The Last of Us Part I: The Remake Nobody Agreed We Needed

Naughty Dog released The Last of Us Part I on PS5 on 2 September 2022, rebuilding 2013’s original The Last of Us from the ground up on The Last of Us Part II’s engine, with a PC port following in March 2023. This is not a remaster in the usual sense — higher resolution textures bolted onto an unchanged nine-year-old game — but a full rebuild: new character models, overhauled animation, rewritten AI, expanded accessibility options, all wrapped around a design that Naughty Dog left almost entirely untouched. That’s the actual argument worth having about this release, and it’s a more interesting one than the “why does this exist” reaction the marketing mostly earned at launch.

Why the rebuild is defensible

A straight remaster of the 2014 Remastered PS4 version already existed and looked perfectly serviceable by any reasonable standard, which is exactly why the “nobody asked for this” reaction landed so easily. But Naughty Dog’s actual target wasn’t visual fidelity for its own sake — it was closing the gap between how Part I played mechanically and how Part II played four years later. The stealth, the crafting, the melee combat and, crucially, the enemy AI in Part I all predate the systemic overhaul Part II brought to the series, and the original 2013 game’s combat, judged purely as a system next to its own sequel, feels noticeably thinner: enemies flank less intelligently, crafting options are shallower, and the tension the sequel builds through smarter, more communicative AI packs simply isn’t present in the source material. The remake imports as much of that systemic depth as the 2013 story structure can absorb without rewriting the campaign’s actual beats.

The photo mode carried over and expanded from Part II, letting players freeze and compose a shot mid-encounter with full lighting and depth-of- field controls, is a similarly modest, genuine addition — a small tool rather than a system overhaul, one that gives the rebuilt environments something concrete to be appreciated for beyond a marketing screenshot comparison.

What changed, specifically

Enemy AI now communicates and flanks with the same awareness Part II established, infected react to sound and light with more variety, and Joel’s melee combat gains the weight and animation quality of the newer engine rather than the comparatively stiff exchanges of the original. Full current-generation accessibility options — audio descriptions, extensive remapping, high-contrast enemy outlines — were built in from the ground up, a genuinely significant improvement over the original’s much more limited support and a direct continuation of the design discipline established in Part II’s own accessibility suite. None of this touches plot, dialogue or level layout in any meaningful way: this is a rebuild of feel and readability, not of story.

A permadeath mode and a dedicated speedrun mode, both absent from the 2013 original, are folded in as genuine new content for returning players rather than pure technical polish, giving the remake at least some material that isn’t purely a fidelity argument. They’re a small addition against the scale of the full rebuild, but they’re evidence Naughty Dog understood that some portion of the audience buying this again would want something to actually do with a story they already know by heart.

The honest case against: what a rebuild can’t fix

The uncomfortable truth the remake exposes is that some of Part I’s pacing and encounter design was already showing its age structurally, not just visually, and a nicer coat of AI and animation doesn’t rebuild an encounter’s actual layout. Several mid-game combat arenas were built around 2013’s more limited enemy behaviour and read as noticeably easier or more linear now that the AI populating them is smarter — a firefight designed to be tense against dumb enemies can become a rout against clever ones, and a few sections show that mismatch more than Naughty Dog seems to have wanted. The bloater and clicker encounter pacing across the back half, largely untouched from the original’s mission structure, occasionally feels sparse next to Part II’s much denser combat spaces, a gap the remake’s tech upgrade alone can’t close without redesigning level geometry the team evidently chose not to touch.

Left Behind, folded in rather than sold separately

The original game’s standalone Left Behind expansion — a flashback prequel exploring Ellie’s friendship with Riley before the main campaign’s events — ships bundled into Part I rather than as separate paid DLC, which is the clearest example of the remake genuinely improving on the original release’s structure rather than just its fidelity. Left Behind’s tonal shift, a quieter story about teenage friendship and loss set inside an abandoned mall rather than the main game’s survival tension, benefits specifically from the rebuilt animation work, since so much of its writing depends on subtle facial performance between two characters rather than combat or spectacle.

