Naughty Dog’s 2013 PlayStation 3 exclusive is a survival horror road trip across a United States wrecked by a fungal plague. It frightens us with scarcity rather than spectacle: a handful of bullets, a flickering flashlight, and the wet clicking of something blind hunting us in the dark. Twelve years and two remakes later it still sets the bar for character-driven horror in games.
Story and setting
The game opens on the night of the outbreak in Texas, September 26, 2013. We play a few minutes of panic as Joel Miller, a single dad, tries to get his daughter Sarah out of town while the first infected tear through the suburbs. Then the title card hits and twenty years vanish.
The main story picks up in 2033. Joel is now a smuggler in the Boston quarantine zone, a walled city run by the military under martial law. He and his partner Tess move contraband and ration cards, and they are very good at not caring about anyone.
A job goes sideways and they end up responsible for Ellie, a 14-year-old with a secret the militia group known as the Fireflies would kill for. She has been bitten and she has not turned. Joel is asked to walk her out of Boston and hand her over to Firefly doctors somewhere out west.
That walk becomes the whole game. We cross the ruined East Coast, the overgrown Midwest and the Rockies on foot and by whatever vehicle still runs, through four seasons, with the relationship between a grieving man and a kid who never knew the old world as the real engine of the adventure. Ellie is voiced by Ashley Johnson and Joel by Troy Baker, and the performances are the reason the quiet scenes land as hard as the loud ones.
The world is a cordyceps fungus story, not a zombie one. The infected are living people whose brains have been taken over, and the game never once uses the word zombie. That distinction matters to the tone: the enemies are victims, and the survivors are frequently worse.
How it scares you
The Last of Us is slower than its reputation suggests, and the slow parts are where the dread lives. Most of the roughly 15-hour campaign is walking through empty houses, listening to Ellie read puns from a joke book, and quietly stripping every drawer for scissors and alcohol. Then the music drops out and we hear a click.
The infected
Four infected types carry the horror, and each one changes how we move.
Runners are freshly turned, fast and still half-human, and they come in packs. Stalkers hide around corners and rush when our back is turned, which is the closest the game gets to a traditional jump scare. Clickers are the icon: blind, fungus-plated and navigating by echolocation, with a one-hit kill if they grab us. Bloaters are the late-stage tanks, armoured in fungal growth and tossing spore bombs.
Clickers are the design masterstroke. Because they are blind, the game teaches us that stillness and silence are survival tools. Because they kill in one grab on most difficulties, every encounter with one has real stakes. Hearing that clicking echo through a flooded hotel basement before we see the source is the purest fear the game produces.
Scarcity and crafting
Ammunition is scarce by design. We regularly finish a fight with two pistol rounds and a brick. The crafting system shares ingredients between items, so a health kit and a Molotov cost the same rag and alcohol, and that choice is a small panic every time.
Crafting happens in real time. Joel kneels and wraps the bandage while the world keeps moving, so patching up in a room full of infected is a genuine risk rather than a pause-menu reflex. Few games have made healing itself scary.
Stealth, sound and Listen mode
Listen mode lets Joel hold a button to see enemies through walls as grey outlines, a controversial crutch that the harder difficulties remove. Without it, we rely on sound, and the sound design is extraordinary. Floorboards groan, bottles roll, and Runners mutter half-words in the next room.
Gustavo Santaolalla’s score stays mostly away from the fights. It is sparse guitar and ronroco, and it tends to arrive after the violence rather than during it. The silence in combat is deliberate, so our own breathing and the enemies’ noises fill the gap.
Human enemies
Hunters, soldiers and cannibals make up at least half the encounters, and they are often more frightening than the infected because they talk. They call out when they find a body. They panic when their friends die. The third-person camera sits close over Joel’s shoulder and his movement is heavy, so there is no graceful way out of a bad position. Chases happen when a plan collapses, and hiding behind a counter while a man with a shotgun walks the aisles saying “I know you’re here” is a core memory for a lot of us.
The gore
The violence is brutal and personal. Melee kills are up close, the shiv counters are ugly, and the game lingers on the aftermath. We rate the gore as heavy, with one warning: the Winter chapter contains imagery around cannibalism and a hunting-knife fight that people who struggle with realistic violence should know about going in. There is no supernatural monster mascot here in the way of silent hill pyramid head. The horror is a man with a machete and a reason.
