The Last of Us™ Part I — 遊戲評測Naughty Dog rebuilt this father-daughter survival story to near-perfection, only for a botched PC launch to bury its greatness until the patches landed

A decade on, no other surrogate-father story has wrecked me quite like this one.

The Last of Us Part I is Naughty Dog's ground-up reconstruction of its own 2013 landmark — not a coat of HD paint but a rebuild down to the bone, with the lighting, the geometry and the foliage all torn out and remade. The route Joel walks Ellie across a dead America is identical to the line; not a word of the script has moved. Every face, though, every shaft of light, every plucked guitar string has been recut.

The greatness underneath is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what happened when that greatness, wrapped in a fresh photoreal skin, landed on PC: shader compiles that ran for hours, memory that spilled past every published spec, stutters and crashes that dragged the PC Metascore down to 59. A game that should have been a victory lap launched, for a while, as a humiliation.

So this review is really answering a split question — a story that could score near the ceiling, strapped to a port that nearly buried it, and what number you write at the bottom of that. The pages below pull staging, music, image, mechanics and bulk apart one layer at a time, so the masterpiece and the botched port can each be judged on their own terms.

If this game gets one sentence of praise, make it this: it tells a father-daughter survival story nobody has matched since.

A smuggling run that turns into one man's reckoning

The skeleton is almost cruelly plain. Twenty years after a fungal plague gutted America, a smuggler named Joel is handed a cargo he doesn't want — a teenage girl, Ellie, immune to the infection — and told to walk her from the Boston quarantine zone out west to a Firefly lab in Salt Lake City, where her body might yield a vaccine. The escort is never just the escort. Joel lost his own daughter, Sarah, on the night the outbreak broke, and he has spent two decades welding that wound shut and running on numbness. Ellie is the thing that forces him to love a child again, against his will and his better judgment.

The game never narrates "they grew close." It lets you feel the bond assemble itself — in the giraffes that wander the Salt Lake ruins, in Joel teaching Ellie to hunt, in the moment a bad pun makes them both laugh in spite of everything. Show, don't tell, held with monastic discipline. That restraint is exactly what separates it from the wall of narrative games that lean on dialogue to do their emotional lifting.

Watch how rarely either of them says what they feel. Joel deflects, Ellie performs toughness, and the truth leaks out only in glances and small acts — a guitar offered, a switchblade kept. By the time you reach the back third you are not being told a relationship exists; you have lived inside its accumulation, hour by hour, and that is why the ending hits the way it does.

The hospital choice, and the lie that follows it

The sharpest cut lands at the very end. The Fireflies tell Joel that extracting an immune sample means surgery on Ellie's brain — surgery she will not survive. Joel doesn't hesitate. He shoots his way through the entire hospital, lifts the unconscious girl, and walks out, snuffing humanity's one shot at a cure with his own hands. The crueller stroke is the lie afterward: he tells a waking Ellie that the Fireflies gave up the search. There is no hero-saves-the-world ending here, only a father who would rather let the world keep rotting than lose another daughter.

The writing refuses to judge him. It hands you the choice intact and lets you carry the unease out past the credits. That moral impurity is precisely why the ending is still being argued over a decade later: it doesn't ask whether Joel was right, it asks whether you would have done the same — and dares you to be honest. Even the supporting roster gets this care. The winter chapter pulls the camera onto Ellie, alone against a cannibal leader named David who tries to dismantle her with "we're not so different," turning a horror set-piece into a psychological siege. And the bundled prequel Left Behind fills in Ellie and Riley's last afternoon in a dead mall — the key to why abandonment terrifies her so much. Naughty Dog never coasts on its bit players.

Why a same-genre rival lands a full tier below

Days Gone, Sony's other post-apocalyptic infection survival piece, spreads its stage into an open world: ride the bike, clear the camps, thin the hordes. That breadth is also its problem. It dilutes its emotional core — the protagonist's bond with his lost wife — into repeated busywork, and it never lands with the density or the ache of the Joel-and-Ellie line.

The root of the gap is narrative density. This game is linear, so every scene is staged to the inch and not a single minute is padding; the moment an open world hands pacing to the player, the emotional crescendos stop arriving on cue, and a player can wander off to clear three outposts at the exact moment the story most needs to tighten. That is what the editor's verdict means: write apocalyptic kinship and the rival still loses on characterization and rhythm, its grief thinned out into open-world filler. Linearity has its own cost, of course — it trades away freedom for that density. But on the single question of telling a story you cannot shake loose, 9.5 is earned.

The sound here is the kind you could listen to with the screen off and still get goosebumps.

