naughty Dog

Played the DLC (?) and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU MY HEART

I've played this game like 3 or four times at this point. Definitely not as impactful as the first experience playing through it. Unfortunately, the show has really dampened my love and admiration for this series. The upgrade is massive though, with some of the best graphics I've seen on the PS5. I'm excited to also play the Part two remake but still...I wish they would have just left this series alone. As essentially a generic zombie narrative with an interesting end twist, stretching this out into a series let alone a television series (which is already flooded with awful zombie content) is truly disappointing.

TL:DR: Feels like a must play for any gamer, casual or otherwise.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game, the gameplay is a perfect blend of slow and fast. Combat feels scattered and enjoyable so that it doesn’t get repetitive (Some parts are more combat focused than others though) But after those parts it allows you to breathe.
Graphics are incredible, like holy shit man what the fuck.

The story and setting is extremely good, worldbuilding feels very realistic. Characters feel realistic and flawed. I actually cried during some parts. I feel as though I could talk about its themes forever, I won’t because of spoilers. But god, it does a great fucking job.

Music is incredibly good, with melancholy guitar twangs during emotional moments and intense combat tracks with drums.

’The Last Of Us’ is an incredibly confusing game for me to put my thoughts into because it's one of those titles that is really close to being amazing to me, but just falls short due to some significant issues I have with it. I don’t even have a lot of negatives, it is just the ones I have are very important to me. I’ll state now that this will be a more traditional look at ’The Last Of Us’ and it won’t be specifically talking about this remake and how it compares to the original alone, although there will be a paragraph dedicated to how it compares to the remastered counterpart (as I have not played the original PS3 version of the game). I also feel I should mention that this is the only Naughty Dog game I have played, although I do plan on checking out the ’Uncharted’ series very soon.

The biggest fault this game has is it feels conflicted in whether it wants to be a game with tense, difficult combat or a game where you don’t do much besides hold forward. It is paced pretty poorly because of this. The games combat sections are usually paced with walk and talk moments that last an incredibly long time or a “puzzle” of moving a certain item to another area that tends to be ten feet apart anyways. I wish they did a bit more to spice things up or focused on a certain style similar to ’Resident Evil 4’ or ’Dear Esther’ instead of switching between thirty minutes of action game then thirty minutes of walking simulator.

The combat itself though is actually pretty fantastic. Mind you, I played on hard difficulty as well as never used the listen mode and saved melee for last resorts mostly as I felt for me, those mechanics made the game a bit too easy. That’s something I do enjoy about some of the features. You can avoid most of the things that make the game easier and it feels completely natural. It’s nice to have something that can make the game more accessible for people who want an easier experience without making it a necessity. There is one thing that doesn’t follow this rule though which is how the sprinting animation changes between when you are in combat and when you are out of it. It ends up being this little tell of knowing you are safe or not which ruins some of the tension of the combat encounters.

There are two different encounters that you will run into. Ones that contain zombies and others that will be with normal humans. They both are executed well. With the humans, I never got good at fully stealthing past all of them so I would just go for a crazy fight and that was always pretty fun. They’re pretty smart too! Some of them will stay behind cover to distract me as another guy flanks me. I felt I constantly had to make sure every corner of me was safe. The zombies I would always attempt stealthing as their quick and odd movement made it hard for me to shoot. Especially since the clickers are blind and can only hear, so it’s made to be stealth encounters usually. Although it does get interesting when they combine normal zombies with the clickers. I will say also that playing the DLC after made me wish the base game had encounters with both humans and zombies, but I’ll talk more about that when I cover the DLC.

You’ll pretty much for the entire game have some sort of npc companion to help you. They don’t have limited ammo and can only die whenever they are grabbed and you haven't saved them in time. They also can’t be seen whenever you are trying to be stealthy which is helpful. I wonder if there was ever at some point an idea to include online co-op? It was a trend at the time with games like ’Resident Evil 5’, ’F.E.A.R. 3’, and ’Dead Space 3’ going this direction. I’m curious if ’The Last Of Us’ was going to have this feature at some point because it kind of feels built around that idea.

