5/5 ★ – TheCriticalPandaBoi's review of The Last of Us Part I.

So, a couple of days ago, I got all of the achievements on The Last of Us Part I, which if anyone knows me personally, they should know that The Last of Us Part I is my favourite game ever made, if not, then one of my favourite games, I have loved this game immensely and played through it multiple times, and I don’t really write game reviews anymore for some reason, but since i just can’t stop thinking about this game, especially when season 2 of the HBO series is mere days away, I thought fuck it, let’s review it. I don’t even know where to begin when talking about this game, because there’s just so much perfection to this, it’s made even more perfect when you play the remake on PlayStation 5, where it has all the graphical upgrades that Part II brought to the table. When it comes to the graphics, it’s easily one of the most prettiest games I’ve ever seen, hell, even on the PlayStation 3, this game still looks groundbreaking from that era of gaming but the PlayStation 5 remake just looks perfect. Back in the day, when I first played this, I believe back in 2022, i would stop playing and take screenshots of gorgeous areas of the game, that’s not something I do very often, the only recent example i can think of is NEVA and if you haven’t played that game, play it, it’s mind bogglingly beautiful. This game also just has such an amazing and immersive soundtrack, the score was composed by Gustavo Santaolalla and this is genuinely one of my favourite scores in gaming, anything else he composed i hadn’t seen, except The Book of Life which is an underrated animated musical, don’t @ me, Gustavo’s score is so good, they brought him back to compose the score for The Last of Us HBO show, and the reason why is because it’s such an important and iconic piece of music to where no other composer would do it justice. As much as I love the score of Uncharted, and i really do, Nathan Drake’s theme is iconic to me, but come on, nothing beats the beginning of The Last of Us where we hear the main theme blasting as we watch the credits. When it comes to the gameplay, the intermission between the action and all that of just walking and dialogue is alright, we do get puzzles quite a bit which are honestly pretty simple to figure out, so i think even if you aren’t a gamer or you’re a nitwit then the innovation of accessibility here is great for newcomers. Even in these kinda simple gameplay moments, I do like the dialogue in these moments and the more you learn about the characters we follow around, some of these conversations are actually optional and it’s good to listen to them because you get more context to these characters and you grow more of a bond with them. The actual combat of the game is where it shines the most on a gameplay standpoint, because honestly, murder has never felt so good before. There’s literally so much body parts and blood that spew depending on the weapons you use, on the PlayStation 4 remastered and I’m assuming the PlayStation 3 original, there’s none of those extra bits of violence, but on the PlayStation 5, you can literally shoot someone in the neck and you’ll see the blood shoot out of where you shot them as the enemies will put their hand there to stop themselves losing blood, it’s brutally realistic. If you shoot someone with a shotgun, you can shoot whole arms and legs off as well as blowing their literal brains out, you can blow them up until what’s left is just a patch of blood left remaining on the floor, bruh, when I was going for the platinum trophy, I saw the blood effect on the water and it just blended into it, I was in awe because of how gorgeous it looked. It’s a great game to really let your inner psychopath escape. The variety of enemies are also a treat, you get a fair amount of human enemies, as expected they are pains in the ass because they have guns, but then you have the infected and just saying that as one type of enemy really discredits the variety of the game. There’s so many different kinds of the infected, my favourite being the clickers because they really do force you to take things slow and go stealthy, as well as just the amazing sound design that they’ve got, which this game is full of amazing sound design. The environments and world that Naughty Dog has crafted into this game is truly just a marble to look at, every single detail of these post apocalyptic landscapes have never looked better honestly. I feel like I haven’t even mentioned the genre this is, if you were living under a rock, The Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse game, and if I’m honest I’m not exactly a huge zombie game player, but honestly The Last of Us takes the standard tropes from a stereotypical zombie survival game and makes it’s own identity out of it. I guess The Walking Dead is probably the best example of what The Last of Us was