The Last of Us Remastered (PlayStation 4) review "We've been there, we've done that, but let's do it again anyway."

I'm not going to make The Last of Us Remastered out to be the second coming of horror games because it really isn't. Granted, it sports a solid enough narrative and some entertaining cover shooter segments, not to mention brief splashes of problem solving. However, it treads so much familiar territory that I hate saying that it succeeds despite itself.

Zombie apocalypse? Done to death, and no, it wasn't a fresh or original concept when this title was a new release. A wave of similar movies hit theaters and bootleg VHS tapes during the late '70s and early '80s, all thanks to George A. Romero's classic sequel "Dawn of the Dead." Both a remake of that movie and the success of the books "Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z" helped relaunch the subgenre to the point of overdose. Personally, I was ready to be done with the undead for while by the time this title dropped.

Since the category became agonizingly popular, you'd think The Last of Us would grate the nerves of zombie-exhausted horror fans, but it manages to actually captivate despite genre fatigue. Part of this notion stems from the manner in which the game's zombies (called "infected") are presented. This experience isn't merely a work of ghoulish terror, but also a body horror piece. When victims become infected, they don't merely turn into flesh-hungry, rotting people. The illness turns out to be a fungal parasite similar to Cordyceps, which grows inside of its hosts until it begins to protrude from their bodies. At first, the fungus drives its victim mad, then it slowly deforms the their body until they become a vaguely human monstrosity. Some of these folks lose the ability to see and need to use echolocation to spot their prey, becoming what are called "clickers." Eventually, the parasite immobilizes its host, and its body becomes food for the bloom.

Fungal monsters are nothing new. Films like "Matango," "Mortuary," and "The Unknown Terror" already utilized fungus people/zombies. However, The Last of Us takes the concept to nightmarish levels that those aforementioned movies only implied, thus confirming our irrational fears of mushrooms and the like taking over the world.

In the midst of this plague, you take the role of Joel. The introductory segment shows us he's another tortured soul who's lost a loved one because of the outbreak. Although this is a predictable setup, the scenes depicting his early outs in the burgeoning apocalypse are no less heartrending. It's not hard to understand why he's become such a crooked dude twenty years after everything fell apart, or why he feels so attached to the other lead character, Ellie.

Ellie, on the other hand, is a strong-willed teenage girl who was born into this hell world. For reasons I won't get into, she has a few destinations throughout the campaign she needs to reach, and Joel is the only person willing to take her there. At first, he only agrees to this odyssey for huge payout, but realizes along the way that he has more personal reasons to see the journey through. Again, this dynamic is nothing new, but it's executed effectively enough that you want to find out how everything ends. You know as you reach each new location that things aren't going to run smoothly and that the two of them will hit snags. You end each section of the campaign wondering what fresh danger they'll run afoul of, and how they'll deal with it. It's definitely got that old school TV programming, "tune in next week for the thrilling adventures of..." vibe, albeit with modern sensibilities.

That's fitting, too, because you don't easily waltz your way out of these conflicts. One thing the game doesn't communicate very well is that Joel, despite having twenty years to hone his gunmanship, isn't very good with a firearm. He wobbles when he aims and misses a lot of his early on shots. At first you might mistake his lack of skill for clunky gunplay, when in reality his unsteady hand is intentional. As you advance through the campaign, you find all manner of goodies lying in various abandoned locales, including crafting items, upgrade bits and pills that level up some of your skills. Thankfully, "gun sway" is among them, allowing you to rise to steadily worse occasions.

Every plot beat plays to your expectations, where infected crash whatever party you're attending. Most of them merely run toward you, waiting for your well placed bullets, arrows, explosives, or baseball bats. Or, even better, baseball bats outfitted with sharp objects for swifter killing. However, worse horrors come along with them, especially the aforementioned clickers and massive “bloaters,” infected that throw poisonous bombs. If you fail to annihilate these guys before they snatch you, the game treats you to a short cutscene of Joel suffering a gruesome death that would make Lucio Fulci proud.

As with any piece of zombie fiction, this one walks the "sometimes humans are a bigger threat than monsters" path, where you also end up battling various factions and even whole towns that have it in for Joel and Ellie. Unlike segments against infected, humans are more calculated and armed to the teeth with weaponry. Most of these scenes demand more careful movement and use of cover rather than balls-out brawling or quick gun work. Although the whole thing about people being worse than zombies is trite, it works here because these scenes are tougher and often nastier than the ones against creatures.

However, each of these segments really put a strain on your skills and inventory. Sometimes you try to mitigate your losses by taking a more stealthy approach, sneaking up on people and stabbing them with shivs or choking them out. Most of the time, though, you end up alerting someone and burning through your allotment of ammo, medkits and molotovs. You become a scrounger with each battle, combing over set pieces to find hidden troves so you can pick up more crafting items, hoping to regain your losses so you can survive another fight. Out of anything this game offers, it definitely succeeds by creating the impression that you're barely scraping by, surviving by the skin of your teeth without demanding the utmost of you. You never truly feel like the experience leaves you without an option or way out, but you always feel like you're struggling to make it, just living from moment to moment.

That's where The Last of Us's use of well-traveled material becomes worthwhile. We've all played third-person cover shooters, and even ones with zombies/infected. However, this one sells the "end of the world, supplies are limited" concept well enough to intensify all of those encounters. Plus, the narrative leaves you wanting to finish up each segment so you can see what hairy odds await its leads later on, be it monsters or men. From a long-time horror fan who's tired of zombies, this title manages to get my stamp of approval despite its familiar offerings.

Community review by JoeTheDestroyer (October 18, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.