TH E LAST OF US PART II REMASTERED

Ellie evolved…

★★★★★ OUT NOW PS5

The new No Return mode allows players to choose their own survival challenges

The recent cancellation of Naughty Dog’s long-awaited The Last of Us multiplayer game – after several years in development – highlights the difficulties of developing blockbuster video games for modern consoles. So, too, does the release of this new version of a game that only recently celebrated its third anniversary. The cutting-edge late-PS4-era title receives a number of visual enhancements on PS5, but it says much about the narrowing leaps between hardware generations that most who played the 2020 sequel will barely notice.

It’s best considered as the interactive equivalent of a Criterion Collection release: an acclaimed work presented with superior image quality alongside a host of bonus features. Three playable deleted sequences have been included, in their unfinished ‘pre-alpha’ form with commentary explaining their origins and why they were cut – pacing purposes, mainly – just months from completion. From a party scene to a sewer escape and a boar hunt, they’re an insightful peek inside the development process (spare a thought, too, for Banun Idris, the lead game designer behind two of these excised sections).

A new mode, No Return, will be the biggest draw for most players. Here, you’re pitched into a series of short skirmishes, which take place in repurposed environments from the main game – in one, you might have to survive against growing numbers of Infected against the clock, before hunting down three groups of Seraphites in the next. Between encounters you’ll spend rewards upgrading your skills and arsenal at your hideout, where you can pick the next challenge via a pinboard of Polaroids, linked by branching red threads. To increase the peril, you only have a single life to complete a run – though unlockable characters, modifiers and more ease the pain of starting all over again.

These encounters are every bit as brutal as the main game, if not more disturbing still in this context. Characters will react with disgust to the horrifying results of their own handiwork, even as they sprint to a supply cache to stock up on ammo or leave items in a dropbox in exchange for a bonus upon their return to the hideout. Much as it highlights the strengths of the main game’s tense, desperate combat, the looping structure seems to undercut its narrative message about cyclical violence. Then again, it might just be the perfect way to reflect the story’s powerful (if bleak) tale of characters using lethal force by choice rather than necessity.