The gunplay does a lot to increase the difficulty of the combat in the game. The aiming I never felt I had a whole grasp of which did a lot to never make me feel too powerful. The game gives you plenty of weapons to use and all of them feel useful so I ended up switching between them constantly. This is cool because switching between some weapons will make you have to dig in your backpack for a second and switch between them which can be super tense. Especially since ammo is super limited, this was something I had to constantly worry about and that made combat so much more memorable for me.

Speaking of limited resources, this game is very hit or miss with it. It attempts to do it and is successful with the limit of ammo, but mostly everything else you can craft which just makes it way easier. The items you craft you won’t find much at all in the world either so you have to craft them which is pretty disappointing. I found myself swarmed in materials more than not, but the items you do have to find in the world are scarce. Enemies do drop items, but it is such a rare case similar to ’The Evil Within’ that it never became something I expected to get.

The exploration is okay. The game is incredibly linear with the occasional side path to small areas. I did feel disappointed sometimes when I was thrown into a huge environment and I didn’t get to explore much of it, but I’m not necessarily surprised by this. It is nice how the characters will mention something if you’re going the “story progression way” so if there hasn’t been something you’ve explored, you can do it now. There isn't much to do besides collect items and solve very minimal puzzles which is lame, but I guess it’s something.

I feel a lot of those issues that I have come from the fact that ’The Last Of Us’ is a very cinematic game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as I do love these types of experiences, but I feel ’The Last Of Us’ is conflicted. It feels less like a video game made to be a cinematic experience, but like an idea for a show that they ended up turning into a game. It feels hesitant to push the game aspect of it outside of combat, yet the combat itself is very gamey. It also suffers from having a QTE for every insignificant action like opening a door. I don’t mind QTEs for major set pieces, but I never understood why it was used for such simple parts. It’s not like it’s more immersive considering I have a giant flashing button on my screen telling me to spam it.

To mention some of the stronger aspects of the game. I thoroughly enjoyed the story. I think it is well written and the things they went for worked well. It isn’t the most original or unique tale, but I find its execution, especially with the characters, excellent. The voice acting is superb which elevates the emotions you will have towards a character due to how realistic the performances are. I don’t think there was a single one that felt out of place or didn’t have as much love put into it. You can tell all around everyone who worked on them really cared about bringing these characters to life and I see it as successful. I won’t get too deep into themes or anything because I never want to spoil an experience and I know some people want to go in as blind as possible and although the story may not be the most special thing ever written, it’s well told enough that it makes me understand why so many people hold it very dear to them and I feel it is something worth experiencing to see if it clicks with you too.

The presentation of ’The Last Of Us’ is quite phenomenal as well… mostly. The sewer location wasn’t the most interesting for me although there were some rooms that were cool there. The office locations weren’t the best either, but most of these environments that weren’t that strong tended to be very dark which definitely ramped up the tension for the zombie encounters so they did have something going for them. Other than that, you’ll see an almost entirely abandoned world where nature begins to take over the buildings and roads that people have built. It gives a feeling of loneliness that you and Ellie are the only ones here and that the rest of the world is gone. Obviously, that’s not true, you fight plenty of normal people throughout the game, but being lost just staring as the grass and trees take everything back made me forget about that, even if it was just for a moment. There has been issues for a very long while now of games sacrificing the actual art design of the world in favor of photo realism, but I feel ’The Last Of Us’ does a very good job at not sacrificing any interesting art. It also runs well now which is cool. I know the PC port was pretty shitty when the game first came out, but they’ve fixed it a ton since then. The game did crash on me once, but it was only one time and I never figured out what caused that to happen.