Lore and ending
Spoiler warning
This section spoils the full ending of The Last of Us, the Left Behind expansion, and the opening premise of Part II.
The ending is the most argued-about scene in Naughty Dog’s history, and it only works because the game has spent 15 hours making us complicit. Here is what happens and what it means.
The Salt Lake City hospital
Joel and Ellie reach the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City in spring. Ellie nearly drowns in a flooded tunnel and Joel is knocked out by Firefly soldiers while trying to resuscitate her. He wakes up to Marlene, the Firefly leader, who explains the plan. Ellie’s immunity comes from a mutated strain of cordyceps growing in her brain. Extracting it to make a vaccine means removing it, and removing it kills her.
Ellie is already in surgery. She was never asked.
Joel breaks out, kills his way through the hospital, murders the surgeon and carries an unconscious Ellie out. In the car park he shoots Marlene so she cannot come after them. This is not presented as heroism. The game gives us the controls, but the camera and music treat it as something closer to a horror movie’s final rampage.
The lie
In the final scene, on the ridge above Tommy’s settlement in Jackson, Wyoming, Ellie asks what happened. Joel lies. He tells her the Fireflies found dozens of immune people, that none of it worked, and that they have stopped looking for a cure.
Ellie tells him about Riley, her best friend who turned when she did not, and about everyone she has lost. She asks him to swear the story is true. He swears. She says “Okay.” Cut to black.
The ambiguity of that “Okay” is the whole point. She does not look like she believes him. Ashley Johnson plays it as a kid choosing to accept a lie because the alternative is losing the one person she has left. The game’s position is that Joel’s love is real and his choice is monstrous, and it refuses to resolve that for us.
Left Behind
The 2014 expansion Left Behind fills in two gaps. One thread is set during the Winter chapter, with Ellie scavenging a mall to find supplies for a badly wounded Joel. The other is a flashback to weeks before the main game, when Ellie and Riley spend a night in an abandoned Boston mall, dance to a jukebox, kiss, and are both bitten. Riley turns. Ellie does not. It is the most moving two hours in the series and it explains why Ellie treats her survival as a debt.
What the Fireflies lore tells us
The outbreak date, September 26, 2013, has become an unofficial fan holiday that Naughty Dog later rebranded as The Last of Us Day. The Firefly symbol, a stylised insect used as both a logo and a graffiti tag, appears throughout the quarantine zones as a sign that resistance still exists. By the time we reach them, the Fireflies are a broken organisation holding onto one last gamble.
The question of whether the vaccine would have worked is deliberately unresolved in the original. Part II leans toward it being real, which makes Joel’s choice heavier rather than lighter. That sequel opens with Abby, the surgeon’s daughter, tracking Joel down in Jackson, and the consequences of the hospital drive the entire story.
Where it fits in the series
The Last of Us is a two-game franchise with a lot of re-releases, so it is easy to buy the wrong box. Here is the release history.
| Release | Year | Platform | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Last of Us | 2013 | PS3 | Original game |
| Left Behind | 2014 | PS3, PS4 | Story expansion |
| The Last of Us Remastered | 2014 | PS4 | 1080p/60fps port, includes Left Behind |
| The Last of Us Part II | 2020 | PS4 | Sequel |
| The Last of Us Part I | 2022 | PS5 | Full remake, includes Left Behind |
| The Last of Us Part I | 2023 | PC | Remake port via Steam and Epic |
| The Last of Us Part II Remastered | 2024 | PS5 | Upgraded sequel with roguelike mode |
| The Last of Us Part II Remastered | 2025 | PC | Sequel port |
Story order is simpler.
| Order | Entry | When it takes place |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Left Behind (Riley flashback) | Weeks before the main game, 2033 |
| 2 | The Last of Us | Summer 2033 to spring 2034 |
| 3 | Left Behind (Winter thread) | During the main game’s Winter chapter |
| 4 | The Last of Us Part II | 2038, four years later |
Our recommendation for a first playthrough is Part I on PS5 or PC. It is the same script, same performances and same level layouts, rebuilt in the Part II engine with modern AI, better animation and a serious accessibility suite. The two older versions are fine if that is what you own, and Remastered on PS4 still looks good, but the remake’s lighting makes the infected sections meaningfully scarier.
