The Last of Us Part I is a 2022 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. A remake of the 2013 game The Last of Us, it features revised gameplay, including enhanced combat and exploration, and expanded accessibility options. Players control Joel, who is tasked with escorting the young Ellie across a post-apocalyptic United States and defend her against cannibalistic creatures infected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus. The game includes a remake of the 2014 expansion pack, The Last of Us: Left Behind, which follows Ellie and her best friend Riley.
Development was led by game director Matthew Gallant and creative director Shaun Escayg, who replaced original directors Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann. PartI was rebuilt for the updated hardware, requiring new animations, art direction, and character models to align with the original development team's vision. The cutscenes and narrative beats were analyzed to identify crucial storylines and their original direction and purpose. The team built upon the game engine of The Last of Us Part II (2020) by expanding the gameplay, technology, and accessibility features. PartI features audio descriptions, supports 3D audio, and uses the DualSense controller's haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.
The Last of Us PartI was released for the PlayStation 5 in September 2022. It received positive reviews from critics, who praised its graphical enhancements, facial animations, artificial intelligence, and its added accessibility, audio, and controller options. The response to its gameplay and level design was mixed, and several critics questioned the necessity of a remake, especially considering its price. It received an award at the Visual Effects Society Awards, and nominations at the Game Awards and Golden Joystick Awards. The Windows release in March 2023 was marred by performance problems and received mixed reviews. The game sold over two million units by March 2024.
Gameplay
The Last of Us Part I is a remake of the 2013 video game The Last of Us, an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective. The player traverses post-apocalyptic environments to advance the story, and uses firearms, improvised weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and stealth to defend against hostile humans and cannibalistic creatures known as the Infected, who have been infected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus.
For most of the game, player character Joel escorts a young girl, Ellie, across the United States. The player controls Ellie throughout the winter and epilogue segments, and briefly controls Joel's daughter Sarah in the opening sequence. In the included expansion The Last of Us: Left Behind, the player controls Ellie as she spends time with her best friend and love interest Riley Abel. The original game's online multiplayer mode is omitted from PartI, and its narrative is entirely unchanged.
The remake features revised gameplay, including enhanced combat and exploration. The overhauled artificial intelligence (AI) allows more non-player characters (NPCs) on screen, with enemy AI acting more aggressive and tactical than in the original game. The Infected received gameplay adaptations, such as new Stalker animations and a charge move for Bloaters. Gameplay additions include a permadeath mode, a speedrun-focused mode, and new costumes for Joel and Ellie. The expanded accessibility options include customizable controls, a screen reader, audio prompts, audio description for cutscenes, and haptic feedback during dialogue; difficulty modes can be customized to change enemy resilience, stealth efficacy, and resource availability. The overhauled photo mode adds several features, allowing visual and gameplay modifiers such as slow motion and infinite ammunition.
On PlayStation 5, the game supports hardware features such as 3D audio, and uses the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers of the DualSense controller to emulate gameplay actions such as shooting a shotgun or drawing a bowstring. It can display at native 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, or upscaled resolution at a targeted 60 frames per second; with variable refresh rate enabled, both modes allow an unlocked frame rate, capable of more than 60 frames per second.
Development
The Last of Us Part I was developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Development was led by game director Matthew Gallant and creative director Shaun Escayg, who replaced original directors Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, respectively. Gallant previously worked as a combat designer on the original game and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016), and became lead systems designer on The Last of Us Part II (2020), co-leading its accessibility features. Escayg was lead cinematic animator on The Last of Us—his first game—and creative director on Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (2017), followed by his work as creative director and co-writer of Marvel's Avengers (2020) at Crystal Dynamics, before returning to Naughty Dog in April 2021. Splitting their directing duties, Escayg took responsibility for the cinematics. Gallant found he resonated with the themes much more closely than during the development of the original game, having become a father in the interim. According to Escayg, the team approached the remake as "a love letter to our fans, to the franchise, and to ourselves as developers"; they felt a responsibility to preserve its essence and quality. Several of the creative leadership team of PartI worked on the original game.
