The Last of Us

Developer Naughty Dog is well known for its dedication to performance and pushing console hardware as far as it can go, as we've already seen with the ...

[The Last of Us Left Behind](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-left-behind-explained/)- the DLC explained [The Last of Us 2 multiplayer](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-2-multiplayer/)- Factions follow-up explained [The Last of Us 2 trophies](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-2-trophy-guide/)- full list to collect [The Last of Us 2 chapters](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-2-chapters/)- how many are there? [subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article). The main difference, however, is that you can now have the option for a frame rate target of 60 frames per second. Previously, the game was locked to 30fps when running on PS4. [The Last of Us TV show review](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/the-last-of-us-tv-show-review/)- why it's worth watching [The Last of Us TV show changes](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/last-of-us-tv-changes-game-newsupdate/)- creators talk deviations [The Last of Us meets The Mandalorian](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/last-of-us-mandalorian-pedro-pascal-newsupdate/)- Pedro Pascal on similarities [The Last of Us Part 1 review](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-part-i-review/)- our verdict on the remade game [The Last of Us PC](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/the-last-of-us-pc-release-date/)- when does Part 1 hit computers? Instead, you essentially get a performance boost for the backwards-compatible PS4 version. The PS5 upgrade for TLOU 2 comes in patch 1.08. [The Last of Us 2 safe codes](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-2-safe-codes/)- open all locked doors [How long is The Last of Us 2?](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/how-long-last-of-us-2-hours/)How many hours you'll need [The Last of Us 2 PC](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-part-2-pc-release-date/)- when will Part 2 reach computers? [Will there be a Last of Us Part 3?](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/last-of-us-part-3/)Latest on the sequel However, when the PS5 released shortly after, Naughty Dog soon managed to enhance the game even further - and it's nice and easy to upgrade. How to get the PS5 upgrade of The Last of Us Part 2 Here's how to get the PS5 version of The Last of Us Part 2.

The spotty track record of videogame adaptations and glut of apocalyptic/zombie dramas receive a welcome boost from "The Last of Us," which proves there's ...

“The Last of Us” premieres January 15 at 9 p.m. Yet despite the limits of past game-to-TV/movie translations, the first season exhibits the kind of delicacy and depth that suggests we won’t be seeing the last of it for some time. ET on HBO, which, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. The spotty track record of videogame adaptations and glut of apocalyptic/zombie dramas receive a welcome boost from “The Last of Us,” which proves there’s room for more of each as long as it’s this good. Still, there’s a genuine humanity in the bond that forms between Joel and Ellie, which develops organically from one harrowing encounter to the next, while also creating strong showcases for the guest stars that pass through their orbits. From that perspective the storytelling here is absolutely fearless and unflinching, creating horrifying scenarios and moments that can be alternately touching and utterly tragic.

One of the most cinematic games of all time is Sony and Naughty Dog's "The Last of Us," which launched in 2013 and became an instant critical and commercial hit ...

In many ways, it's a perfect story for where we are in 2023, picking up the pieces of the last few years and finding what's important to us again. I wanted a little more building, and the show rushes the final two episodes in a way that made me wonder if that's where most of the compression happened when it lost a chapter from the initial ten episodes that Mazin said would happen back in July 2021. In terms of storytelling and design, the show will be very familiar to gamers, almost too much at times. After a chilling prologue in which an expert on a talk show offers his belief that the world-ending pandemic will be fungal and not viral, "The Last of Us" opens properly in 2003, hours before society's collapse. [Pedro Pascal](/cast-and-crew/pedro-pascal)), an Austin-based contractor, and his brother Tommy ( [Gabriel Luna](/cast-and-crew/gabriel-luna)). It's a fascinating deconstruction of the game that leans on character and storytelling instead of action, and it does so in a way that's confidently grounded.

The HBO adaptation is well versed in the bleak clichés of the zombie genre, but it also offers something unexpected: empathy.

