Last week, we put the spotlight on The Last of Us Part II Remastered using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights:
16.01.2024 - 15:41 / polygon.com / Last Of Us
The Last of Us Part 2’s No Return is so good it makes you wonder why Naughty Dog even bothered with making a story. A bonus mode that comes with The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, No Return transforms the acclaimed 2019 game into a full roguelike experience. It’s a well-rounded, engrossing rework that shows off the game in a new light, while also underlining the identity crisis at the heart of Naughty Dog: the version of the studio that excels at top-flight action-adventure games, and the Naughty Dog that strives to tell uncompromising, mature interactive stories.
Unlike the recent, similar roguelike experiment from Sony Santa Monica’s God of War: Ragnarök, No Return has no narrative justification. It’s a pure arcade experience: You select your difficulty, your character — each with their own playstyle — and any available modifiers, and try to make it as far as you can, until you die and start all over again.
Roguelike fans and the roguelike-curious haven’t been hurting for options for a very long time now, but big-budget, marquee dalliances in the genre are still quite rare. No Return is more than an expensive novelty, though — the mode is a challenging yet accessible approach to roguelikes that shows off every flavor of The Last of Us Part 2’s tense, violent action by breaking it into pieces, relishing in the multiplicity of options and all the satisfying fiddly bits for upgrading weapons and characters present in the main game.
A generous cadence of unlockable characters, costumes, and game modifiers keeps adding variety in the early going, even if you spend your first few runs eating shit — a vital way to avoid the biggest roguelike hurdle, which is demanding mastery before doling out rewards. Juxtaposed so much more closely together, the different feeling of controlling Ellie, Abby, and others is more pronounced, making character selection feel like more than an aesthetic choice. Each character has a different starter weapon and upgrade track (Abby, for example, lets you upgrade melee abilities from the jump) with others doled out as rewards for progress.
Divorced from the weight of its story, you get a different appreciation of what The Last of Us Part 2 is: a tremendous, tense, and muscular stealth-action thriller, wholly committed to the visual language of desperation and the violence it elicits. Without story context, The Last of Us Part 2 is still quite remarkable four years on for how carefully it labors toward a cinematic verisimilitude, taking prestige video game murder to its logical endpoint in a way not really seen since God of War 3.
If this were done on purpose, I imagine it might cause Naughty Dog’s labelmates at PlayStation Studios to hang their heads in shame and try something
Last week, we put the spotlight on The Last of Us Part II Remastered using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights:
The Last of Us Part II Remastered arrived last week, and if the cutscene commentary from the game's director, writer and key actors wasn't enough for you, Naughty Dog has another behind the scenes piece coming. Grounded II: Making The Last Of Us Part II, a documentary on the game's creation, will arrive on February 2 at 12PM ET on YouTube as well as in the game itself. There's a trailer in the remastered game currently, and the full documentary will be added via a downloadable patch. That patch will also have some new skins for Ellie and Abby in the main game.
Black Forest Games, a German video game developer subsidiary of THQ Nordic, which Embracer Group owns, is reportedly planning to lay off around 50% of its employees. Last December, two Danish developers owned by Embracer Group, 3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks, announced that over half of their staff would have their roles eliminated. With that announcement, around 1000 people were laid off by Embracer in the second half of 2023. Now, Black Forest Games is seemingly the latest developer to be affected.
The Last of Us Part II’s about to be seen in a whole new way. Grounded 2, a making-of documentary for The Last of Us Part II, premieres next week.
With the release of The Last of Us Part II Remastered, gamers are again going through the emotions of playing this title and the incredibly dark story that Naughty Dog presented to them originally on the PS4. Now, with the PS5 version, fans aren’t just getting the most “aesthetically pleasing version” of the game but also getting insight into what made this game what it was. The documentary attached to the new game brought the voice actors into the mix and creative director Neil Druckmann to explain some of the game’s key moments. But the biggest moment that everyone wanted to hear about was the “final battle” between Abby and Ellie.
Rewards from new boss encounters, hero skins, and game-changing mods are all available in when you complete different challenges in the roguelike No Return mode. The survival missions your chosen character can attempt in a run could unlock additional features. It may take time to meet every goal, but each challenge offers an exciting opportunity.
Naughty Dog has received plenty of criticism of late for the renewed emphasis it’s placed on re-releases, but clearly, those re-releases are paying off for it and Sony. The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered launched last week, and it seems to have got off to a solid start where its sales are concerned, having debuted at No. 3 in the weekly UK physical sales charts.
This article has MAJOR SPOILERS for The Last of Us Series
Avatar: The Last Airbender fans have every reason to be skeptical of Netflix’s new show. Even if they hadn’t been legendarily burned by a live-action production before, there’s the departure of the original series’ creators for their own sandbox of upcoming animated Avatar efforts.
It’s true that when The Last Of Us Part II Remastered was announced that many gamers rolled their eyes. This was a PS4 game that was getting a “remaster” for PS5, and it once again felt like a company trying to get a money grab because they knew how popular the game was on a previous system, so they “upgraded it slightly” and then brought it to the newest system. However, we’ll give Naughty Dog credit. Not only did they upgrade the visuals for the title, but they also gave players more to do than in the PS4 version. Key among these additions was “No Return Mode.”
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered releases today, bringing that heartbreaking story back into our lives in even higher definition. And with a few extra goodies.
Sony is issuing refunds to those who purchased The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered full price by accident, if they have it on PS4 already.