A few plucked strings hold up an entire dead world

Gustavo Santaolalla's spare guitar theme is carried over untouched — the remake never reaches for a bigger orchestral re-score to sound "grander," and that is exactly the right call. A handful of lazy, almost detuned plucks over a barely-there low drone, and the screen fills with the emptiness and grief of a civilization that has already left the room. It doesn't score heroism; it scores the bone-deep tiredness of simply staying alive, which is the true register of this story.

The music stays restrained the whole way through. Long stretches are silence, and the theme only rises when the feeling genuinely breaks the dam — the giraffes, the hospital, the final frames. That "sound only when it must" approach lands every cue squarely on an emotional beat instead of laying cheap sentiment end to end. The remake didn't move a single note of it, which tells you Naughty Dog understood that some things were already right ten years ago, and "upgrading" them would only do damage.

Performances that hold the whole thing up

Troy Baker as Joel and Ashley Johnson as Ellie are the other half of the foundation this story stands on. Through heavy motion capture and synced delivery, they play the unsaid things — the bluffing, the swallowed grief, the forced toughness — in layers that the script alone could never carry. The collapse behind Joel's quiet "baby girl," the fragility tucked inside Ellie's teenage bravado, lives in the tremor and the pause of the voice, not the words on the page.

There is a craft point worth flagging here. Preserving a beloved score is easy to praise and hard to actually do, because the temptation to "modernize" is enormous; the remake's discipline in leaving it alone is itself an artistic decision, and the right one.

Environmental audio works for the gameplay just as hard. The clearest case is the Clicker, the infected that has lost its sight and echolocates with a string of skin-crawling clicks. When you hear those clicks close in through the dark, the physical tension is something no visual cue could ever hand you. You catch yourself easing off the controller, as if the buttons could give your position away — and when a game's sound makes you instinctively hold your breath, the audio has stopped being atmosphere and started doing the work of the mechanics. Few games make their soundscape this functional without ever announcing that it is.

Spatial audio on console pushes the placement further

On PS5 the game leans on Tempest 3D audio and the DualSense haptics to push the directionality and texture of sound to another level. You can tell whether the infected are closing from your left-rear or dead ahead, and rain striking different surfaces travels into your palms through the pad. The PC version can output high-quality audio when the hardware is up to it, but this depth of physical integration is a PlayStation-exclusive bonus.

Set it against the route God of War (2018) takes — epic, orchestra-soaked, swelling to fill the room — and this game walks the opposite way entirely. One uses a thundering choir to carry the weight of Norse myth; the other uses one out-of-tune guitar to carry a father's silence. Both are superb, yet they sit at the two poles of game scoring, and this one proves that in the right story, restraint and empty space hit harder than grandeur — that a single held silence can land heavier than a full orchestra. Between the score, the performances and the environmental work, 9.0 in audio is fully earned.

The image is the proudest, most visible upgrade in this remake — right up until you try to run it smoothly on PC.

A rebuild where micro-expressions do the acting

Naughty Dog rebuilt the lighting, the models and the foliage from scratch on its in-house engine rather than smearing a filter over old assets, and the most direct payoff is the faces. The crow's feet at the corner of Joel's eyes, the tremor in Ellie's lower lip before she cries, the flickers of feeling almost too small to register in a conversation — all of it is reproduced with next-gen facial capture and rendering. Plenty of the key exchanges need no dialogue at all; you read the face and you understand. That "micro-expressions can act" level of realism still reads as an industry benchmark in 2023.

The ruined-world atmosphere is just as accomplished. Vines pushing through cracked masonry, leaves drifting on standing water, sunlight breaking through a shattered window in visible god-rays — almost every frame is a screenshot you could hang on a wall. None of it is beauty for its own sake; it keeps narrating the single fact that civilization has been gone for twenty years.

The original from 2013 already had remarkable art direction; what the rebuild adds is fidelity, not taste. Surfaces hold up under a closer camera, skin catches light the way skin should, and the density of detritus in a room now reads as a place people fled rather than a set. It is the rare remaster where you can pause, lean in, and the illusion does not fall apart.

Landmarks you don't forget, one after another

From the walled Boston quarantine zone of the opening, to the drowned, rust-grown streets of Pittsburgh, to the giraffes wandering into frame in the Salt Lake ruins, the game throws out a new "unforgettable" tableau every hour or two. These landmarks aren't isolated set-dressing — they are the breathing room in the narrative rhythm, a stretch of quiet, mournful beauty handed to player and character alike after a run of taut stealth. The pacing of awe is as deliberate as the pacing of dread, and the two keep trading off all the way down the road.

On paper PC should be the ceiling for all of this: ray-traced shadows, ultrawide ratios, an unlocked frame rate, finer texture options and a deep settings menu the consoles never get. In theory, hardware permitting, this is the best place to see the journey — higher resolution, steadier frames, sharper distances on every leg of the road. Which is exactly why the launch optimization disaster stung so badly: the version that should have been the best briefly became the one that wouldn't run at all.