This is no ordinary grab bag of jump scares and grisly kills: The Last of Us respects its genre but works to defy its creakiest tropes. The Last of Us works hard to present a more sanguine view, including through Joel and Ellie’s deep bond—although franchise fans know that that connection will eventually grow complicated. This is especially true in the third episode, a mostly self-contained work that focuses on one of Joel’s survivalist allies, Bill (Nick Offerman), and his relationship with another survivalist named Frank (Murray Bartlett). Plenty of plot details in The Last of Us might feel conventional, but the show still offers a rich genre stew, with the kind of high-budget flavor that sets tentpole HBO productions apart from their straight-to-streaming counterparts. But what made The Last of Us even more immersive was how [it implicates players](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/the-last-of-us-limits-video-game-violence/613696/) in the lead character’s own morally dubious actions. [comes up](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/02/uncharted-video-game-movie-review/622815/) again and again as the medium grows in ambition: How do you translate a game that was itself clearly inspired by film and television?

Los Angeles' pouring rain and red carpet flooding leaned into the post-apocalyptic ambiance of HBO's “The Last of Us” series at the Regency Village Theater ...

This time around it allowed us to take our time and have a slow burn with the relationship between Joel and Ellie, over a year-long journey that could have only been adapted into a TV show.” Co-showrunner and creator of the original game, Neil Druckmann was quick to add why it was best that “The Last of Us” was better suited as a series over a film. You have to get the casting right, the scripting right, the production design, the music, the editing, the visual effects.

A review of the HBO series The Last of Us, based on the video game and starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

But the series reminds us why postapocalyptic stories continue to invade our psyches: They remind us of the value of being alive and how terrifying it would be to stand among the few who still are. Like the dystopian prestige dramas The Leftovers and Station Eleven, The Last of Us is driven less by raw plot than by its study of relationships. Even if The Last of Us treads familiar ground, it is still a gripping and ambitious work that seems fated to become the premium cable network’s next Twitter-trending hit. The other lies in translating the inherently interactive experience of a game into something that feels unique to television. [reportedly exceeding](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-of-us-break-the-curse-of-bad-video-game-adaptations) each of the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, The Last of Us is punctuated by intense action sequences and elaborately rendered practical and visual effects. The nine-episode first season, which debuts on Sunday night, focuses on Joel (Pedro Pascal), a man who lost his daughter when the pandemic began in 2003, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager whose immunity to the fungus could be instrumental in finding a cure in 2023.

Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us. The Last of Us, HBO's TV adaptation of the bestselling 2013 video game of the same name ...

How much of that is a testament to the expert handling of the adaptation, or to the loving construction of the original game? The third episode of The Last of Us fleshes out the story of Bill (Nick Offerman, in a fantastic subversion of his own typecasting), a gruff, no-bullshit doomsday prepper (or survivalist, depending on who you ask). As for adapting The Last of Us, Druckmann was similarly reluctant to lose the core narrative of his game. But my favorite part of the show did turn out to be a new addition to the canonical story of the game. Their relationship is the narrative heart of the game, as well as the series. The Last of Us is very, very good. When he was building the original game, he insisted on a single narrative for The Last of Us, in stark contrast to the gaming world’s affection for “open world” formats, where players can roam where they choose. He received pressure from his bosses to turn the epic, bloody finale of The Last of Us into a choice between two endings, but he maintained that Joel’s character development made a dark, climactic turn inevitable. [widespread](https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/05/the-last-of-us-review) [critical](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/jun/05/the-last-of-us-ps3-video-game-review) [acclaim](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/06/13/the-last-of-us-review-this-is-the-end-beautiful-friend-ps3/?sh=2f433c462639) bordering on reverence for his attention to the craft of storytelling. The Last of Us is set in a postapocalyptic world in which a fungal pandemic turns infected people into zombies. Warcraft, the highest-grossing film adaptation of a video game since 2016, boasts nearly $440 million in box office revenue but didn’t even break even because of marketing and distribution costs. The pressure is on: The series is contending with the scrutiny of devoted fans; the shadow of a film adaptation shelved in 2016, and Hollywood’s decadeslong history of turning beloved video games into shows and movies that range from dull to embarrassing.

Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann co-created HBO's new drama "The Last of Us," starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

But for all that the fall was not the fault of humanity in this telling of our demise, I hope, in seasons to come, to see still more of the world beyond our heroes’ relationship. (The Bartlett episode in particular makes a strong case for itself as a successor of sorts to “Black Mirror” at its best. That we come to understand them as well as we do without this layer of detail — indeed, with the show seeming eventually to be rushing away from its protagonists — is an achievement. Adapted from the popular video game of the same title by “Chernobyl’s” [Craig Mazin](https://variety.com/t/craig-mazin/) and the game’s designer, Neil Druckmann, “The Last of Us” can lean too hard on action sequences, which emphasizes the uncanny surreality of the infected. [Pedro Pascal](https://variety.com/t/pedro-pascal/)) that buoys “The Last of Us” through its run. Here, as in “Chernobyl,” we watch as characters slowly, then all at once, come into awareness that the world around them is falling apart.

It also helped that Perotta served as an executive producer on the series, helping to translate as well as flesh out his novel for the big screen. The success ...

Both of them turn out to have hidden depths: Melanie is working to keep the Snowpiercer running while Andre instigates a revolution and ends up taking control of the train - as well as its community. Perhaps the biggest twist on the post-apocalyptic genre would come courtesy of The Last Man On Earth. Another show that took a different approach to the end of the world would be Into The Badlands on AMC. Plenty of comic books have explored the end of the world, and the most infamous are Brian K. [reevaluation of Craig Mazin's work](https://collider.com/craig-mazin-chernobyl-the-last-of-us/), as he served as head writer on the series. It also gets extremely meta as there's an actual in-universe novel named Station Eleven, which leads to the formation of a deadly cult. Unlike other shows attempting to grapple with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, Station Eleven took a different approach by leaping in and out of time, exploring the events that led up to the formation of the performing collective known as the Traveling Symphony. This approach led to the series gathering critical acclaim, particularly when it came to the performances of series leads The success of The Leftovers also led co-showrunner Damon Lindelof to develop another series for HBO with Watchmen. It centers around the survivors of a mysterious event that led to 2% of the world's population mysteriously disappearing. It also helped that Perotta served as an executive producer on the series, helping to translate as well as flesh out his novel for the big screen. [The Last of Us](https://collider.com/the-last-of-us-hbo-review/) on HBO.

Inspired casting, excellent acting, hugely inventive storytelling … no console-to-screen journey has ever been this good. And it's one of the year's best ...

I initially thought he might be too impishly gorgeous to play a mid-50s southerner who doesn’t want to be doing any of this shit, but he creaks around in a denim shirt with just the right amount of world-weary heaviness and “your ankle’s twisted, but it isn’t broken” practicality. For the type of person who shuts their curtains to keep the daylight out so they can better enter the atmosphere of the game they are playing, there is hesitancy with this. The Last of Us came out in 2013 on the PlayStation 3 and is considered one of the best video games ever made. But there needn’t be: what the writers (Craig Mazin, from your favourite, Chernobyl, and Neil Druckmann, writer and creative director of the original games) have done is cleverly extended out the world of The Last of Us to tell the stories that can’t be told by pressing R2 and X every couple of seconds. Every human you encounter is trying to stab you or scavenge bullets off you or recruit you to one side of a conflict between the citizen army and the underground uprising. So HBO has decided to remake it as a TV series (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), cutting all traces of the video game out of the story, and finally letting those who have an Xbox experience it for themselves.

Hollywood has mostly failed to adapt successful video games into satisfying series and films. In an interview, the creators of this new zombie thriller ...

