The Last of Us, a famous and acclaimed franchise was reconstructed for PlayStation 4. This time, with high resolution in every detail, characters, shadows, and lights improved.

20 years after a pandemic had devastated humanity, amidst cities overrun by forests, the survivors kill each other for resources, such as weapons, food, and any other utensilsthat they need. Here we are going to play the most part asJoel. An extremally violent survivor that will do whatever it takes to survive and fulfill the mission he was designated, to protect Ellie, the only human immune to contagious spores whose age doesn’t affect her maturity and extreme braveness.

Besides this, The Last of Us: Remastered includes packages in maps of abandoned places and also a single-player mode for The Last of Us: Left Behind. Enjoy the maximum that this gameplay offers, in a narrative that represented one generation, in the old PS3.



What has changed?

Well, the remastered, besides launching the packages that I mentioned before aiming for the release of PS4, as much as they were released on similar dates, it came as a promise of formatting the entire image system, resolution, and game art. It may seem foolish to change something that has worked so well as this wonderful franchise, but the changes worked well and were made with mastery.

Now, besides hunting zombies, killing, and dying because of the resources in the most absurd and apocalyptical landscapes, you’ll have another goal: visualize and see the beautiful ambiance, so, in the graphics, the game reaches a higher and well-produced point. Therefore, I’ll exemplify below some comparations between both versions:





The relationship between Joel and Ellie

In the beginning, we live in a quarantine area protected by the army with Joel, here we don’t know anything yet, who are the “good guys” and because of it, we don’t know if we can trust anyone, except Tess, a woman that helps us in smuggling activities. That being said, in one of the several exits of this zone that we make to search and kill another smuggler, Joel and Tess receive a mission from Marlene, fireflies’ leader, the main rebel group in the war against the army in this first moment, to bring and protect a teenager, Ellie who is immune to this pandemic, to a rebel base to search for the cure.

Without believing in it at first, since it has already passed 20 years in this apocalyptic and where we can’t trust anyone easily, they are insecure if they accepted this commitment and the relationship between the main characters shatters, with provocations every time.

In a moment, when we ran away from the soldiers, Tess ends up getting bitten and sacrifices herself so that the other can progress. Now, with the only two most important characters of the narrative, we’ll advance and pass through several problems, dividing it into 4 parts, one for each season of the year.



First, it’s important to highlight that at the beginning of the game, on the outbreak day, we played with Joel running away from the city where he lived together with his daughter who still was a kid, Sarah, and her brother Tommy, which unfortunately just the two men were able to survive. So, imagine, a man surviving through a zombie apocalyptic after losing his daughter, and now he has to take care of a girl that doesn’t have any family ties with him, the only one immune to spores.

Of course, the relationship won’t be the best, but it is one of the most beautiful things to see, it hits a certain point of the series where we’ll be watching the enormous maturity of Ellie and Joel’s “thick skin” combine as a single factor, the union. In the end, we are going to see and feel that these two people combine are sensational protagonists, but now they have a feeling of father and daughter.



Use and abuse of crafting

Like all post-apolitical games, one of the main concerns of the players of TLOU it’s to saveresources, rags, alcohol, blades, and especially ammunition for various weapons. That said, it’s important to explore the entire map, even when we are trapped by a horde of clickers or runners (I’ll explain the difference soon), get rid of them and collect items, because you’ll certainly need it.

Now that you have everything that you need, you won’t have difficulty crafting anything, the game will easily give instructions, you just have to access the menu and click on the desired item, it can be a medic aid, a weapon improvement, or Molotovs.

Besides this, in the same menu, it’s possible to upgrade our character’s abilities with medicine collected on the map, and can also view cards that we collected around (they can tell a story without affecting the main narrative or without being important in some factors), we can find it in some places, tables that allow us to upgrade our weapons, placing aims, increasing ammunition capacity and others.



The “living” challenges

Prepare the nostalgic feeling, because if you think that zombies are common, that they are similar to each other, as we see in many movies and series, you are completely wrong, as in Resident Evil there is a certain variety among our enemies, reminding us of this other beloved franchise that rained on old consoles for a long time, of course,we are not counting with hunters that are going to compete with us every time and are going to kill us in the first opportunity to grab our resources, in this first game we are going to find 4 different challenges, runners, stalkers, clickers and the worst of them all, bloaters.

Each one is a different stage of infection, and runners are the most recent infected, they run a lot and can see you at a reasonable distance, they are easily defeated in hand-tohand combat, so they are not very challenging, the problem is when they come in a large number or with other types. Continuing, stalkers are a complicated stage, they are in a longer infected period than runners but not so long as clickers, because of that, they will have the first one speed combined with the second one veracity.

Now, we have the worst ones, the clickers, characterized for a huge fungous instead of a head, they are blind but have an extremely qualified hearing, any sound can arouse these monsters, I emphasize that it’s still important to keep distance here, in hand-to-hand combat you’ll always get the worst of it unless you have a knife and the ability to use it in moments like these (unlocked on the menu), thus, you can try to pass without being noticed by them or to approximate without making any sound and stealthily kill them all.

Finally, we are going to meet the fourth stage of the infection, the rarest and resistant, bloaters are huge creatures that will throw spores from a long distance, harming us considerably, and when they get close, they’ll split your skull in half, so the combat here is going to take some movement and cleverness to scape, I hardly recommend using Molotov, it’s going to delay the attacks and cause a beautiful mess.



A complete masterpiece

I already mentioned most factors, but as an excellent game and in my opinion, it’s also the factor of being a game extremely complete, the quality of the sounds wouldn’t be different, in other words, it’s wonderful. In every aspect, of the soundtrack, with songs well placed that represents the moment that we are living, being played on tense, tranquility or imminent danger, and also the deafening zombiesound, especially the clickers, that are going to give us shivers and gives us a lot of fear and worry.



The cure (spoiler alert)

In the final part, we security delivered Ellie to Marlene and fireflies inside a hospital, where qualified doctors will produce a vaccine to finally free humanity of spores. However, that is one of the most beautiful scenes, as I mentioned before, we see the peak of Joel and the girl’s relationship, as they become connected like a father and a daughter.

That is, Joel wakes up inside the hospital (he was knocked down by fireflies because they didn’t recognize him), and then he discovers that they need to remove Ellie’s brain to make the procedure since the brain is where the infection establishes, and what of course, this would kill her. Knowing this, our main character goes to the operation room to save her, but he faces armed men on his way, men with fusils of high caliber that will end our lives in instants and make us wish that they were a huge horde of bloater instead.

After this huge challenge, we arrive at the room and the doctor will try to stop us, we kill him in a cold blood, and you can kill two nurses if you wish. Finally, with Ellie in our arms, we run as if it’s the end of the world to escape soldiers, that can’t shoot us because they’re afraid of hitting Ellie, in the end, when we escape through the elevator we find Marlene on the garage, that, of course, wants to stop us, but again Joel won’t be merciful, he kills her and progress, that’s his line of thought.

Finally, we escape easily with a vehicle found at the place, so Ellie wakes up from her sleep on the way to Jackson (the city where Tommy lives) and starts to ask about what has happened, Joel lies that the cure wasn’t enough to protect her, however, she remains suspicious and doesn’t believe, but this will be a story for a second game.



The Last of Us: Remastered is available for PlayStation 4 and 5.