It took me a little while to work out the audience The Last of Us Part I was for. Originally, I fell into the camp of grumbles I’ve seen online: what purpose does a remake like this serve? What do we gain by hauling TLoU into its third console generation on the hop?
Turns out, quite a lot, actually, though much of it may not be visible at the surface level.
It’s been just shy of ten years since The Last of Us made its bow on the PlayStation 3. At the time, it was a groundbreaking narrative experience that pushed the envelope of storytelling and motion capture in big-budget games production. It had its pitfalls — some clunky shooting and AI that would hop around in plain sight, somehow invisible to enemies leap readily to mind — but, for most, the positives outweighed the negatives. Its conclusion, a moral-shredding series of decisions made by an emotionally shattered father that never dealt with his grief, divided audiences. Was Joel right, or was he a selfish bastard? Was he both? It’s a question the sequel sought to answer in detail.
Does any of that change in the move to PlayStation 5? No. The story remains, beat-for-beat, as you remember it. All the moments that hit you hard the first (or second) time you played it still arrive with a body blow.
So, then, what’s different, and who is this remake for?
A Last of Us for the Rest of Us
The Last of Us Part I is a version of the game built from the ground up for everyone that couldn’t play it the first, or even second, time around. I want to clarify: I don’t mean people who gave it a miss, or had it (somehow) fly under their radar. I mean people who were not able to play the game due to physical disabilities or information processing disorders. Though the original PS3 version of The Last of Us contained some accessibility options, and the PS4 remaster contained more still, neither approach the array of accessibility options contained in this PS5 remake.
The list of accessibility options contains everything seen in The Last of Us Part II, and even expands on that already sprawling array of settings. A new option for deaf or hard-of-hearing players is a personal favourite: Naughty Dog takes creative advantage of the DualSense’s precise haptic feedback to turn dialogue into vibrations. Vibrations through the controller mimic the delivery of character dialogue, telling the player where the emphasis is in every sentence. It’s a clever, elegant idea that does exactly what any accessibility feature should do: it opens a door that would otherwise have remained shut to an under-served section of the audience.
Other accessibility options allow the player to tweak the game’s overall difficulty to taste. Don’t like the button-mashy quick-time events for moving shelves or breaking out of a grapple? Turn them off. Need some extra time to deal with enemies you’ve grabbed? Now they can’t escape. Again, these options aren’t just about making the game trivially easy for the average player (though you can use them for that purpose if you need to — that’s still accessibility!). They’re options for people who may not have complete mobility in their hands, or are using bespoke (or otherwise less conventional) input methods.
All this functionality, to me at least, is the driving force behind this remake. It answers the question of why a remake like this needed to exist, beyond the obvious monetary benefit of having both TLoU titles aligned on a single platform.
How They Make It This Pretty Though
Because this is a remake more than it is a remaster, The Last of Us Part I makes a great many tweaks to overall gameplay. Some aspects remain the same: Joel is still a truly terrible shot, the aiming reticule deliberately challenging to move about in a rapid fight. You’re still bobbing down to craft in real time and carrying everything in a backpack. You’re still levelling up by finding pills in the wild. Clickers and other infected still display a preternatural ability to turn around when you’re half a second from delivering a shiv in their necks.
Its the visual changes that make the most noticeable difference, however. Naughty Dog has rebuilt and rerigged its character models, allowing for greater expressiveness. This is another significant reason for the remake: showcasing two of the most memorable performances in video game history. When Joel holds his daughter in the game’s famous opening, tears stream down his face and his face contorts into a mask of grief and agony. When he finds himself in a physical fight, you can see his musculature moving in ways that the original could never have displayed. The micro-expressions exhibited in tense conversations between Troy Baker’s Joel and Ashley Johnson’s Ellie, fleeting twitches in the original, are more effectively communicated than ever. Some character models, like Marlene, Henry and Sam, look entirely different, and it helps sell the toll this hard, difficult world takes on these characters. Everyone is dirtier, wrinklier, more weathered.
Environments are similarly detailed, and Naughty Dog once again demonstrates an unmatched capacity for set decoration. Even the air in its overgrown environments feels heavy. Vegetation creeps into closed doorways, cracks, and grates. Most impressive of all are the lighting and effects. Explosions have a startling beauty to them now — you’ll want to replay the intro sequence just to watch the petrol station explode. Seriously, explosion of the year. Otherwise, it was the little things that kept capturing my attention. Moths drawn to security lights. Fluid dynamics that look and behave like real water — I was able to watch water spray through a small crack in a cement ceiling and follow its path along a shattered, slanted floor to where it was pooling, creating a weight that threatened to collapse the structure beneath it. The level of detail is extraordinary.
All this to say, if you’ve picked up a new TV and you want to give it a run for its money, bung The Last of Us Part I on and kill some time just having a look around. Tremendous work.
Should you play it?
That’s still entirely up to you. The benefit of this package, outside of the excellent accessibility options, is that you already know exactly what you’re going to get. It’s still a landmark achievement in video game storytelling, a harrowing, morally ambiguous yarn about a broken dad with the fate of the world in his deeply compromised hands. Its performances are still so striking, even moreso with all the work that has gone into reinvigorating character models and animations. Its environmental design keeps Naughty Dog’s position at the best-in-class tier, and Gustavo Santaolalla’s score still tears at the heart with every gentle pluck of a guitar string.
I can’t tell you if The Last of Us Part I is a game you should play, only you can decide that. What I can say is that, when Naughty Dog is prepared to put this much work and effort into a remake, it makes a lot of other studios look lazy by comparison.
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