That’s kind of how it works with Joel and Ellie, and that’s kind of how I think it’s going to work with the part of the audience that, like you and like me, has such an attachment to the Ellie that Neil and Ashley created in the game. In “The Last of Us” — or really any game where you’re playing somebody that has guns, and you’re fighting against other people that have guns — you’re going to get shot. Unlike a live actress, who you realize is a person and might see in other things, you don’t see Ellie anywhere else, so she almost seems to belong to the story. [Chernobyl](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/arts/television/emmy-awards-live-updates.html),” the Emmy-award winning mini-series, while Druckmann and his studio, [Naughty Dog](https://www.naughtydog.com/), are considered the benchmarks for narrative storytelling in games — fans are hoping “The Last of Us” will be different. In the game we have long action sequences to get you into a flow state, which gets you to better connect with the character — you see yourself as that character. Here’s the bad reason: Somebody in a room who doesn’t know anything about playing video games looks at a PDF of how many copies are sold, and they go, “Well, let’s just do that. DRUCKMANN The most important thing was to keep the soul of it, what it’s about: these relationships. Their journey across the United States, past zombies and cannibals, raises questions about the limits of love and the atrocities a parent will commit in the name of protecting a child. “The Last of Us,” for instance, is less about the actual outbreak than the father-daughter relationship between a smuggler named Joel (played by A decade later, an HBO series based on the game is set to be released, [on Sunday](https://www.hbomax.com/series/the-last-of-us), to a public that has grown all too familiar with the possibility of a germ apocalypse. So we get that out of the way pretty quickly.” After one of them describes something like Covid-19, the other silences both the fictional crowd and us when he expounds upon the ways in which a warmed-up planet could lead to something much, much worse.

As a gamer (and an editor at The Washington Post's video game vertical), I'm familiar with the premise and even some pivotal plot points of the games, though I ...

There’s the original PlayStation 3 game, a remastered version for PlayStation 4 titled “The Last of Us Remastered” and If you want to play “The Last of Us,” you’ve got a few options — and one more coming in March, if you’re willing to wait. The game’s 2020 sequel, “The Last of Us Part II,” explores the fallout from decisions made in the original game; the TV show’s first season follows the plot of the first game. Still, having watched a few episodes of the show, there’s no indication that playing the series is an important prerequisite to enjoy the HBO adaptation. In “The Last of Us” (both the game and the show) a fungal infection ravages the world, taking over human hosts and turning them into unusually floral zombies. For those interested in the new prestige drama, but maybe less interested in video games, there’s good news: You don’t need to play the games to understand the show.

HBO's new post-apocalyptic series is based on a video game with tens of millions of fans. For them and for newcomers, here's what to expect.

The game has been lauded for its diversity of characters in a medium often dominated by macho male protagonists, and that hasn’t been lost in translation. Without the action-first requirements of a video game, Druckmann and Mazin seem freed to deepen the dominant themes. Early signs suggest the answer is “very,” with the show including most of the major characters and plot points. The big question for fans of the video game is, how faithful will the series be to its source material? [announced](https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/06/screen-gems-to-distribute-sam-raimi-produced-the-last-of-us-movie) that it would be distributing a Sam Raimi-produced film version of the game, with Kaitlyn Dever and the “Game of Thrones” star Maisie Williams as early contenders to play the female lead. Fans of the game series will also recognize the brothers Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard); Ellie’s former ally Riley (Storm Reid); and the malevolent David (Scott Shepherd), a cult leader with dark secrets of his own.

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey star as Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Additionally, following each episode (the first of which airs on 16th January in the UK) ...

[first reviews for The Last of Us are in](https://www.eurogamer.net/hbos-the-last-of-us-tv-adaptation-is-getting-rave-reviews-from-critics), and they are looking very positive. Additionally, following each episode (the first of which airs on 16th January in the UK), there will be discussions about everything that just happened in the lives of Joel and Ellie thanks to Sky Atlantic's The Last of Us 2am Club. If you are based in the UK and looking forward to the upcoming TV adaptation of The Last of Us, I have some good news - it will be airing on Sky Atlantic at the same time as it does on HBO in the US.

The highly anticipated and Alberta filmed "The Last of Us is slated to be released on HBO and HBOMax on Sunday, January 15, and Canadian viewers can ...

"We have seen great growth in the number of productions coming into the province and now with The Last of Us, it was kind of an anomaly because of its size, the number of people that were hired, and the number of Albertans working on it," he said. "Ghostbusters was huge because brought in a ton of money but The Last of Us - it's the biggest production we've seen in Canada as far as T.V. has approximately 1,400 members in its ranks.

It's a small grievance, not worthy of a memoir. And so far, having zero interest in videogames, and less-than-zero in their patchy adaptations, has not impacted ...

