The Last of Us Remastered + Left Behind

Note: This review contains spoilers for The Last of Us and Left Behind

I originally played The Last of Us when it came out seven years ago on PS3 and though I remember liking it, I didn’t think about it again until The Last of Us Part II was announced. As time went on, however, I lost interest in playing the sequel, due to certain behind-the-scenes information that came to light and certain information from leaked footage. This made me consider replaying the original The Last of Us to see if my opinion had changed after all this time, which I fulfilled through the PS4 remaster, released only one year after the PS3 version, which I had bought but never opened. Doing this made me realize why I liked it in the first place, but now I see the flaws a lot more.

In 2013, an outbreak of a mutated Cordyceps fungus ravages the US, turning the people into zombie-like beings known as the Infected. 20 years later, civilization is decimated, forcing survivors to live in sanctioned quarantine zones. At this time, Joel is looking for a weapons cache traded to the Fireflies, a rebel group who opposes the quarantines. To get the weapons back, he has to smuggle a girl named Ellie, who is immune to the disease, to the Fireflies main hideout. What follows is a treacherous trek across America with many obstacles, both human and Infected, along the way.

One of the greatest strengths of The Last of Us is easily its storytelling, due mainly to the game’s narrative-driven nature. From a very powerful and emotional opening, where Joel’s daughter Sarah dies during a fairly realistic take on what would happen during the breakout of a zombie apocalypse, it doesn’t let you go. The character writing is the real highlight, especially in how Joel and Ellie’s bond grows over the course of several months. I grew attached to them again and felt the emotional weight of some key moments, like Joel’s serious injuries sustained from protecting Ellie or when he decided to put the safety and future of his brother, Tommy, above his own in getting Ellie to the Fireflies. Outside of cutscenes, there’s also some optional dialogue during non-combat segments. It’s worth it to find these opportunities, since they help flesh out the characters and how they’re feeling in the moment.

The character writing between Ellie (Ashely Johnson, Left)
and Joel (Troy Baker, Right) is easily the game's greatest strength.

I also better appreciated this time how the game ended, specifically how it’s conclusive with Joel saving Ellie from the Fireflies, but the morality of Joel’s choice, as well as his decision to lie to Ellie about what happened, is open to interpretation. This allows the story to outlive the game through discussion and speculation based on in-game evidence. Personally, I understood Joel’s attachment to Ellie as a surrogate daughter and saw evidence that the Fireflies were incompetent and may have never found a cure by playing God with Ellie, but I can also understand how someone would interpret it differently.

That said, from a pure storytelling perspective, some beats were still rather predictable, be it through familiarity with storytelling techniques or the way the game focuses on specific elements. One standout example is that I automatically knew, during a section where I had to fight off Infected with a sniper rifle, that Sam wasn’t going to make it because an Infected was on him and the camera put special emphasis on his apparent survival. With that in mind, despite the time gap since playing the original game, the story came back to me as I reached certain sections, which should speak to how well it stuck with me. For example, I forgot about Tess’ role in the early part of the story, but as soon as I reached a specific area, I instantly remembered that something big happened to her.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s rather underwhelming by comparison and feels more mediocre nowadays, but it does at least try to tie into the “survival” aspect of the setting. Exploring the environment, especially if you go out of your way to check every nook and cranny, allows you to scavenge scrap metal and tools, supplements and various supplies. Scrap metal is useful at work benches, where, depending on your Tools level, you can upgrade your various guns and holsters to allow for a stronger offense and better prepare your loadout for each situation. When you’re out in the field, you can use the supplies to craft many useful tools and items like shivs, health kits, Molotov cocktails and bombs of the nail and smoke varieties. Supplements also help with increasing Joel’s natural skills while also granting some new abilities like defending yourself with a shiv when a Clicker attacks you.

