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.
The Last of Us Part I hit 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 hasn't changed: this is Naughty Dog's ground-up remake of a 2013 game most of its audience has already finished, possibly twice, at seventy dollars.
What that money buys is faces. The remake runs on the Part II engine rather than an upscale, and facial animation now carries entire scenes that used to lean on voice acting alone. Ellie's face through the winter chapters is a different performance than the PS3 could render, the giraffe scene lands harder than it has any right to on a third viewing, and abandoned houses reward stopping to look around in a way the old engine never earned. Enemy AI got pulled forward too, flanking and calling out your position like Part II's, and the accessibility menu, dozens of options deep, is the most thorough Sony has shipped.
“Ellie's face carries scenes the original engine simply couldn't.”
The box also includes Left Behind, the Ellie-focused DLC, plus a permadeath mode and a speedrun mode. What it doesn't include is Factions, the original's scrappy multiplayer, cut entirely. I put real months into Factions in 2014, and dropping it from a seventy-dollar package built on nostalgia is the one omission here I'd call a mistake rather than a choice.
Here's my pitch for returning players, though, and I mean it: permadeath is the best way to experience this campaign a third time. Knowing one clicker ends the entire run turned encounters I'd been sleepwalking through since 2013 back into actual decisions. I made it to the university on my first attempt and lost the run to a shiv I didn't have in a doorway I'd forgotten. I sat there for a full minute. No other seventy-dollar feature this remake offers did anything close to that.
The story is still the story, beat for beat the same as 2013 and 2014, still one of the best-told in the medium, with Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson holding up against anything the studio has done since. Naughty Dog knows exactly who keeps buying it. I'm three purchases deep, apparently, and the doorway got me anyway.