At a glance: The Last of Us · PlayStation 3 · Naughty Dog / Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013 · Action-adventure / survival · Score: 9.5/10
The PlayStation 3 went out with a masterpiece. Released in June 2013, five months before its successor launched, The Last of Us asked a seven-year-old console to render quiet conversations in dappled woodland light, a clicker’s ruined face in close-up, and a man carrying everything he has left to lose across a broken America — and the hardware, impossibly, held. Naughty Dog’s post-pandemic odyssey is the defining game of the PS3’s final year and one of the most decorated games ever made. Revisited on the machine it was built for, stripped of remasters and television adaptations, it remains a gruelling, beautiful, perfectly controlled piece of work.
Twenty years after the fall
A fungal outbreak — cordyceps, jumped to humans — ends the world in a prologue that does more damage in fifteen minutes than most games manage in their whole runtime. Twenty years later, Joel Miller is a smuggler in the Boston quarantine zone, hired to move a fourteen-year-old girl named Ellie across the country to a rebel militia. She may be immune. That may matter. The journey takes a full year and four seasons, and the game’s structure — Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring — gives the story a novelistic patience. This is a road story in which the road keeps taking things.
The writing’s great achievement is restraint. Joel and Ellie’s relationship is built from small change: a joke book she refuses to put down, a conversation about a football team, long silences on highways. The game trusts performance capture and Gustavo Santaolalla’s sparse, plucked score to carry emotion that lesser scripts would underline in dialogue. When violence comes, it is ugly and costly, and the game keeps a straight ledger of what it does to both of them. Winter, played largely from Ellie’s perspective, is the bravest chapter a blockbuster studio had shipped to that point — and the ending, famously unresolvable, trusts the player to sit with it. People are still arguing about the last five minutes. That is the point.
Survival as a systems problem
Where Uncharted was abundance, The Last of Us is scarcity administered like medicine. Ammunition is counted in single bullets. Health kits and molotovs are assembled at benches and in backpacks from the same pool of rags, alcohol and blades, forcing a genuine economy of choices: the shiv that opens a locked supply closet is the shiv that saves you from a clicker. Combat arenas are wide, multi-route sandboxes in which stealth is the default language — listen mode lets Joel sense enemies through walls, a concession to playability that the harder difficulties wisely remove, turning sound itself into the primary sense.
Every fight in The Last of Us is an exam you sit with whatever you happened to be carrying. Winning feels less like triumph than like getting away with something.
The infected are sound-designed terrors — runners who still look almost human, stalkers, and the blind clickers whose echolocation turns a storeroom into a minefield — but the human enemies are the real test: hunters who communicate, flank, and react to your last known position with an intelligence that was ahead of its time on this hardware. Deaths are frequent and horrible, and the game’s checkpointing is merciful enough to keep frustration pointed at yourself rather than the design.
The PS3 pushed past its limits
Technically, this is the console’s summit alongside its stablemates. The lighting model — baked, golden, dusty — makes a virtue of the hardware’s constraints, and the character models in conversation are close to the best the generation produced. It costs something: the frame rate sits at thirty and dips in the busiest encounters, textures stream in late in the largest areas, and the fans of a launch-model PS3 will be audible throughout. None of it dents the experience materially, but it is honest to note that this game was straining its machine, and the strain is part of its story. The PS3 did not go quietly. Its last big exclusive is also its most demanding.
Left Behind and the multiplayer footnote
The Left Behind chapter, released as downloadable content in 2014 and woven between the main game’s seasons, fills in Ellie’s past in a snowbound Boston mall and is essential — some of the finest writing in the whole work is in its quieter, stranger half. The Factions multiplayer, a tense team-based survival game with a meta-layer of clan management, was better than it needed to be; its PS3 servers closed in 2019, leaving the campaign, complete and self-sufficient, as the game’s legacy on this hardware.
A world told in objects
The environmental storytelling deserves its own paragraph in any honest account, because The Last of Us rebuilt the standard for it. The plot is in the rooms: a child’s bedroom in Austin with the posters still up, a Pittsburgh hotel where the ambushes make sense once you find the register of guests who never left, a university dormitory that tells you exactly what happened to the students in laundry, letters and a final note taped inside a door. Ish’s story — a whole community in the sewers beneath Pittsburgh, told in scrawled notes and a nursery behind a locked door — is a novella hidden inside a corridor, and the game never once points at it. The famous giraffe scene works for the same reason: after ten hours of learning that beauty in this world is a lure or a memory, the game simply lets something be beautiful, at length, with no catch, and it is devastating. Crafting this density of narrative into set dressing on the PS3’s memory budget was a technical discipline as much as a writing one. Every room in the game was dressed by people who knew what the room was for. That is why the world feels inhabited rather than decorated, and why wandering off the critical path in this game never feels like wasting time.
The performances at the centre
None of it works without Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, whose Joel and Ellie remain the reference point for performance in games — not for shouting, but for the opposite. The famous scenes are quiet: a conversation in a car about a world Ellie never saw, a joke delivered half a second too late because Joel was deciding whether to allow it, a rooftop at the end of Autumn. Naughty Dog’s animators preserved the actors’ smallest choices, and on the PS3 — a machine whose launch titles had marionette cutscenes — that fidelity felt like a dispatch from the future. Around them, the ensemble is flawless: Tess, Bill, Henry and Sam in the game’s most devastating subplot, and a Winter antagonist played with a soft-spoken menace that makes the chapter curdle. Santaolalla’s score, all ronroco and space, won its awards honestly. This is the game that ended the argument about whether blockbusters could carry performances of this weight. They could. On this hardware, they did.
The verdict
Every console deserves a farewell this good, and few get one. The Last of Us on PS3 is a survival story whose mechanics, performances and pacing are in perfect alignment — a game about what people cost each other, built by a studio at the absolute peak of its powers, on hardware giving everything it had left. The remasters are cleaner. This is the original lightning.
Score: 9.5/10 — The PS3’s closing masterpiece. Endure it on the original hardware at least once; you will not forget it.