A stunning remake of one of the best stories in gaming, held back only by asking full price for a game most players have already finished.
I bought this game twice before, once on PS3 in 2013 and once on PS4 in 2014, which is the sort of thing you only really notice when a third version turns up asking seventy dollars. The Last of Us Part I landed on PS5 in September 2022, the PC port that followed in March smoothed over its own rocky launch, and with the dust settled on both the question sits exactly where it always sat: this is Naughty Dog's ground-up remake of a decade-old game most of its audience has already finished, possibly twice.
The remake runs on the Part II engine rather than an upscale, so facial animation now carries entire scenes that used to lean on the voice acting to do all the work. Ellie's face through the winter chapters is a different performance from anything the PS3 could render, the giraffe scene landed harder on a third viewing than it has any business doing, and abandoned houses reward stopping to look around in a way the old engine never earned, so what the seventy dollars is buying here is faces.
“Ellie's face carries scenes the original engine simply couldn't.”
Enemy AI got pulled forward as well, flanking and calling out your position the way Part II's does, which quietly changes how encounters play even where the level layout hasn't moved an inch. The accessibility menu runs dozens of options deep and is the most thorough thing Sony has shipped, and I turned three of them on for a friend who has played maybe four games in his life and watched him get through the opening on his own, which I definately hadn't expected.
The box also includes Left Behind, the Ellie-focused DLC, along with a permadeath mode and a speedrun mode.
What it doesn't include is Factions, the original's scrappy multiplayer, cut out entirely. I spent real months in Factions back in 2014, enough that I can still tell you the loadout I settled on, and dropping it from a seventy-dollar package built almost entirely on nostalgia is the one omission here I'd call a mistake rather than a decision. The standalone multiplayer project Naughty Dog went off to build instead has since been scaled back, which leaves the thing I wanted nowhere at all.
For anybody coming back a third time, permadeath is the way to do it. Knowing that a single clicker ends the entire run turned encounters I'd been sleepwalking through since 2013 back into decisions with weight on them, and I started scouting rooms from doorways like a coward instead of walking in swinging a brick. I made it as far as the university on my first attempt and lost the run to a shiv I didn't have, in a doorway I'd forgotten was a doorway, about eleven hours in. I sat looking at the death screen long enough that the console dimmed the display on me, and then I started again the same night.
The story is still the story, beat for beat identical to 2013 and 2014 and still one of the best told in the medium, with Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson holding up against anything the studio has done since. What's changed is that I now know every beat coming, so what I watched for this time was the small stuff at the edges of frames, and the performances survive that kind of attention rather better than the pacing does.
I couldn't tell you whether the remake justifies its price for somebody who finished the PS4 version and remembers it fondly, because I stopped being that person somewhere in my second playthrough and I can't get back there to check. Naughty Dog knows exactly who keeps buying this game, I'm three purchases deep and in no position to be smug about the pricing, and the doorway got me anyway.