inspired by but honestly, I feel like the writing of The Last of Us is a lot stronger with how it handles it’s character drama. As much as I love Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead and how each season until i stopped watching the show, just watching him slowly go into this intoxicating mentality of this brand new environment he’s found in and having to adapt is very interesting to watch as a man turns slowly into becoming broken, but that comes nowhere near to what they do with Joel Miller in The Last of Us. Joel Miller is one of my favourite video game characters, hell, one of my favourite protagonists ever made, he’s so incredibly interesting and the reason why is because he’s unlikeable. It’s such a great move by making Joel lose his humanity and break him at the very beginning of the game with one of the most tragic prologue in gaming. I’m gonna rip the bandage off, Joel is not a good person, but that’s just it, he’s human and he’s trying to survive, so as a player, you’re watching and playing as Joel from his lens but once you break him down, he’s a really selfish man who only cares about himself and that’s why he’s interesting. Even though i think he’s selfish, you can’t ever call him wrong, the moral questions always spring up with any decision that he makes, and Joel is someone who thinks for himself and everyone else who he’s with logically, he could be selfless and help someone out and do a good deed but he’s also risking something bad happening and their lives. It mostly comes in with the ending but I will talk about the ending in a little bit because I wanna go into spoilers. I can’t talk about Joel without talking about Ellie, I fucking love Ellie to bits, she’s such a great little counterpart to Joel’s character. Ellie and Joel’s relationship is what grips the game together, watching their chemistry grow upon this whole year journey they go on is just amazing, you really feel like you grow a bond with Ellie too as you play through the game. Since Ellie is immune, she feels like she’s got a huge responsibility on her shoulders for potentially solving a cure for humanity, and you can feel her wanting to save humanity. ⚠️I’m going into some spoilers so just know that I have warned you!⚠️ She’s also someone who struggles with her own life, there’s this moment in the Left Behind DLC where her and her best friend were bitten and they wanted to wait out their turn so they can die together. Even in this ending, Ellie tells Joel that she’s still waiting for her turn to die, because she doesn’t wanna be in a world without her friend, and if you ask me, the theme of this game has a subtle hint of loneliness. Often, a lot of these characters that we meet across this journey are all suffering from some sort of grief, and a majority of that is to do with loss in some way, it’s a game where you have to choose between loneliness or companionship. Which is why I personally love the ending to this game, it’s my favourite ending to anything period, the fireflies have a chance to actually get the cure for humanity, but in order to get it, Ellie has to die. Joel chooses to kill all remaining fireflies in this hospital, in order to save Ellie out of selfishness, because he doesn’t wanna lose another daughter, he needs her because he’s grown a bond with her, and he decides to let humanity suffer in order to keep Ellie alive. He chose the selfish choice because he didn’t wanna lose her, let me ask you this question, if this was your daughter and this was the scenario you were in yourself, would you stop them and take her home dooming humanity, or would you let them kill her to get this vaccine that has only a chance of working? It’s a tough one, ain’t it? For Ellie, she’s open with letting Joel know that she wouldn’t been okay with dying for humanity, because it would have given her death purpose, she would’ve felt like she had purpose in life and that purpose was taken away from her for Joel’s selfishness. And when Ellie tells Joel to swear that he was telling the truth about no cure, and he lied straight to her face, completely damaging the trust between him and her forever. The Last of Us Part I is a game about love, redemption and growth and how those things can bring life to humanity, it’s one of those rare games that I consider to be perfect through and through. Even though, it had like 250+ collectibles to obtain that platinum trophy, I would without a doubt in my mind go through all of that again because of how much I love this game. Overall, The Last of Us Part I is one of those gaming experiences that is truly special to me, it’s an experience that I encourage everyone in their right mind to go and play it right now! It’s literally on almost every generation of PlayStation and it’s on PC, because it’s one of those unforgettable games that never got a sequel… Wait, there’s The Last of Us Part II?! To be continued…