The Last of Us Part I (PlayStation 5, 2022)

It’s been seven years since I played The Last of Us and I wasn’t expecting the intro to hit quite so hard. Knowing everything that’s coming these characters’ way over the two games makes restarting their long trip across a post-apocalyptic America carry a lot of weight

Misery is doled in spades for the next fifteen hours or so, though I’d forgotten quite how heavily The Last of Us ladles on the pain so early on: there’s something especially miserable about Joel’s daughter waking up in the middle of the night into a very different world than the one she went to sleep in. The flip side is that while the story wallows in pain and loss, sneaking and blasting your way through this broken world is as fun as it ever was.

As I said in my The Last of Us Part II review, people often criticize these games for being traumatizing, miserable experiences. Sometimes they are, but surviving a nail-biting firefight or escaping a swarm of infected remains a white-knuckle experience I just can’t get enough of. Plus it’s not exactly high-falutin’ criticism, but exploding monsters’ heads with a shotgun freakin’ rocks.

But there are already hundreds of thousands of words out there singing The Last of Us‘s praises. All that applies to Part One, but when playing it you can’t help but wonder whether it was really worth remaking so soon after release.

I found myself thinking of Gus van Sant’s ill-advised 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. That works from Hitchcock’s script, uses the same camera movements, Bernard Herrmann original score, and only updates a few technological elements. Most people wondered what the point was, with Van Sant’s film now merely a strange cinematic footnote

Part I isn’t quite as unnecessary as the ’98 Psycho, though when I was picking through the sumptuously rendered scenery I couldn’t help but wonder whether all this time and effort couldn’t have been put into something new rather than painstakingly recreating what we already have.

There’s zero doubt in my mind that developers at Naughty Dog have a tonne of amazing game ideas that aren’t being realized, so was improved facial animation, more detailed environments, and a higher-resolution worth sacrificing some never-to-be made new title that could have broken ground in the same way The Last of Us once did?

I mean, yeah, the characters are more emotive courtesy of the PS5’s grunt, but given that The Last of Us didn’t exactly have a problem with wringing tears out of gamers in 2013 you have to wonder whether this was worth it.

Maybe I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth. The Last of Us was and is an exciting and enjoyable adventure with a supremely confident ability to crank up the action and just as quickly decelerate into quieter moments.

But throughout all that is a background hum of feeling that sumptuous remakes like this are a sign of commercial cowardice and their success will make it harder for the next groundbreaking new game to emerge. After all, why would Sony take risks when you can just wring out fresh revenue from proven hits?

Mixed feelings!