An accessibility suite that sets the bar

The accessibility framework inherited from Part II is carried over whole: high-contrast mode, scalable subtitles, color-blind adaptation, generous aim-assist and navigation cues, a list deep enough that players who are visually impaired, hearing impaired or limited in mobility can each find a setup that fits. Screen reading, haptic combat callouts, fully remappable controls — each could anchor its own feature piece. This is not a box-ticking checklist; it is genuine, designed inclusivity, and it lets players who would otherwise bounce off the harder stealth finish the journey. The options are granular enough that two players with very different needs can each tune the game into something playable without breaking the experience the designers intended. In an industry that still treats accessibility as a post-launch afterthought, Naughty Dog built it in as a first-class concern, weighted as heavily as the lighting or the animation. It remains the reference point the whole industry measures itself against, and it is one of the few places this remake genuinely, unarguably goes further than the original — a place where "we did something the 2013 release didn't" actually holds up.

A launch that drove the ceiling through the floor

Then came the PC launch that nearly ruined all of it. On day one players met shader compiles that ran anywhere from tens of minutes to several hours, VRAM use far past the advertised spec, frequent stutters and crashes, and on Windows 11 outright failures to boot. OpenCritic's aggregate sat at 82, yet the PC Metascore landed at 59 and the user score briefly cratered to 1.7 — a game that should have looked stunning simply did not run for a long stretch.

Naughty Dog patched its way back: one update of roughly 25GB to tune frame rate and texture fidelity, then a second roughly 49GB patch aimed squarely at cutting shader-compile time, lifting CPU performance and fixing the boot crashes. Patched, the image returns to where it should have been. Hold it next to that same year's Resident Evil 4 Remake — another high-spec remake, but Capcom's port held steady from launch. The visual foundation here is worth a 9; the launch state of this port is a big part of why the overall number gets dragged down.

The mechanics are the most "2013" thing about this game — solid, but you can smell the decade on them.

Crafting under scarcity forces the trade-offs

The core loop is built on never having enough. Alcohol, rags, blades, scrap powder — the same salvaged junk feeds a health kit, a Molotov or a makeshift throwable, and what you're carrying usually only covers one of them. Patch yourself up first, or gamble the materials on a thrown device to clear a room? That repeated weighing inside the backpack turns the apocalypse's "scarcity" premise into playable pressure instead of a line of backstory.

Crafting also burns real time — you can't leisurely assemble gear under an enemy's nose. The second a fight kicks off, how the materials get split, when you stop to stitch a wound, when you bet everything on one thrown Molotov, all of it gets decided with your pulse up. On higher difficulty that squeeze sharpens further, and a single bad allocation can leave you replaying one encounter over and over until you respect the economy.

It's a small system on paper — a handful of ingredients, a short list of recipes — but it does an enormous amount of tonal work. Every crafted item is a quiet admission that you are scraping by, that nothing here is plentiful, that the next fight might cost you the bandage you were saving. The mechanic and the mood are the same thing.

Stealth and Listen Mode: go quiet or go loud

Nearly every encounter is the same question: slip past, or brawl once you're spotted. Listen Mode lets Joel hold his breath and sense bodies through walls, and paired with thrown distractions and stealth takedowns it forms a complete sneaking chain. But the scarcity of ammo and materials makes going loud expensive, so most of the time stealth isn't an option, it's the requirement — getting clocked by a pack of infected usually means a reload.

The enemy ecology hands you two entirely different threats. Among the infected, ordinary Runners track by sight, the blind Clicker tracks by sound, and the Bloater is a spore-lobbing armored tank; among the human Hunters, you face believable AI that calls out flanks, searches cover and circles to your blind side. The first set tests your stealth and your ears, the second your movement and your fire discipline, and alternating the two keeps combat from going stale and forces a fresh read on every cleared zone.

The difference matters more than it sounds. A room of Clickers is a puzzle of sound and sightlines — one wrong step and the instant-kill grab ends you. A yard full of Hunters is a firefight of angles and timing, where a thrown brick buys the second you need to reposition. The game keeps shuffling the deck, so the muscle memory you build against one threat is only half the answer against the next.

Feel that's solid, a template stuck a decade back

The heft of melee, the recoil of the ranged weapons, the crude weight of the improvised gear all still land as convincing after the rebuild — swinging a pipe and squeezing off a shot carry real feedback. But set it beside the fluid combat of Part II, where you can dodge, go prone and crawl flat through tall grass, and this game's movement reads as plainly dated: there is no dodge button, and moving and shooting both drag with a touch of 2013 latency.