This is a remake, but don’t think of it as a completely new experience or anything. It is the same game that came out a decade ago with very few quality of life improvements, slight HUD change, more accessibility options, and a graphical upgrade. It’s not even similar to the ’Resident Evil’ or ’Dead Space’ remakes. It adds nothing really new and doesn’t cut anything out (well except the online lol). That is the most important thing to know about this remake so you can make up your mind whether that is worth the price tag or not. Visually, the game does slightly differentiate itself. The remake can look a bit more washed out of color which I am not sure how I feel about. I think both styles work well enough. The lighting is absolutely fantastic in the remake. The face models do look a little different from the originals, but it wasn’t an entire overhaul or anything. They just touched up on it a little. There is one thing the remake adds being a speedrun mode. This basically gives an in game timer on your screen and will pause at cinematics and loading screens and I thought this was really cool! I used to speedrun and livesplit can be a pain in the ass so this was pretty dope to see.

’The Last Of Us’ I feel has the potential to be so much more, but just misses the mark. It has a well told story, decent combat, an interesting world, yet is all held back by the confused mess of what kind of video game it wants to be, if one at all. I do recommend it, it is a game people adore and I am one person out of those who are a bit more harsh on it, but it still is an enjoyable experience and I would say it is worth trying.

Even after all this time this games emotional beats still hit hard, if not harder, than when it first released, especially with the release of Part 2 and everything we know that happens in that game. It really adds a whole new perspective to the ending and the weight of Joels decision, and Ellies relationship to him in the sequel.

There was a lot of discussion on the neccesity and pricing of the remake, some of which I agree with, but after experiencing it first hand I can fully say it was worth it. It's drop dead gorgeous (and some iffy performance on PC which has been mostly ironed out) just brings so much more life to these characters and the world.

Buckle in, this is gonna be a long rant.
The Last of Us is a game that has alluded me for damn near a decade now. As someone who didn't have a Playstation, I kept hearing about how legendary the game was, how it's story was unlike anything else for the time.
Fast forward to now and the game finally comes to a platform that I can play it on! Granted I expected it to not run as smooth as it would on console, but I was excited to experience the story nonetheless.
I want to make it very clear right now, as far as I got in the game, the story is really good, it's worth all the praise that it gets. Actually playing the game though? Oh dear god where do I begin...
I couldn't finish this game, because it's DREADFUL. I wanted to give the game the benefit of the doubt as glitches and bugs are obviously a PC only issue and most people who play this game no matter the version won't have to deal with that. But jesus christ this is inexcusable. The characters that travel alongside you are dumb as rocks, and constantly caused me issues. Events just wouldn't trigger when they were supposed to and I had to waste a lot of time just waiting around. Enemies are glitchy as hell and do whatever they want, including shooting through walls, and killing me without even firing their weapons! Character models glitch into terrain all the time. I have fallen through the map twice, and the game has crashed my whole system twice!
The more of this game I played the more miserable it made me, and not in the way that it's supposed to. I can see how the game is SUPPOSED to work but I couldn't tell you how much I'd enjoy the game if it worked properly, because this port never does, I never actually experienced that. And I played this game for 10 hours!
Even if I eventually get to play a version of this game that works, my first experience of most of this story is ruined by this broken pile of garbage and I will never get to properly experience it blind. I don't know if Iron Galaxy is just bad at porting or if Sony rushed the game out the door, or both. But either way, thanks guys, I'm glad I finally got to see what the fuss was about!
Should've just watched the TV show.

TLOU1 rating: 5/5
Left Behind rating: 4.5/5

While not being the most justifiable remake out there, I had an absolute blast playing The Last of Us Part I. Getting to replay the first Last of Us game was such an enjoyable experience, I honestly think i enjoyed it more this time around than the first time i played it. I finally got around to playing Left Behind for the first time too, and thoroughly enjoyed it as well. The complete visual overhaul on the graphics and the combat tweaks made the overall experience so much more enjoyable, i constantly found myself gushing over the graphics and enjoying the combat a lot more than i did with the ps4 remaster.

Overall i really enjoyed my time with this remake, i can easily recommend it to anyone who owns a PS5 or PC (as long as the port is actually good now) who somehow hasn’t played this masterpiece of a game already. can’t wait for whatever naughty dog has planned next, whether it be a new last of us or a new ip, y’all better believe i’m there no matter what.