When you inevitably find yourself in a combat situation, you’re able to approach it in any way you want. Sometimes you can sneak your way past everyone, both human and Infected, and make it to the next section, but your options are to otherwise stealthily knock everyone out or fight with your guns and fists. No matter which way you choose, you can use Listen Mode, which feels like a more realistic take on Batman: Arkham Asylum’s Detective Mode by allowing you to focus your hearing and hone in on everyone’s location within a certain radius. Since I chose to prioritize stealth and conserve the already scarce ammo as much as possible, I found it surprisingly easy to have a maxed-out inventory about halfway through the game.

Listen Mode helps greatly with locating enemies.

I don’t remember if the original release did this or not, but there’s one quality-of-life choice that I appreciated involving the health kits. If you don’t have any and your health is low for a certain amount of time, the game will just give you one to use. I also don’t know if it works on any difficulty above Normal, which I played, but it’s a real godsend in tense situations. A small detail that I also liked about The Last of Us Remastered is how flashlight noises and recorder audio came out of the speaker of the DualShock 4 controller.

Of course, there’s a reason I considered the gameplay underwhelming. Some of the issues I had were admittedly more nitpicky and don’t affect the enjoyment much, if at all. For instance, making it so the first ever drawer you can open is empty, telling me where to go while I’m still scavenging, and placing supplies in seemingly mean places beyond a “risk vs reward” exchange (like having to kill a Clicker to get to something good). This also includes the obvious “inevitable firefight” level design some sections use. Also, I felt that, every once in a while, I had difficulty telling where to go while in particularly dark places. I’m aware this was likely just me not putting two and two together at the time, but I thought it worth mentioning.

Then there are the more serious issues. While the game itself isn’t necessarily the most challenging, there are somewhat random difficulty spikes with a higher death count during some encounters. The peak of this, at least for Joel, is when you have to dodge sniper rounds in an abandoned suburb and the only way to avoid taking significant damage or blowing through health kits is following one specific route behind cover. Ellie’s portion of the game, Winter, is also generally more difficult than Joel’s due to even scarcer ammo and supplies, no way to improve crafting/healing speeds and a decidedly different definition of stealth that’s more likely to get every enemy’s attention. It makes sense for her to not have as much experience as someone much older than her, but the execution of that logic sometimes felt frustrating nonetheless.

While not obvious from this screenshot, Ellie's section isn't as fun as Joel's.

Speaking of Winter, I also ran into what I presume is a specific glitch that left me scratching my head. During the boss fight against David, presented as the world’s deadliest game of cat and mouse, I died enough times on the third stage for one reason or another and on one of my respawns, not only did he teleport all the way across the map, he seemed somehow easier to sneak up on despite not showing up as well in Listen Mode. Out of frustration I took the victory, though it did feel hollow. The rest of the game isn’t free from glitches, however. Most noticeably, there were some instances of braindead AI, resulting in situations like Ellie or a human enemy running into a wall. Additionally, I killed a group of humans with a nail bomb and it took another group a few seconds too long to figure this out, despite walking right into the aftermath.

Some issues with the game design itself also persist or stand out more now. Puzzles in The Last of Us are disappointing, if only because so many of them involve moving ladders and planks of wood or swimming while pushing wooden pallets to compensate for Ellie’s inability to swim. Between set pieces, there are also enough noticeable transition sequences, like doing nothing but riding a horse and talking while on a linear path, that I wondered why some of them weren’t just cutscenes. This time, I also realized just how many human enemies there were in comparison to the number of Infected, of which there are four types (Runners, Stalkers, Clickers and Bloaters). Also, it still bugs me that Joel has to be as slow and quiet as possible to avoid attracting Infected, yet Ellie can run at full speed and make a lot of noise with no consequences (unless you're playing as her).

What has aged well are the visuals. Despite going for realism, there’s enough stylization that even seven years later, the game looks stunning, especially in buttery smooth 60 FPS. There was clearly a lot of thought put into the environmental detail, since the post-apocalyptic world looks very lived-in while also giving the sense that nature had partially reclaimed the earth after 20 years. This attention to detail also helped make the giraffe scene in the university stand out, since it highlighted how the animals thrived in a more natural setting. In the case of this scene, it also helped that the giraffes were rendered accurately, down to their black tongues (a detail that other media usually gets wrong).

