Even the small addition of flecks of spit shooting from a character’s mouth as they shout adds a new layer of intensity to the drama that I admire. Admittedly, they have been touched up, and I do appreciate how the ultra-high level of facial detail has allowed Naughty Dog to extract even more subtle microexpressions from the cast’s performances. The Last of Us Part I does, however, lean on the exact same performance capture, voice acting, and cutscene direction that was used for the original PS3 version, Tess included. The faint hint of a relationship between the two that perhaps hasn’t always been entirely platonic makes way more sense in this context, and the later bond between Joel and Ellie is made all the more special when it’s clearer it’s not the kind of connection Joel could’ve made with Tess previously.
Crafting a Tess that more authentically appears to be a woman in her 40s rather than her 20s paints her more as a generational peer of Joel’s, rather than a woman younger than his own daughter would have been 20 years after the outbreak.
I’ve seen some resistance to the updated Tess, but I think it’s a minor but smart change. There have been some moderate redesigns for a couple of key characters, too – most notably Joel’s smuggling partner, Tess. I opted for the dynamic 4K/60FPS performance mode and toggled off the film grain, as the higher frame rate makes for far, far smoother camera panning and the default grain effect honestly does little but obscure how good everything actually looks on the PS5. In-game there’s definitely an overt leap in fidelity and quality. While I’d agree that it’s been tough to see a vast gulf between 2014’s The Last of Us Remastered and The Last of Us Part I in the video comparisons Sony has been rationing out, I will caution that watching two cutscenes smooshed together on a smartphone screen probably isn’t the best way to appraise the meaningful differences here. Our full performance review of The Last of Us Part I goes into much more technical detail, but broadly speaking all the characters and environments have been remade entirely, and it does show.
While The Last of Us Part I features two display modes – one that achieves native 4K at a targeted 30 frames per second, and another that presents dynamic 4K at a targeted 60 frames per second – Naughty Dog has done much more here than simply dial up the resolution and crank out an increased framerate. Despite some hand-wringing to the contrary, this does feel mostly true. For clarity, The Last of Us Part I has been positioned as a complete rebuild for PS5 – a remake, and not a remaster.
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