So The Last of Us puts to bed the question of whether it’s possible to create a good video game adaptation. The series’ first scene – in which two scientists discuss the biggest threat to humanity on the set of a 1960s talk show – is a memorable, unexpected opening. The prestige finishings simply reassure non-fans that it’s okay to like a show based on a PlayStation franchise. Its greatest asset, however, is Pascal and Ramsey’s chemistry, which provides the show with both levity and warmth, and more importantly, a point. Much of the dialogue reads like a game cut-scene. A mutation of the Cordyceps fungus has found a way to live inside humans, turning much of the population into zombie-like beings.

HBO's big-budget adaptation of "The Last of Us" video game debuts Sunday on HBO and HBO Max. The apocalyptic series is heavily lacking in the dead, thrills, ...

Overall, "The Last of Us" is more thrilling to play. There's a couple who look like Rick and Michonne knock-offs (one of the two characters was even on "TWD" briefly and shares a similar hairstyle to fan-favorite Michonne). Often, it feels like someone at HBO simply [watched every cut scene from the game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoeZJLHnbNk) and based their adaptation on that instead of actually playing through the game to understand its emotional core and the details that made it beloved. But there are far better zombie and apocalyptic series to watch right now ranging from "All of Us Are Dead" to "Alice in Borderland." If you love the game series, "TLOU" is, at the least, worth checking out. Here, it seems like Ellie is cursing for the sake of it. Though it often follows the game beat for beat, the series speeds through some interesting groups and areas that easily could've been a focus of an entire season. Other than the first half of the pilot and the series' third episode, most of "The Last of Us" slogs along with a few great moments here or there. Much of the series is pretty dull for an apocalyptic thriller, which shouldn't be the case for a show involving a pair traversing a country full of the undead. But this is also the running trend with video-game adaptations. Most bizarrely, the series strangely lacks in the dead department. Psychologically, the game is tough to play in one sitting.

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay always seemed well cast, the linear and cinematic story always seemed well suited to prestige television, and while Druckmann's ...

I'm excited for this episode, but I'm not excited for it to be the greatest television episode of all time. It is the best episode of television this year, or perhaps the best episode of television of all time. The Last of Us is always best when it is slow and tender, and way back when the show was announced in 2020, Instead, at least those of us keeping up with it as it drops, will watch episodes one and two a week apart from one another, then wait another week for episode three. Episode three is not just a good episode of television, nor even the best episode in the series. [The Last of Us TV show reviews are in](https://www.thegamer.com/the-last-of-us-hbo-review-round-up/), and they are positive across the board.

At some point during the year-long shoot of HBO's The Last of Us, showrunner Craig Mazin accompanied actor Troy Baker to one of the many elaborate sets in ...

So I just want to thank everybody in the city for being so welcoming, so kind and so patient with us as we did all sorts of crazy things in every corner of Calgary and every corner of Alberta.” “I particularly found the crew in Alberta was outstanding,” he says. Mazin says he hopes to make more seasons of the series. “But everybody agreed with me. “I was like ‘Oh Lady Mormont!’ because I did not know her name … It takes place 20 years after a pandemic has turned most of the human race into infected, zombie-like creatures. But Mazin said The Last of Us stands apart from anything else he has played. “Part of my job is to be critical,” says Mazin. So even when sincerely wowed, he tended to keep it close to his chest. . . As fans of the video game, on which the series is based, know, Baker is the actor who played the main character of Joel in the original game. Article content

Despite Joel already being one of the most popular characters in The Last of Us games, the HBO adaptation should make some changes to him.

To make Joel a more compelling character in the HBO series than he already is in the games, all aspects of his life should be explored. The Last of Us Part 2 faced criticism for Joel's role; he acted very different than he did in the original game, as he had developed off-screen. [Joel and Tommy](https://gamerant.com/the-last-of-us-prequel-joel-tommy-potential-good/) simply mentioning some things that happened to them in the years between. After the time skip in the video games, players got to know Joel as someone who rarely got close to others, keeping a distance from those he could care about due to his fear of losing them. [The Last of Us on HBO could take Joel](http://gamerant.com/hbo-last-of-us-photo-pedro-pascal-joel-bella-ramsey-ellie/) that the games didn't, all without changing much from the source. Joel Miller is one of the most beloved characters in The Last of Us.

Based on the video game of the same name, HBO's “The Last of Us” is a post-apocalyptic story about a population that has been decimated by a pandemic.