One thing you lose with Part I: Factions, the original’s surprisingly tense online multiplayer, is absent from the remake. Naughty Dog cancelled the standalone multiplayer project in December 2023.
Play Left Behind after finishing the main story, not before. The Winter thread spoils a major beat, and the Riley flashback hits harder once you know Ellie.
The HBO series
HBO’s adaptation premiered in January 2023 with Pedro Pascal as Joel, Bella Ramsey as Ellie and Gabriel Luna as Tommy, with Neil Druckmann co-creating alongside Craig Mazin. Season 1 covers the first game almost beat for beat, with Bill’s episode greatly expanded. Season 2 arrived in April 2025 and adapts the first half of the darker Part II, including the scene everyone dreaded. Ramsey’s Ellie gets more of the kid’s swagger than the trailers suggested.
We would still play the game first if you can. The show is excellent but it cannot replicate the feeling of having two bullets and a Clicker between you and the exit.
Where to play
The original 2013 release is PlayStation 3 only and is now disc-only in practice, so most people will be choosing between the three later versions.
PlayStation. The Last of Us Remastered is a PS4 disc and digital release that also runs on PS5 via backward compatibility. The Last of Us Part I is a native PS5 game sold on the PlayStation Store. Sony rotates both in and out of the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue, so as of October 2026 we would check the current catalogue before buying rather than assume either is included. There is no Xbox version and no Game Pass listing, as this is a Sony-owned property.
PC. Part I launched on Steam and the Epic Games Store in March 2023 with a rough first month of stuttering and crashes. Iron Galaxy and Naughty Dog patched it extensively through 2023 and it is in a good state now. Expect long shader compilation on first boot, and give it a modern GPU with at least 8 GB of VRAM for the high texture settings. It sits comfortably among the best pc horror games to play tonight if your hardware is up to it.
Steam Deck. Part I runs on Deck after the optimisation patches, but it is a demanding game and we needed to drop to low settings and accept 30fps in the dense city sections. Check the Deck compatibility badge on the store page as of October 2026, since Valve updates those ratings as patches land.
Difficulty settings. The original PS3 game offers Easy, Normal, Hard and Survivor, with Grounded added as paid DLC; Grounded is built into Remastered, and Part I runs six levels from Very Light through Light, Moderate, Hard and Survivor up to Grounded. Grounded removes Listen mode and the HUD, cuts ammo to almost nothing, and is the version we would call genuine survival horror. Easy is a fine way to experience the story if you mainly want the characters.
If you liked this
Resident Evil 4 (2023) for the same tight-resource, over-the-shoulder combat with far more action and a goofier heart.
Alan Wake 2 for a slow, atmospheric story game where the writing matters as much as the scares.
Dead Space (2023) for sci-fi survival horror that nails dismemberment-based combat and claustrophobic sound design.
FAQ
Is The Last of Us actually a horror game?
Yes, with a caveat. The infected sections, the sewer and the hotel basement are pure survival horror, built on scarcity, sound and one-hit kills. The human-enemy sections play more like tense stealth action. If you cannot handle gore or realistic violence, this is a 3/5 scare game with 5/5 gore intensity, so weigh that accordingly.
How long does it take to beat The Last of Us?
Around 15 hours for the main story at a normal pace, plus roughly two hours for Left Behind. Collectible hunters and Grounded runs push that past 20. Part I is the same length as the original because the levels are identical.
Which version should I play first?
The Last of Us Part I on PS5 or PC. It is a full remake of the 2013 game with the same script and performances, so you lose nothing and gain modern visuals and accessibility options. Remastered on PS4 is the budget choice and still holds up.
Do I need to play the game before watching the HBO show?
No. Season 1 follows the game’s story closely, so either order works. We prefer game first because the ending lands harder when you have been the one pulling the trigger.
Why is Ellie immune?
The game explains that a mutated strain of cordyceps grew in her brain after she was bitten and stopped the normal infection from taking hold. The Fireflies believed they could reverse-engineer a vaccine from it, and whether they were right is one of the central questions the sequel picks up.