The Last of Us: all the news about the video game franchise turned TV series

Naughty Dog officially announced The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5 on Friday evening following a bunch of leaks about the game earlier in the day. The game will be released on January 19th, 2024 — just like the leaks said.

The biggest new addition seems to be a “roguelike survival mode” called No Return that’s “designed to let players prove their mettle in randomized encounters and experience The Last of Us Part II’s combat in a fresh experience,” Naughty Dog’s Jonathon Dornbush said in the announcement blog post. You’ll be able to play as some new characters and work through “various stealth and combat encounters that will pit you against a range of enemies, with unique twists that can add new, unexpected factors to any given encounter.”

The Last of Us Part I arrived on PC this March as an embarrassing, broken PC port of a game, even on high-end machines. When I tried it on my Steam Deck handheld, the game was utterly unplayable — despite co-creator Neil Druckmann’s assurances that the game would “grace” the Steam Deck.

But after 11 patches, I can finally confirm The Last of Us is completely playable on Valve’s portable PC.

The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us is over — and there’s a lot to dig into. Between the show’s heavy themes, its long-controversial ending, the way it changed and adapted the game, as well as the games themselves, we’ve got plenty of different stories to read after the finale. They span the last 10 years, from the onset of the original PS3 game all the way up to the TV show’s season 1 finale. Here are reviews, interviews, deep dives, and more to explore while we wait to see Ellie and Joel hanging out in the post-apocalypse once again.

While HBO’s The Last of Us brought quite a few of the original video game’s actors back for cameo roles throughout the first season, the show was always careful not to draw too much attention to them so as not to pull focus from the larger story being told. But for its season 1 finale, The Last of Us pulled out one of the bigger guns for a tense and moving scene. It’s a moment that series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wanted to capture the ethos of the entire series.

Heads up, this post contains spoilers for The Last of Us’ season 1 finale.

In HBO’s The Last of Us, it’s spore-spreading mutants rather than flesh-eating zombies that plague the survivors fighting desperately to stay alive in an apocalyptic future. But uninfected humans do have reason to be concerned about being hunted down and eaten. Episode 8, “When We Are in Need” from writer Craig Mazin and director Ali Abbasi, lays bare in brutal detail just what makes living out in The Last of Us’ infected and infested wilderness so dangerous — even in winter months when the fungal monsters aren’t an immediate threat.

With Joel (Pedro Pascal) still wounded and in need of medical attention as “When We Are in Need” opens, it almost seems like a godsend when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) first encounters a preacher named David (Scott Shepherd) and his right-hand man James (Troy Baker) who insist that they can help keep her safe. But as Ellie gets to know the pair and how they’ve been managing to survive with their small group of fellow believers out in the woods, the encounter becomes one of The Last of Us’ most nightmarish chapters that highlights how people have lost part of their humanity.

Watching episode 6 of The Last of Us, I was filled with dread. I’d played the game years ago (despite a very rational and healthy fear of all things zombie), and I knew where this episode was headed and what kind of fights Joel and Ellie would be forced into. But then the show didn’t spend hours in one location as Joel and Ellie snuck around trying to avoid getting murdered and doing a little murdering of their own. Instead, the episode moved breezily along and got right to the good stuff — which, in video games, usually means the cutscenes.

This article contains spoilers for the first six episodes of The Last of Us.

The huge success of The Last of Us’ HBO series has seemingly led to a big sales bump for the newly released remaster of the first TLOU game. According to a new report from the NPD Group, The Last of Us: Part I jumped from number 36 on its best-seller chart in December to number 11 in January, the month the series premiered.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt saw its own boost in popularity following the release of Netflix’s The Witcher series in 2019, while Cyberpunk 2077 jumped up Steam’s charts after Cyberpunk: Edgerunners came out in September. But for The Last of Us, Sony had almost definitely been preparing for a rise in interest in the series due to the show, so I’m guessing it’s not too surprising to see that the game is selling more.