The world looks both lived-in and reclaimed by nature.

Unfortunately, there are some persistent visual issues, even after all this time. Apart from the occasional pop-in on grass textures with a surprisingly noticeable draw distance, I also noticed some times where entire environmental textures would suddenly pop into existence if I viewed certain spaces from behind sufficiently sized cover. This ranged from a fence that disappeared if I walked too much behind a wall or an entire forest texture if I crouched behind natural cover. Sometimes, the game might get confused where to draw something, most often a water cooler bottle that audibly vibrated against the ground before settling. Also, as someone who took basic equitation, I found the horses a little too spindly to seem realistic (compared with the more accurate giraffes).

Between the two walls, there's no fence...

...until I take two steps to the left.

Instead of properly setting up the death animation during the sniper section,
it once placed everything over a white void before restarting properly.

No forest/mountain textures...

...until I stand up.

On the upside, the voice acting and motion capture work are nothing short of superb. This is especially so for Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson as Joel and Ellie respectively, since they have great chemistry and believable emotions that highlight the great character writing.

About eight months after the release of The Last of Us, a DLC story, Left Behind, was released, acting as an interquel between the Fall and Winter chapters that expands on Ellie’s story about her friend Riley from the end of the original game. Since this DLC was included within The Last of Us Remastered, I didn’t have to spend any additional money to play it, so I jumped right into it after finishing the main campaign (which the game itself actually recommends doing).

The story of Left Behind alternates between Ellie’s efforts to find a first aid kit for Joel after the events of Fall and her friendship with Riley months prior. There’s good timing in the changing perspectives, which also highlights the similar mall settings. Once again, the main highlight is the character writing, with Ellie’s present panic over Joel’s wellbeing and her final moments with Riley in the past showcasing the strong bonds between the different characters very well. I also found the budding lesbian romance between Ellie and Riley tastefully done, since the game doesn’t shove it in your face and lets the moment build up very naturally, acting as a good contrast to the inevitable dark climax.

Ellie scavenges a mall for medical supplies to help Joel.

Considering how well the story was written, the only real issue I could see was how they depicted Riley’s fate, since it cuts off around the moment Ellie had already described to Joel, down to the dialogue. It would be interesting to know how Riley finally went out and if Ellie had any part to play in it, which might add another layer to her survivor’s guilt, but at the same time The Last of Us is certainly dark enough as it is.

The gameplay of Left Behind is very similar to the Winter section of the main game, but with even scarcer ammo and supplies to compensate for the short length of the campaign, about one or two hours. From a purely technical standpoint, the only improvement is that now you can hold Triangle to lift security grates instead of repeatedly tapping it. Otherwise, there are now scenarios where you can pit humans and Infected against each other, creating a new strategic layer where you can influence and have to deal with the outcome. The Riley portion also had a few interesting sequences, including a clever one where Ellie uses her imagination to play a broken arcade cabinet.

A clever minigame sequence.

Since you still play as Ellie, a lot of the issues I had with the Winter portion still carry over to Left Behind, including her tendency to attract unwanted attention. The climax of the present half also drags a bit too long, with Ellie having to fight off two waves of human enemies with already limited resources just to get back to Joel. The only saving grace is that a group of Infected can spawn to help finish off the second wave, but it’s still a pain to get that far in the first place.

As for the Riley portion, while I understood the idea behind it, adding some element of agency to certain bonding moments, there's a real lack of stakes until the ending, where they have to run away from Infected. Since the interactions during this half of the DLC are mostly dialogue or dialogue triggers, I sometimes wondered why a lot of it couldn't have been cutscenes, since they would achieve largely the same result. Otherwise, the interactive portions are mainly there for replay value.

After a gap of seven years between playthroughs of The Last of Us, I realize that I enjoyed the character writing more than I did the gameplay. While the gameplay itself is pretty solid and does its job in enhancing the survival aspect of the setting, it feels more mediocre now, particularly with the limited puzzle types and general ease of combat. I would still recommend this game, but mainly for those who can enjoy a good story regardless of the quality of the gameplay. Otherwise, temper your expectations.