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The Last of Us Part I, or sometimes called the remake of The Last of Us, brings one of the most acclaimed games of all time back into the spotlight. After the game’s original launch in 2013, the PS4 remaster in 2014 and The Last of Us Part II in 2020, this PS5 remake attempts to bring the original and beloved game more in line with the recent sequel using a variety of to modernizations. It also comes just months before the HBO adaptation debuts as one of the brand’s original series in 2023.
Suffice it to say, now is a great time to get involved with The Last of Us, but is the $70 price tag worth it for fans? In the end it’s your money and you have to spend it however you want, but what we can provide is a detailed rundown of what’s new in this remake so you can judge for yourself. Here’s everything that’s been updated for 2022 and beyond in The Last of Us Part 1. For new players, this guide has been kept spoiler free.
New game modes
The Last of Us Part I includes two new optional and challenging modes for players who want to experience the game in new ways. Permadeath mode is pretty much what it sounds like: if you die at any point in the story from about 12 to 15 hours, the game resets.
However, there is some flexibility in deciding how much progress you lose on death. When using permadeath, you can choose to go back to the very beginning, the beginning of an act (2-3 hours), or the beginning of a chapter (30-60 minutes). Note that this mode also disables manual save, and exiting the menu or closing the game counts as a death.
Speedrun mode is another new feature that allows you to submit times for others to try to beat. Players playing in speedrun mode can compare their best times with friends and receive official tips from the PS5’s map feature, which can be accessed by pressing the PlayStation button while the game is in progress.
Accessibility Settings
Like The Last of Us Part II and many other first-party games, PlayStation has placed an emphasis on including many accessibility features in The Last of Us Remake. In many cases, these are new features that were not present in the original release of the game. The full range of options is split into several categories:
- Alternative Controls
- Magnification and Visual Aids
- Motion Sickness
- Navigation and movement
- Screen reader and audio prompts
- Fighting accessibility
You can read more about the accessibility options of The Last of Us Part 1 here.
Within each category, you’ll find a wide variety of options to customize the way the game plays to your liking or needs, such as button press or hold, camera assist, color blind mode, HUD adjustment, motion blur, the ability to fully skip puzzle sections, an invisibility switch, and ways to change AI behavior, such as preventing enemies from flanking you or keeping your allies from being grabbed by enemies. In total, there are over 60 accessibility options that can be turned on if you wish.
Difficulty to adjust
In addition to the dozens of accessibility options, the game’s difficulty can now be adjusted, just like the sequel, in different categories. This includes:
- Overall Challenge Difficulty – Very Easy, Light, Moderate, Hard, Survivor and Grounded (Available once the game is completed)
- Player Resilience
- Enemy Resilience
- Ally Aggression
- Stealth efficacy
- Resource availability
Each of these categories has six different options on its own continuum, meaning if you want enemies to go down quickly, but stealth, for example, is much harder to execute, you can tweak it to your favorite mix.
Display modes
The Last of Us Part I includes two display modes for 4K TVs. It’s up to you to choose which one is active, and you can switch between them at will. The modes include:
- Performance: Balanced resolution and frame rate. This maintains a constant 60 frames per second and allows the resolution to move between 4K and 1440p when on-screen action requires it.
- Fidelity: Prefer resolution over frame rate. This plays the game in 4K at 40 frames per second, which is smoother than the game’s original 30 fps, but not as smooth as what’s offered in performance mode. Still, you get the guaranteed 4K resolution without upscaling.
In general, I find the difference between 4k and 1440p negligible, so in the end I always go for the higher framerate, but this is something you want to adjust to your preferences.
New PlayStation trophies
The Trophy List for The Last of Us Part I is slightly different from the original game, the biggest difference being the absence of difficulty related trophies. This comes as part of a seemingly concerted effort by Sony to remove such trophies from its games so that more players can aim for and achieve Platinum trophies, the reward for completing a game’s trophy list.
Other than that, the list is as you’d expect if you’ve played before, including the partition between the base game and the standalone Ellie-centric prequel chapter Left Behind. There are no trophies associated with the game’s permadeath or speedrun modes, so you can ignore them and still earn platinum if you’d like. You’ll still want to collect all of the game’s collectibles, hear all of Ellie’s jokes, and do some gameplay-specific achievements.
Better collectible tracking
The Last of Us has many collectibles, including Firefly pendants, comic books, and more. In this remake, you better keep track of what you’ve found – and what you’re still missing – in each chapter. This should make it easier to go back to a chapter and find what you’re looking for on your way to 100% game completion.
Enhanced Photo Mode
PlayStation consistently includes some of the best photo modes in games, and it still does in The Last of Us Part I. The range of options includes tons of filters, logos, frames, and camera controls, as you’d expect. But it also includes an elaborate lighting setup that allows you to frame scenes in ways few games — perhaps none — have allowed before.
More Bonus Features
When you beat the game for the first time, you’ll unlock a number of alternate visual filters, character skins, and more. This system was in place with the original game, but it has been expanded for the remake to include many more unlockable “toys”, for lack of a better word. The full list includes:
- Mirror world
- Mirror on death
- slow motion
- Bullet Speed Mode
- Unlimited ammo
- Infinite tinkering
- Infinite melee durability
- Infinite listening mode range
- A shot
- 8-bit audio
- 4-bit audio
- Helium audio
- Xenon audio
Visual revision
Perhaps more than any other reason, this remake exists because it aligns the original game with the much more recent sequel, creating a cohesive 40-hour storyline for those who want to experience the full story. This is no coincidence of timing, as the complete saga now looks and plays great all on PS5, much like the TV series The Last of Us will debut on HBO sometime in 2023.
Gallery
The brand touted the adaptation as one of its most exciting new series, even featuring it in the “one more thing” slot in an August trailer for what’s coming up on HBO soon. Among so many other multimedia projects looking to adapt PlayStation franchises into movies or shows, probably none have the prestige that Naughty Dog and The Last of Us have long brought to the platform, so this remake goes as far as you’d expect, as it built on the framework of a nine-year-old video game.
Character models are made to better match their sequels, environments have gotten a lot more detail both on a large and small scale, and of course the fidelity of, well, everything in the game world is much sharper than ever before.
While the 2014 remaster was a matter of increasing the resolution made possible by more powerful hardware, The Last of Us Part 1 is a faithful remake. It doesn’t change the story, not by a single line of vote. But what it does do is bring one of PlayStation’s most popular and prestigious projects into the modern age, and with that it aims to attract new players as well as returning players.
Is a nicer, more accessible, more special version of the best game of 2013 worth your time and money? That’s up to you to decide in the end, but for more on the game, read our The Last of Us Part I review.
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