What got left behind: Factions

The remake notably drops the original’s Factions multiplayer mode entirely, which Naughty Dog has instead spun off into a standalone live-service project under long-term development. That’s a significant value gap for anyone who bought the 2013 original specifically for its multiplayer community, and it means Part I is a purely single-player purchase in a way the original release never was, a trade-off the marketing around the remake was notably quiet about.

Haptics and 3D audio as genuine additions

The DualSense’s adaptive triggers and haptic feedback are wired into specific weapon behaviours — a shotgun’s kick, a bow’s draw tension — in a way the PS4 original simply couldn’t offer, and the PS5 version’s 3D audio implementation makes clicker echolocation and infected movement readable through sound with a precision the original’s audio mix never achieved. These are the two upgrades that most directly improve moment-to- moment tension regardless of how a player feels about the remake’s price, since they change what the player’s hands and ears can tell them about a dark room full of infected before a single frame of improved lighting matters.

The price tag, and the actual question

The full-price release of a substantially-unchanged nine-year-old game’s story is the sharper, more legitimate version of the “why does this exist” complaint, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than dodging: a player who already owns the 2014 Remastered version is being asked to pay full price again for improved combat feel and accessibility rather than new content, which is a genuinely different value proposition to a remake that expands or reinterprets its source material. This desk’s essay on remake culture argues most remakes preserve a reputation rather than the original design; Part I is a slightly different case, since the design itself is barely touched and the actual product being sold is fidelity to the feel of a game most players already know intimately.

The specialist comparison: remaking your own work versus someone else’s

Most high-profile remakes of the last decade have been built by a studio rebuilding somebody else’s design from scratch, and the discipline that takes is its own specific craft. Part I is a different exercise: the original writers, directors and designers rebuilding their own nine-year- old game with the benefit of everything they learned making its sequel, which is closer to a director’s cut than an outside interpretation. That distinction matters when weighing this against a studio built specifically around the remake as its core business, since the standards for judging “did they understand the original” simply don’t apply here the same way — Naughty Dog can’t misread its own game’s intent, only choose how much of its own newer toolkit to import into it.

Where to play it

Part I released on PS5 first, with the PC port arriving in March 2023 after a rocky initial performance patch cycle that Naughty Dog spent several months correcting with driver and stability updates. The PS5 version remains the more stable and better-optimised of the two at launch, though the PC version has since caught up and offers the wider range of display and performance options once its early technical problems were resolved.

The verdict

The Last of Us Part I is a genuinely well-executed technical rebuild in service of a question its marketing never answered convincingly: whether closing the systemic gap between a beloved original and its sequel is worth a full-price rerelease. The craft on display — AI, animation, accessibility — is real and carefully done, and it’s the correct way to modernise an older game’s feel without touching its story. Whether it’s the correct business decision for the audience being asked to pay for it again is a separate question this desk doesn’t think the remake fully justifies. Anyone who wants the sequel’s own systemic depth in its native, intended form should read this desk’s take on The Last of Us Part II, which argues the structure this remake retroactively imports its combat feel from is the more interesting design story; anyone weighing remake culture more broadly should see the modern remake canon for where genuine reinvention sits against fidelity exercises like this one.

Spoilers below

The story remains unchanged from 2013: Joel, hired to smuggle Ellie across a post-pandemic United States because her immunity to the Cordyceps infection may hold the key to a vaccine, chooses at the story’s climax to slaughter the Fireflies attempting to extract that immunity through a procedure that would kill her, then lies to Ellie about what happened to protect her from the truth. The rebuild does nothing to soften or reinterpret that ending’s moral ambiguity, which is precisely the point — Naughty Dog’s own sequel spends its entire structure interrogating the consequences of that lie, and Part I’s unchanged ending is what makes that interrogation possible. Ellie’s final line to Joel, asking him to swear the story he told her is true, lands with the same unresolved tension it always has, made only slightly sharper by faces now capable of the same range of expression Part II used to devastating effect.