Playing Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part I, a “rebuilt” version of the original 2013 game and its DLC, feels less like playing a videogame than examining a totem; an object of power and reverence, paying recursive homage to itself, forever.

We’ve all worn Joel’s threadbare boots, staggered through wooded trails, overgrown city streets, and spore-infested basements in iterations past, or we’ve heard about it from someone, or we’ve watched it play out in a pre-rendered cutscene on the stage of an award show over the blazered shoulder of some boastful nerd. Its story feels, through sheer force of repetition, embedded in the fabric of videogames, so deeply ingrained as to have kickstarted the longstanding “dad game” trend (which labors still, today, exemplified in the upcoming God of War Ragnarök).

It makes sense, then, that to play this new version is to play in the interest of something, anything, other than its central plot or its narrative beats. I’m not being told a new story, I am being invited—for the $70 USD price tag now standard for PS5 games—into a hushed, darkend gallery, to admire, and to revere. Is that HDR? Confirmed. This framerate? Liquid smooth. Load times? Minimal! Come, lay your hands on the ridges of this uprezed bump texture, feel the nuanced weight of this revamped physics model, be astounded by the realistic maiming systems! It is all readily on display, there to be observed. The kernel of the thing is itself unchanged, unremarkable, invisible. Instead, the eye sticks on the details, focuses on the distracting surface, polished and polished again to a blistering sheen.

While the game was still in previews, a tweet gained some traction, featuring a series of screenshots comparing the new game with 2014’s The Last of Us Remastered. Under the author’s Jeweler’s Loupe-like examination, layered over with a cacophony of Sharpie notations, fell such transgressions as altered tree placements, variations in scene lighting, slightly different camera angles, and so on. Each screenshot was used as ironclad evidence that Part I had completely abandoned the design principles of its predecessors. In reality, all were absurd, cherry-picked, non-issues. Shifted details and other evidence of the artist or the retoucher’s hand in the process of retouching does not always a disaster make. To remaster is necessarily to bring change, and often the most interesting aspects of remasters are to be found in the minute and multifaceted ways an original work might have been adjusted, in the little shifts and cracks that have appeared during its transition into the present.

Playing Part I, though, it’s easy to see how some may mistake its high-resolution trees for its forest. With a piece of art that largely lives and dies by its layers of painstaking polish, it’s only natural to take an even more critical look at the kind of things most other games, including The Last of Us’ previous iterations, tend to get a pass for. As a game’s visual fidelity comes closer and closer to the shining utopia of verisimilitude, like Icarus, its seams and shortcomings expand and become more obvious. Texture pop-in tends to jar more when laid over a photorealistic background. Or enemy AI getting stuck in its pathfinding, or Ellie hiding, once again, in plain sight in front of oblivious guards, or Joel’s character model, woodenly swapping between animations; all easily ignorable when the overall image was smaller, fuzzier, more impressionistic than representational. I didn’t care about rough edges or mistakes when they were happening in the visual layer interpolating, what was at the time, a rich narrative experience. But in Part I, the visual layer is all that’s left. The story within is long solidified, frozen. To be dug up and thawed out and reused to energize future totems: games, television series, eventually movies with confusingly cast actors, probably. It’s the source that powers all of this stuff, but its own power, its actual ability to move, to compel, has mostly gone.

So I’m left basically cold, a detached observer investigating a detached object. Watching sweat glisten realistically off the skin of companion characters as they robotically follow Joel, then trap him in doorway bottlenecks or behind desks. Admiring the responsive surface and light scattering in the water of a flooded subway tunnel before doing the umpteenth version of the schlep-Ellie-around-on-a-floating-pallet puzzle. Playing through Part I is an often unavoidable reminder of a specific time and place. A dated (though still wildly influential) mechanical approach and game design ontology. One which feels very much its age regardless of how many facelifts it has received from an army of clever and talented artists.

These limitations would be okay, of course, if I really was in a museum, watching something on a rare piece of celluloid, brought back to life after being thought long lost or destroyed. Remasters are often pitched as opportunities for new players to experience old games in more accessible modern contexts. But Part I is something else; it wants, seemingly, to be seen as something more. It relishes its totemic status, its status as historical marker, as monument. A monument to a game making approach and broader philosophy. The Last of Us, after all, has long been lauded as the pinnacle of storytelling in games. Through the many years since its release, Naughty Dog has presented fans with updates and sequels which haven’t challenged or renegotiated the original’s premise, but instead mostly operate under the assumption of its righteous position in videogames’ canon. 

When, for example, a character from the first game immediately dies in the sequel, we are expected to be deeply moved, to understand the motivations for everything that comes after. We are supposed to cheer Ellie along her path of maturation into adulthood and burgeoning romance, like a gaggle of hovering aunts and uncles. We are expected, in turn, to receive Part I as something special, and necessary. Expected to treat the gameplay and the bones of the thing as something eternal, classic, unmovable. All warts, all slapdash contrivances to be embraced and immortalized, to be showcased again and again, proof of Naughty Dog’s peerless capabilities as a maker of hyper-budget videogames.

It’s a little hard to swallow; to be sold (at aforementioned exorbitance) a basically hollow thing. Gleaming and beautiful on the outside, old and crusty within. Moving my characters through this lustrous, dead world, feels discordant and rife with unexpected friction. It’s a museum exhibit that requires my participation, my enthusiasm. Less a history than a mutated memory. Less picture perfect than xeroxed and redrawn. A piece of ruin, of headstone, wrapped in gold leaf before being dropped in our waiting hands.

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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Twitter @youmeyou.