The Last Of Us Remastered and Revisited

The Last Of Us Part II (henceforth referred to as TLOU 2) came out recently, and the internet has been positively abuzz with chatter about Naughty Dog’s latest fungal zombie adventure. Everyone, relax: I’m going to play the game soon and review it, and then the matter will be settled for all time.

But before I do that I decided to replay the first game, which I haven’t revisited since it came out in 2013, via the PS4 remastered version. This isn’t going to be a full review since I already did one of those ages ago on the old blog, but rather a look at whether the game still holds up today.

Spoiler warning for the entire first game. Also please note that I haven’t looked at any of the leaked plot details of TLOU 2, so don’t talk about them in the comments.

The Last Of Us, for the non-Gamerheads in the audience, is set fifteen years after humanity is ravaged by a mutated version of the cordyceps fungus, the one that causes the “zombie ant” phenomenon you may have seen in a nature documentary. The remaining uninfected humans either live in military quarantine zones under martial law or eke out a brutal existence as scavengers and bandits in the vast stretches of wasteland outside. As the game opens, things aren’t looking too rosy for humanity: the quarantine zones are falling one by one, either imploding due to civil strife or overwhelmed from without by hordes of infected, and the scavenger lifestyle doesn’t seem like a viable alternative for all but the most ruthless and bloodthirsty. In this desperate situation we find Joel, a middle-aged smuggler with a shady past and a lot of personal demons, who is hired to transport a fourteen year old girl named Ellie to a group of rebels called the Fireflies halfway across the country. Ellie is immune to the cordyceps fungus, having been bitten three weeks ago and showing no signs of turning, and the Fireflies believe she might be the key to making a vaccine and saving what’s left of humanity.

In evaluating The Last Of Us seven years later, it’s important to remember the context the game came out in. Games in the big-budget AAA space now routinely aspire to the status of lë artè

haute, with at least one game a year hailed by the shallower ends of the press as gaming’s Schindler’s List or Citizen Kane moment (including, just recently, TLOU 2), but in 2013 that really wasn’t the case. Back then, if you wanted halfway decent writing you looked strictly to the indie scene, where games like Gone Home were breaking new ground by repurposing the tools and language of action games to tell smaller stories about relationships and human drama.

(I hasten to add that I’m talking strictly about the mainstream here; people have been making games with compelling writing since before graphical interfaces existed and high-minded art projects have always existed, but your average casual consumer was unlikely to know about any of those. Another caveat is that I’m mostly talking about western developers).

This was an era where AAA games usually aspired to the standards of schlocky action movies at best: characters tended to fall into broad archetypes like “is sort of similar to Han Solo”, stories often felt like they were cobbled together at the last minute to justify the game’s structure, and dialogue often consisted of either Marvel-esque quips or barked military jargon about how Bravo Actual is Oscar Mike to the LZ which is hot, I repeat the LZ is hot.

The LZ is always hot, Bravo Actual. The LZ is always hot.

So when The Last Of Us came along and it had characters who spoke like actual god damn people and featured dialogue and general writing that you could slot into a movie released outside the Summer blockbuster window or a relatively prestigious TV drama a lot of people, myself included, fell over themselves to shower it with praise.

But was that praise warranted? Having replayed the game in its entirety, I actually think it mostly was.

If you break the story down into its fundamental parts, it’s very standard zombie/post-apocalyptic fiction, employing tropes that weren’t exactly fresh in 2013 and have grown positively desiccated in the years since. The crumbling architecture, mournful slow pans over destroyed icons of urban civilization to reflect on All That Has Been Lost, bloodthirsty apocalyptic raiders and familiar story beats--oh no, someone’s been bitten!--are not in any way fresh or original.

But there’s something underneath all of that, a vital essence that shines through despite the stale structure. Most zombie stories will claim that it’s not actually about the zombies man, it’s about the humans but usually that’s not true, because whenever the writers think the audience might be getting bored they’ll throw hordes of zombies in to spice things up. If you took away the armies of shambling corpses, there’d be nothing else there.

But The Last Of Us really, truly is about the people and not the zombies. They’re so de-emphasised that a casual observer might not even realize the game even has zombies in it; I straight-up forgot about them in the run-up to the second game’s release. And the humans are interesting: Joel’s evolution from gruff loner to soft-hearted protector to violent Revenge Dad is, again, absolutely nothing new on paper, but the game goes further than most stories of this kind, in any medium, by giving that character arc a more solid emotional foundation than Taken-esque masculine wish fulfilment. 

“It goes further” is my main takeaway from this revisit. The treatment of this story and these tropes is just a bit more thoughtful and nuanced than you usually see, and the results are highly compelling. I only intended to play part of the way through this before moving onto the sequel, but I ended up replaying the entire thing and the Left Behind DLC because I just couldn’t put it down once I started.

Of course, there is one area where the game has undoubtedly aged, which is the graphics. When the game originally came out I thought it looked basically as good as a video game could possibly look, but of course time will always prove such sentiments wrong. The graphics are still highly impressive for a PS3 game, especially played in 4K at a steady 60 fps framerate, but you can definitely see where Naughty Dog’s ambitions outpaced that console’s horsepower. 

Still on the visual end of things, something that really stood out to me this time is Ellie’s character model, which makes her look far younger than fourteen. Teenagers looking like pre-teens is almost universal in non-filmed media (movies and TV shows tend to go in the other direction by casting obvious adults as teenagers), but the developers seem to have heavily exaggerated the juvenile aspects of her face to make her look cuter and the results are frankly kind of weird. Ellie’s head has this unsettling uncanny valley quality, like she teleported into the Last Of Us universe from a game with a different art style, which I found extremely distracting.

And it’s impossible to discuss a game like this without bringing up certain global events; when I booted the game up and started the opening sequence, which depicts society rapidly falling apart due to the cordyceps infection, I was like “Oh right, this game is about a global pandemic destroying civilization. Huh.” Given that we are still very much not out of the woods yet in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, this aspect of the story was a little more #relatable than I was expecting.

Those quibbles side, I still think The Last Of Us is as good now as it was seven years ago. Now it’s time to dig into the sequel, which I’m sure will absolutely not disappoint me in any way.