![]() ![]() ![]() The PS5 is home to multiple stunning titles ( Horizon Forbidden West and fellow remake Demon’s Souls are standouts) but true to form, nobody does it like Naughty Dog. Visually, however, the game fully matches the 2020 title and often surpasses it, given that it’s been rebuilt from the ground up for the PlayStation 5 hardware. These aren’t the complex and agonizing murder puzzles of the sequel. Why would the developers build new mechanics, or even add some of the bigger changes from the sequel, if the scenarios themselves were never built around utilizing them? But after getting accustomed to the small sandbox-style arenas in Part II, the gameplay here does feel quaint. The game plays how you remember it, which makes sense given than nothing has been changed from an encounter standpoint. Shooting is more impactful and enemy AI seems a bit brighter –but overall the improvements are marginal. The remake lifts many of the updated mechanics from Part II to create a more modern control scheme. Combat is a mix of stealth, gunplay, and melee that’s all easy to execute, maintaining the illusion of cinematic storytelling for the most part. The exploration elements amount to scrubbing every nook and cranny of overgrown streets, dilapidated buildings and homes, and occasionally forests and sewers, picking up ammo and crafting resources that will (hopefully) keep you alive once the inevitably violent encounters hit. įrom a mechanical standpoint, the gameplay mostly revolves around exploring linear stretches of the world in the third-person. The game’s harrowing story is more effective than ever. ![]() It’s also a 15-hour plus experience, which allows audiences to spend much more time fully immersed in every detail of the world, beyond what can be presented in any single film or season of television. But to its credit, the story never feels rote, largely due to stellar writing and god-tier performances by the cast, led by Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie) - whose voice work and motion-capture performances here set the standard for the next decade of cinematic storytelling in gaming. Tonally, it’s halfway between Children of Men and Logan, with a dash of The Walking Dead. Immune to the plague, Ellie may be the key to the cure, and so they embark on a cross-country odyssey defined by tragedy and poignancy. Players primarily take on the role of Joel, a grizzled smuggler struggling to survive who is tasked with delivering Ellie - a mouthy teen/adorable nightmare - to a militia group called the Fireflies. Set 20 years after a global outbreak caused by the ( terrifyingly real) cordyceps fungal parasite leaves the world in ruin, the story of The Last of Us Part I centers on the duo of Joel and Ellie. So, it isn’t surprising that developer Naughty Dog’s decision to remake The Last of Us was met with skepticism. Initially released in 2013 as a swan song for the aging PlayStation 3 and re-released the following year as The Last of Us Remastered for the PlayStation 4, the game exemplified the controversies at the heart of the gaming industry at the time, from “can video games be art?” to, “are cinematic games really games?” and even, “how can anything ever be better than Grand Theft Auto V?” And that’s all before ever getting to the exhausting debate around the game’s portrayal of violence, the term “ ludonarrative dissonance,” and the absolute maelstrom of hatred toward the game’s controversial (and superior) sequel, 2020’s The Last of Us Part II. THE LAST OF US is a game with some baggage. ![]()
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