Naughty Dog hoped the remake would allow PartI and PartII to be played sequentially with no technological or visual discrepancies. They felt new audiences, such as viewers of the television adaptation and new PlayStation 5 players, could be reached. The remake was partially inspired by PartII flashback scenes, for which the team rebuilt areas and assets from the original game: Gallant said that several team members pondered if "the whole game looked as good as those flashback sequences, how exciting that would be". Development began by transitioning the game to PartIIs updated game engine. The game was rebuilt to use the PlayStation 5 hardware, requiring new art direction, animation, and character models. The technological and graphical enhancements were intended to align with the vision of the original game's team. Escayg wanted each element to make the player feel grounded and immersed in the world. The team re-evaluated thousands of "micro decisions" during development, removing objects deemed unimportant or distracting and detailing or redesigning those that required improvements. Areas were re-evaluated to determine if their designs were a result of the PlayStation 3's technical limitations; where appropriate, some areas were rebuilt or further detailed.
The developers rationalized the rebuilt accessibility features as important to the remake. They expanded the features from PartII—assisted by PartI being built in PartIIs engine—with three presets configuring settings recommended for players requiring hearing, motor, or visual aids. During the development of The Last of Us PartII, blind accessibility consultant Brandon Cole noted that visually impaired players missed environmental context and the unspoken interactions between characters, but the production timeline limited the team's ability to implement a solution. Gallant revisited the idea for PartI and collaborated with Descriptive Video Works to create audio descriptions for cutscenes. Writing and recording the audio descriptions caused difficulties, as they had to convey the information succinctly while maintaining the context and themes. The customizable vibration options were inspired by a review of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (2022) from Can I Play That?, which criticized the lack of variability. The team identified sequences that would present accessibility problems—such as the arcade sequence in Left Behind—and engaged several consultants for assistance, including Cole.
The combat system—particularly melee—evolved using development tools from PartII. The team felt the original game's combat sequences were iconic and required no significant overhaul; they forwent the ability to go prone in gameplay—a feature added in PartII—as it would have "broken the gameplay and the combat space" since the original game was not built for it. PartIIs dodge mechanic was similarly omitted as it required reworking both enemy attacks and the gameplay space, and would diminish the claustrophobia and tension of the fights; Gallant noted "Joel fundamentally needs to different than playing as Ellie", PartIIs playable protagonist. PlayStation 3 hardware limitations forced the original team to "hack together" combat sequences, including some that are pre-scripted; advancements on the PlayStation 5 allowed the developers to create dynamic encounters, with AI directing the enemy NPCs to investigate and analyze with more accuracy. The fundamental AI technology built upon PartIIs. While the original game was limited to eight NPCs during enemy encounters—forcing some to disregard the player in the presence of others—the PlayStation 5 allows up to 128 active NPCs focusing on the player. In some instances, the original game could not have both male and female Infected fighting simultaneously, which was corrected in the remake. Gallant found the new technology made gameplay sequences more unpredictable.
The visual departments analyzed the original game to understand it better, focusing development resources on the most crucial scenes and storylines to maximize their impact. Rather than simply improving the visuals, the team analyzed its cutscenes and narrative beats, employing modernized techniques to emphasize story moments. Art director Erick Pangilinan ensured that the team remembered the original direction and purpose behind each scene; in some instances during development, they lost track of the original purpose, which would impact other scenes later on. The original game's vision was to emphasize the world's beauty, as opposed to a visually dark and dystopian image; art director Sebastian Gromann felt that PlayStation 5 allowed a truer realization of this vision, particularly due to the more complex models and shaders allowing increased fidelity and volume of foliage. Characters and environments benefited from an increased polygon count. The original motion capture data was used for the cinematics, with the facial animation overhauled to more closely resemble the original performances. The remake was considered a good opportunity to expand some environments, such as adding detail and items to the back offices of the Boston museum, and visually shifting the university section for a more claustrophobic feeling. The team forced themselves to pull back on some additions as they failed to heighten the experience or fit within the narrative context; trees and overgrowth were initially added to the military city, but removed when the team realized it would be unrealistic in the setting.