More fundamentally, the whole thing is still a linear-corridor template: cleanly signposted, beautifully staged levels, but next to no open exploration, no stat progression, no room to build. A weapon upgrade tree exists, yet it's slight enough to barely register as a choice; you never hoard parts for a particular build, and you never walk away from a level wondering what you could have done differently with your loadout. The systems are there to support the journey, not to be played with for their own sake, and once you accept that, the absence of depth stops feeling like an omission and starts feeling like a deliberate narrowing of focus.

Why the score lands at eight, not lower

Players who love being led by an invisible, steady hand through a great stretch of road will love it; the craftsmanship of that hand is undeniable, and being guided has never felt this assured. Players raised on the freedom and the growth-feedback of the modern open world may find it narrow, a little old, the corridors a touch too obviously corridors. That is why this dimension sits at 8.0 — it polishes stealth, crafting and enemy design to a genuine sheen, and the moment-to-moment tension still holds up today. Its weakness isn't crude execution; it's that it speaks the design language of the last decade rather than this one. This is an excellent old set of mechanics, not a dated bad one, and the gap between those two things is exactly what the score is trying to say. A clumsy game can score lower and deserve it; this one earns its eight by doing a smaller, older thing extremely well, and asking you to meet it on the terms of its own era rather than yours. Judge it as a 2013 design lovingly preserved and it shines; judge it against the freedom of a 2023 sandbox and it inevitably gives ground.

Bulk is the hardest thing to defend about this game — it's good, but it gives too little and asks too much.

A tight linear journey, almost exactly long enough

The main path runs to a HowLongToBeat median around 15 hours, with the completionist run for collectibles and conversations sitting near 24. For a purely linear narrative game that length is judged well — long enough to build a real bond with Joel and Ellie, short enough that no carefully staged crescendo gets diluted by padding. There are no fetch-quests stuffed in to inflate the clock; nearly every leg of the road is pushing the story or seeding the feeling.

Put another way, the content density is high and the filler is scarce; as a one-time experience the pacing is textbook, and the lack of bloat is a real virtue rather than a shortcoming on its own. The problem isn't "short," it's that beyond those 15 hours there is almost nothing left for you — every chip is pushed onto the journey itself, with no reason to linger once the credits roll. No repeatable mode, no web of side content, no open ground to wander back through; the moment you finish is, for all intents, where the game ends for you.

For many players a journey this good doesn't need replay value, and that is a fair position to hold. But the calculus changes the instant you've paid full price for it. A one-and-done campaign at sixty dollars asks you to value the hours very highly, and not everyone's wallet agrees with their heart on that math.

One slice of extra content, and it isn't even new

The bundled prequel Left Behind adds roughly two hours of extra story — Ellie and her friend Riley, one brief, doomed afternoon of teenage joy in an abandoned mall. It's beautifully done, an important piece of why Ellie fears being left so badly, and the swing between laughter and loss is genuinely moving. But two hours is two hours, and Left Behind already shipped inside the original and the PS4 remaster; it isn't something this remake invented.

Beyond it, this "Part I" carries no new chapters, no side missions, no collectible threads, no fresh mechanics built for the remake — everything is what the original already had. Its fidelity to the source borders on stingy: the money you put down for the remake buys an overhaul of image and performance plus that excellent accessibility suite, and not one new playable hour or new beat of story. There is no expanded epilogue, no behind-the-scenes mode of any real heft, nothing that says "here is a reason beyond the visuals to own this specific edition." For a $59.99 release, that content sheet is awfully short, and the silence where new content should be is loud.

Cut multiplayer, full price — the value problem

What stings veterans most is two things stacked together. First, the original's well-regarded Factions multiplayer is cut entirely, leaving only the single-player campaign and stripping out a whole layer of long-tail, repeatable play. Second, it shipped at the full $59.99 while the PS4 Remastered remained a perfectly adequate way to experience the story, the visual gap not nearly wide enough for most people to justify paying full freight a second time.

Held against the hundreds of hours of side content, random events and explorable wilderness in Red Dead Redemption 2, those dozen-odd linear hours look thin, and the entry in your library never lights up again once it's done. That's a category difference, of course — a narrative gem shouldn't be measured with an open world's ruler, and forcing the comparison distorts both; linear and open are simply two different value standards. But the combination punch of zero new content, cut multiplayer and a full-price tag makes bulk and value the least defensible link in the chain. The 6.5 already folds in that very high narrative density and that taut, water-free run before docking it for the stinginess and the unkind price — and it isn't unfair to the game. A different scorer might land a half-point either way, but no honest one is calling this a content-rich package; it is a superb short story sold at the price of a novel, and the score simply reflects the receipt.